Entertainment
Toxic Masculinity and Big vs. Aidan: How 'Sex and the City’s' love triangle has aged
Ballet flats, low-rise jeans and Cosmopolitans are back in style, so it is the perfect time for all six seasons of “Sex and the City” to stream on Netflix. The HBO series, previously exclusively on Max, premiered April 1 on the streaming service, where a wider subscriber base pulled in first-time viewers and rewatchers who are ready and willing to share their thoughts on social media.
This week, there has been increasing buzz about one of the iconic episodes in the series, when Carrie Bradshaw invites Mr. Big, the ex-boyfriend with whom she cheated on her current boyfriend Aidan, to the latter’s cabin.
I couldn’t help but wonder — does Carrie Bradshaw’s Big versus Aidan love triangle still feel relevant?
When it first premiered in June 1998, “Sex and the City,” an adaptation of Candace Bushnell’s newspaper column and book, broke a lot of barriers with its depiction of four single women in their 30s and 40s navigating their friendship and vibrant sex lives in NYC. (It also fell short in a myriad of ways, namely in how incredibly white, heteronormative and privileged the characters were. While some of this changed in Max’s “And Just Like That,” for the purposes of this essay, I’m just focusing on the original series, not the films or subsequent spinoff.)
Since airing, it’s been common parlance to declare people specific archetypes promulgated by the show either via the four main friends — are you a Carrie or a Samantha? — or by the type of love interest one embodies — is he your Mr. Big or your Aidan?
Sarah Jessica Parker, as Carrie Bradshaw, and John Corbett as Aidan Shaw in an episode from “Sex and the City.”
(HBO)
In particular, when it comes to Carrie’s love interests, both men were pretty flat characters. Big is the stereotypical, wealthy, charming playboy with serious commitment issues who just needs the right woman to come along and “fix” him. Aidan, in contrast, is the stable, Hallmark Christmas movie boyfriend who would love nothing more than to get married and stay home eating fried chicken — but he can skew boring.
The bad boy versus nice guy trope is a staple of mainstream ‘90s rom-coms. Millennials were raised on a diet of toxic, patriarchal relationships on film and TV, where male characters spend the majority of their time treating female characters horrendously, and then redeeming themselves in the final 20 minutes with one grand gesture. We became a generation trained to wait for our Bigs to catch on to their mistakes, come down the street in a shiny limo, and beg forgiveness. If he hasn’t come back and repented, it’s only because it isn’t our last 20 minutes yet.
But does that trope still work in 2024? I’ve spoken with friends of mine — die-hard Big fans who cheered from our sorority house living room when he showed up at Carrie’s Paris hotel in the 2004 series finale — who are now rewatching the series and wondering why they were so hung up on Mr. Big in the first place. This sentiment has been echoed on social media, with viewers who are rewatching asking if Big has always been this infuriating. Is it just because millennials, now in their 30s and 40s, are at a more stable life stage where we can look back at Big as the walking, talking embodiment of a red flag? Or has society itself shifted away from the Mr. Bigs of the world?
Well, as it turns out, both things can be true.
“In your 20s, your life stage is about searching for identity and collecting experiences. Big was exciting because he was giving Carrie all of these new experiences,” says Israa Nasir, a mental health therapist who treats millennials and Gen Z adults going through life transitions. She says when she first watched the show, she remembers thinking Big was amazing. “But in your 30s and 40s you’re in a different life stage developmentally, you’re more about finding roots. Millennials are rooting down, we’re looking for stability. We can look back at Big and be like ‘Big was a huge red flag, because he couldn’t give her stability, which is required to move through the life stages.’”
This stability versus excitement is a conversation topic in Season 3, Episode 7, called “Drama Queens.” Over brunch, Carrie tells her friends she’s been waking up in the middle of the night sweating because she’s so anxious about the fact that everything with Aidan has been going so well.
“I’m used to the hunt, and this is effortless,” Carrie says. “You’re not getting the stomach flip,” adds Samantha. “Which is really just the fear of losing the guy,” says Miranda, ever the pragmatic one. Carrie admits she’s not used to being with someone who doesn’t do the “ever-seductive withholding dance.” When Miranda says she’s comfortable and safe and happy with Steve, Carrie deadpans, “Are you dating a man or a minivan?” Samantha tells her, “Your relationship is my greatest fear realized.”
From left, Kristin Davis, Kim Cattrall, Sarah Jessica Parker and Cynthia Nixon in HBO’s “Sex and the City.”
(Craig Blankenhorn / HBO)
Nasir says that there is a generational difference in how we are engaging with romantic relationships, just by virtue of the world changing and an increase in emotional literacy.
“A 25-year-old current Gen Z person has way more access to self-help content, personal growth, self-awareness, all of those things that help you define yourself and relationships versus a 25-year-old millennial in the mid-2000s who did not really have that,” says Nasir.
