***Spoiler alert for allllllllll things Sex and the City.***

I recently completed a re-watch of the original Sex & The City series and the first movie, and I gotta tell ya, it was a wild ride. When the series first came out in 1998, I was 13-years-old. While I did not start watching it right away, I probably fully dove in around the age of 15. Sidebar- I did not grow up in a house that really employed censorship. If that’s a problem for you, take it up with your therapist and not me, tysm. But I digress. My mom and I watched it together religiously. We had a very open and communicative relationship, and we found ourselves fascinated by their unabashed sexuality, glamorous lives, loyal sisterhood, and the raunchy jokes.

If you didn’t experience the advent of Sex and the City, it is nearly impossible to truly convey just how revolutionary it was. As far as I know, nothing even remotely like it had really existed up until then, and it paved the way for a whole new era of television and storytelling. And while all of those things are still true, watching it as an almost 40-year-old woman is an entirely different experience than it was as a teenager. When the series finale aired, I was just about to turn 19. I was young, idealistic, so goddamn stupid, and thoroughly enjoying a carefree and fun-filled life with my friends. I thought the relationships they all ended up in were the peak of romance, and that there had never been better friends than the foursome of Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha. As an adult woman, I realize that almost all of that is bullshit.

There are a lot of reasons I feel this way, which is why I’m going to break this up into a series touching on the different aspects of the show that have taken an intense shift for me in the 20ish years since I first watched the series. First: the men.

Many of my feelings about the men of Sex and the City really haven’t changed much. For example: Jack Berger was the worst from the moment he was introduced, and continued to be that way throughout his arc. He was a weak, insecure, bitter, jealous little bitch and I hated him with the heat of a thousand suns as soon as we met him. Conversely, despite him being the youngest of the foursome’s partners, Smith Jerrod was the best of the bunch. More on that later.

The biggest surprise for me were my new feelings regarding Steve Brady, the on-again, off-again love interest of Miranda Hobbes who is the father of her son and eventual husband. Yes, Steve was a kind, cute, quirky bartender who loved Miranda deeply despite her prickly nature and fierce independence. But he was also incredibly insecure and manipulative. Their first breakup occurred because he was too proud to accept a suit from Miranda. He agreed to accompany her to an event at her law firm, and she knew he needed something to wear, so she offered to buy him a suit since she invited him. He insisted on paying for it himself, maxing out multiple credit cards in the process. The night of the event, mere HOURS before they were supposed to go, he showed up in his jeans and t-shirt and told Miranda he returned the suit because he couldn’t afford it, then told her they were too different and wanted different things because she was a successful lawyer and he was a New York City bartender barely scraping by. Her success always bothered him, because at his core he was insecure and her success made him feel inadequate.

They got back together a season or two later and once again, despite having deep love for each other, things turned rocky pretty quickly. Steve tries to talk Miranda into having a baby just because he thinks it will be fun. This man, who works nights and cannot make his half of the rent in Miranda’s fly ass Manhattan apartment, tries to guilt her into having his baby. Miranda was on track to make partner at her firm and worked ridiculous hours. She had already made several concessions to accommodate their opposite schedules, including moving Steve into her apartment, and staying up much later than was healthy for her to see him, but it was never good enough for him. When he finally accepts that Miranda is not going to give him what he wants, he insists on the next best thing: a puppy. Miranda doesn’t want a puppy. Miranda is a cat person, not a dog person. But in a desperate attempt to hold their relationship together and to give Steve what he wants, she agrees and welcomes a puppy into their home. And, shocker, despite promising that he would be the one to care for the puppy, he sleeps through the whimpering while Miranda lies awake in bed. Finally, after they break up this time, he has to live on Miranda’s couch for weeks before he finds somewhere to live, and this bitch has the audacity to give women he has picked up Miranda’s phone number, a fact she discovers when checking her answering machine after work.

Then, after all they’ve been through, all the ups and downs and break ups and back togethers and oh yeah Steve impregnating Miranda after a “mercy fuck,” they declare their final love to each other at their son’s first birthday party and break up with their respective partners. Steve moves back into Miranda’s apartment, and Miranda proposes to him over cheap beers. They get married in a quaint little garden ceremony and then Steve promptly guilts Miranda into moving to Brooklyn. And I get it, I do. Their expanding family had outgrown Miranda’s apartment, but it’s just the way he went about it that was so infuriating. Guilting anyone into a decision is coercion, and Steve never really cared about what Miranda wanted, only about his own happiness. Then in the first movie he cheats on her and he was well and truly dead to me. Yes, they get back together and figure it out in a grand romantic moment and blah blah blah, but this is why I did not feel bad for Steve like everyone else did when Miranda leaves him in And Just Like That. To me it felt like past time for her prioritize her wants and needs, and Steve was forever dragging her down. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say.

Perhaps I am biased, as Miranda was always my favorite of the foursome. She was driven and successful, yet entirely relatable. She was cold and stoic, but loved with her whole heart and would do anything for the people she loved. She deserved a great love that would meet her at her level. She deserved someone that supported her and her ambition, rather than trying to squelch it and make her smaller by cuddling her to death in the mountains cut off from Wi-Fi and her beloved tabloids. Instead, all she got was a bartender named Steve. And let me be clear– there is nothing at all wrong with being a bartender. If only Steve Brady would have felt that way, too.

In the next part of this series, we will talk about Harry Goldenblatt, and why he isn’t exactly the perfect man like I originally thought.