There is black and white, there is yin and yang, there is Charlotte and Samantha — or at least this is what we’ve been led to believe.
Listening to Candace Bushnell and Kristin Davis speak on the most recent episode of Davis’ Sex and the City rewatch podcast Are You a Charlotte? means we no longer must imagine what Euclid would have felt if faced with Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, for the foundation of all we’ve once known has been rocked.
Okay, that’s a bit of an overreaction, but when Bushnell — the author of the inside-Manhattan newspaper columns that inspired the show and the model for Sarah Jessica Parker’s character Carrie Bradshaw — discussed a recent binge of the series on Netflix, it engendered a surprising revelation. Everyone on the show, even Davis’ Charlotte, was having a lot of sex.
“[The newspaper column] was all euphemism,” she explained. “We didn’t want it to be about actual sex. Everyone knows [people] have sex, so it was all the things around sex. And then when it was on HBO, I mean, it could be quite specific. When I started rewatching it when it was on Netflix, I was like — I forgot how much sex everybody was having.”
Instead of replying “Candace, the show is called Sex and the City, not Staying in With a Pot of Chamomile and Knitting in the City,” Davis chimed in with an “I’m with you!”
Bushnell continued, “Charlotte was having so much—”
“I know! The ‘prude’!” David concurred.
“Yes, the ‘prude,'” Bushnell continued.
“What on earth?” Davis, whose interjections on Are You a Charlotte? are oftentimes quite amusing, said.
Bushnell then concluded, “She was really like Samantha!”
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According to The New York Daily News, Samantha had intimate encounters with 42 people — 41 men and one woman. Charlotte had 19. (Since we’ve got the abacus out, Carrie also had 19 and Miranda was close on their heels at 18.)
Nineteen is certainly a lot lower than 42, but, um, 19 over the course of 94 episodes of television is not exactly and insubstantial amount. We are not here to criticize or celebrate, mind you, merely to report.
For more of Candace Bushnell’s appearance on Are You a Charlotte?, a far more loaded question today than yesterday, listen to the episode below.