“Millennials inherited a very patriarchal system. Many of us are entering the space of self-awareness for the first time whereas Gen Z is already there so their expectations from a relationship are very different.”
Nasir adds that Gen Zers have changed the gender dynamics of dating. They are much more fluid when it comes to identity and sexuality, they’re more open to polyamory, and they don’t engage in the same debates about who pays, who initiates sex, etc. — themes that are a large part of “Sex and the City’s” plotlines. She says when speaking with her Gen Z patients about relationships, she often thinks about the episode where Miranda bluntly tells two young women that maybe “he’s just not that into you.” It was met with horror when Miranda said that, but Nasir said that kind of factual, upfront, candid conversation is par for the course among the younger generations.
In Nasir’s opinion, society hasn’t replaced patriarchal archetypes, we’ve just added more to the spectrum. And even though there are still a plethora of heteronormative love triangles and television often still adheres to the status quo, nuance has crept in. In Netflix’s “Never Have I Ever,” she points out that the lead love interest, Paxton, is the popular guy but with a sensitive side. Nasir says she sees more of an emphasis on platonic love, an expansion of what a long-term soulmate relationship can be, as depicted in series like “Grace and Frankie” or “Insecure.” She compares it with how the archetype of the woman on television changed and expanded from the ‘50s to the ‘90s. “From the ‘90s to the 2020s, there are more types of relationships that you see. We continue with every generation to add to the baseline,” Nasir says.
Suzanne Leonard is a professor of race, gender and sexuality studies at Simmons University in Boston. “We’ve been in a long, 20-year process of undoing the allure of Mr. Big,” says Leonard, adding that she doesn’t know whether the storylines on television have changed as much as the viewership has. “Audiences are much more aware of the dangers of toxic masculinity and that doesn’t read as sexy anymore. I think you have more sophisticated feminist viewers.”
“It’s sort of seeing what was actually right in front of us the whole time, but we couldn’t see it,” she adds. Leonard partly attributes this shift in our views of romance, this fatigue around brooding, emotionally unavailable characters, to the post-#MeToo moment. (She even points out that Chris Noth, the actor who played Big, was accused by several women of sexual abuse).
“Male power and male violence has been so sexualized and romanticized, and in the ‘90s and early 2000s, heterosexual women were really encouraged to be attracted to that type,” says Leonard. #MeToo created an awareness and reckoning with toxic masculinity that forced people to realize what society pushed as alluring might in fact be red flags.
Our emotional vocabulary around these kinds of relationships has also shifted, as therapy-speak infuses our everyday language. Twenty years ago, we didn’t say someone was “toxic” or “gaslighting” or “love bombing.” “It has been able to give us labels to very normal human experiences,” says Nasir. And when you can identify these experiences, you can manage them better by naming them and walking away.
Last week when “Sex and the City” hit Netflix, there was buzz around how Gen Z would react, with some (correct) predictions that the “Carrie is the toxic villain” debate would ramp up as it did when “And Just Like That” aired. “Carrie is the worst human being I have ever seen,” said one first-time watcher. (In contrast, pop star Olivia Rodrigo proudly wore a “Carrie Bradshaw AF” shirt while performing in New York on April 5.)
Right on cue, first-timers began to react to the love triangle storyline on X, formerly Twitter, and TikTok, expressing how upset they were about the Carrie-Big-Aidan triangle. “Now why would Carrie cheat on Aidan with Mr.Big!” tweeted one viewer. “Personally I think Carrie Bradshaw should’ve been court-martialed for inviting Big to Aidan’s cabin,” wrote another.
Then the “Carrie Is Aidan’s Big” discourse began. It’s a debate that felt familiar — was Aidan pathetic for saying he didn’t feel comfortable with her being friends with Big after she had an affair or was he just setting boundaries? When he agreed to get back together with her, should he have wholeheartedly trusted her, and dropped his identity as the victim? Or was Aidan trying to change Carrie into something she wasn’t, and their lifestyles never would have really meshed anyway? And it wasn’t all anti-Big arguments. Did she belong with Big, so they could be toxic together? And there was perhaps the most cutting tweet of all, “Carrie deserved that post-it.”
Did Carrie belong with Big, so they could be toxic together?
(Craig Blankenhorn / HBO)
Pop culture historian Jennifer Keishin Armstrong wrote the book “Sex and the City and Us,” and says she’s always hated Carrie and Big together. “Mr. Big does not come around in the end; that’s the point of your Mr. Big,” says Armstrong, adding that Carrie shouldn’t end up with either of the two men. She is of the mind that Big was terrible for Carrie, but Carrie was terrible for Aidan.
“Television is trying to reflect real life, but it’s hard to get TV out of your head while you’re living your life. This is part of why Mr. Big and Carrie ending up together upsets me because I think it gives false hope when most relationships like this one do not have a happy ending in real life.” (For what it’s worth, the real Carrie agrees.)
Armstrong says the gold standard on TV is now two people with a real friendship who are also attracted to each other. She sees “The Office’s” Jim and Pam as an influential model of this kind of love.
“I do think relationships have gotten more nuanced than they were in the early 2000s,” she adds. “If we look at the TV side of things, think of ‘Fleabag’, whose entire finale is predicated on a very complex, romantic relationship that doesn’t work out the way we’re hoping in our soul, and it’s beautiful.”
It’s hard to imagine how groundbreaking it would have been to have Big and Carrie’s last conversation be them acknowledging their love for each other but promising, “It’ll pass.”
In the series finale, Carrie has a final message about how the most important relationship is the one you have with yourself — but this message is undermined by the fact that this is also the moment she looks at her phone, and for the first time in six seasons, we find out Big’s real name.
I propose an alternate, healthier ending for Big and Carrie — and it already exists in canon. It’s in Part 1 of the series finale, when she confronts Big for boomeranging back into her life right when she’s moving on.
“You do this every time,” Carrie tells Big. “Every time! What, do you have some kind of radar: Carrie might be happy. It’s time to sweep in and s— all over it?”
Big tells her he made a mistake and insists “it’s different this time,” but Carrie interrupts him to say she is done.
“You can drive this down street all you want,” she says, throwing his signature move back in his face. “Because I don’t live here anymore.”
Book Review
Dear Monica Lewinsky
By Julia Langbein
Doubleday: 320 pages, $30
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First loves can be beautiful or traumatic, sometimes both. They are almost always intense, with emotions on speed dial and hormones running amok. Nothing like the durable consolations of late-life romance, but headier, more exciting and, in the worst cases, far more damaging.
Even decades later, Jean Dornan, the protagonist of Julia Langbein’s smart, poignant and involving novel “Dear Monica Lewinsky,” can’t recollect her own first love in tranquility. Its after-effects have derailed her life, and an unexpected email invitation to attend a retirement party in France honoring her former lover sends her into a tailspin.
An agitated Jean finds herself praying to none other than Monica Lewinsky, the patron saint of bad romantic choices, or as Langbein puts it, “of those who suffer venal public shaming and patriarchal cruelty.” In Langbein’s comic, but also deadly serious, imagination, this is no mere metaphor. The martyred Monica has literally been transfigured into a saint. And why not? Surely, she has suffered enough to qualify.
Jean and Monica have in common a disastrous liaison with an attractive, powerful, married older man. Monica was humiliated, reviled, then merely defined by her missteps. Meanwhile, her arguably more culpable sexual partner survived impeachment, retained both his political popularity and his marriage and enjoyed a lucrative post-presidency.
Jean’s brief fling during the summer of 1998 coincided with the public airing of Monica’s doomed romance. Jean’s passion took a more private toll, but she still lives with what Monica calls “this deepening suspicion that your existence is a remnant of an event long since concluded.”
Though framed by a fantastical conceit, “Dear Monica Lewinsky” is at its core a realist novel, influenced by the feminism of #MeToo and precise in its delineation of character and place. Langbein’s Monica — having finally transcended her past and ascended to spiritual omniscience — becomes Jean’s interlocutor. Together, they relive the fateful weeks that Jean spent studying the Romanesque churches of medieval France and charming David Harwell, the Rutgers University medieval art professor co-leading the summer program.
Every now and again, Monica, as much savvy therapist as all-knowing seer, interrupts Jean’s first-person account to offer guidance. Threaded through the narrative, as contrast and commentary, is a martyrology of female saints. These colloquially rendered portraits, reflecting a punitive, patriarchal morality, describe girls and women who would rather endure torture or even death than sully their sexual purity — stories so extreme that they seem satirical.
The portraits play off the novel’s milieu: a series of churches, as well as the medieval French castle that is home to an eccentric and mostly absent prince. The utility of religious doctrine and practice is another of the book’s themes. One graduate student, Patrick, is a devoted Roman Catholic, unquestioning in his faith. Others are merely devout enthusiasts of medieval architecture. Judith, a doctoral candidate at Harvard, has an addiction of her own: an eating disorder that threatens to disable her.
A rising junior at Rutgers, Jean is one of just two undergraduates in the program. Her initial dull, daunting task involves measuring and otherwise assessing the churches’ “apertures” — windows and doors. Later, she is assigned to collaborate on a guidebook and write a term paper.
A language major unversed in art, architecture or medieval history, Jean feels overwhelmed at times. But she does have useful talents: fluent French and the ability to conjure delicious Sunday dinners for her bedazzled colleagues. (The author of the 2023 novel “American Mermaid,” Langbein has both a doctorate in art history and a James Beard Foundation Journalism Award for food writing, and her expertise in both fields is evident.)
As the summer wanes, Jean’s fixation on David grows. Langbein excels at depicting the obsessive nature of illicit, unfulfilled desire — how it swamps judgment and just about everything else. A quarter-century Jean’s senior, David is trying to finish a stalled book project, laboring in the shadow of his more prolific and successful wife, Ann. An expert on the erotically charged religious life of nuns and the art it produced, she shows up briefly in the story and then conveniently disappears.
David is smooth, seductive and, to 19-year-old Jean, far more appealing than the fumbling schoolboys she has known. But he turns out to be no more grown-up or emotionally mature. After the flirtation and its consummation, David beats a hasty (and unsurprising) retreat. Then he does something worse: He allows his guilt to shred his integrity.
In the aftermath of that summer, a wounded Jean stumbles through her last two years of college, “berserk, unfocused, humiliating.” She abandons her academic and career ambitions, takes a job as a court interpreter, and marries Michael, an affable nurse who has little idea of her emotional burdens.
Then that invitation, inspiring “a racy heat,” arrives, and Jean must decide whether to confront her past or keep running from it. Is there really much of a choice? Fortunately, she has the saintly Monica as her guide. More clear-eyed now, Jean must reject her martyrdom and reclaim her own truth and agency. If she does, David, at least in the realm of the imagination, may finally get his comeuppance.
Klein, a three-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia.
The sixth outing in the director’s chair for filmmaker Kirk Jones, I Swear dramatizes the real-life story of touretter John Davidson (played by Robert Aramayo). Tourette’s Syndrome, for those unfamiliar with the condition, is a nervous system disorder that causes various tics, the most prolific being erratic and explicit language. However, as I Swear expertly showcases, the syndrome is far more than ill-timed outbursts of curse words. Davidson’s story is one of societal frustration, finding your people (both with and without the condition), and using your voice to help others rise. The subject and subject matter are handled with absolute care and understanding under Kirk’s measured vision and Robert Aramayo’s BAFTA-winning performance.
The film kicks off with the greatest exclamation to democracy ever uttered (*%#! the Queen!), as a nervous John Davidson prepares himself before entering an awards ceremony hosted by Britain’s royal family. Right away, the film tells us what it is: a triumph over adversity that blends humor and human drama with education. It’s an important setup, as the film flashes back to Davidson’s 1980s youth, where we see his time as a star soccer recruit flatline as his condition takes hold. Davidson’s life spirals from there. Some aspects, like school bullying and accidental run-ins with authority figures, are expected but important to empathizing with young Davidson’s (young version, played with heart by Scott Ellis Watson) new everyday life. The more tragic, a complete meltdown of his family system, is unsettling if quick. His father (Steven Cree) is never given enough screen time to explore his alcohol coping tendencies. However, his mother Heather’s descent into easy fixes and blaming is crushing and convincing. Harry Potter series actress Shirley Henderson (Moaning Myrtle) gives a layered performance as Heather. Someone who loves her son, but also feels cursed by him as the entire family exits the picture. It’s bitter, she’s tired, and fills each conversation with ‘only medication and your mother can save you’ energy.
From there, the viewer and Davidson find refuge in a host of characters. Maxine Peake plays Dottie, the mother of a childhood friend and a retired mental health nurse. Screen vet Peter Mullan plays maintenance man Tommy Trotter. Together, they help Davidson build a life and an understanding of himself that carries the film forward into its second half. After that, the film is primarily a 3-actor show as director Kirk fills the screen with these tour-de-force performances. Peake and Mullan are great vessels to get the film’s main message across: patience, love, and a shared responsibility between the diagnosed and those who understand their struggle can help change the path for people quickly left behind by a normative world. Together, they are the soul of the movie, with the filmmakers clearly hoping the audience will follow their lead after they exit the theater (in my case, the beautiful Oriental Theater for the Milwaukee Film Festival). Both performances are perfectly warm and reflective and shouldn’t be left out in discussions of I Swear.
I say this because the movie is anchored by The Rings of Power actor Robert Aramayo, who leaves Elrond’s elf ears behind to bring an acute naturalism to his performance of main character John Davidson. Aramayo’s physicality and timing of the fitful Tourettes Syndrome never feel out of place or overplayed. In fact, the movie as a whole does an amazing job of never veering into sentimentality. While many moviegoers left with tissues dabbing their eyes, the filmmaking never felt like it was forcing that reaction out of audiences. It straddles the line between feel-good and reality with every story beat and lands squarely on the side of letting the real inform our feelings. Anyone with an ounce of empathy will grasp the film’s message and hopefully take it with them into life.
I Swear continues at the Milwaukee Film Festival on Tuesday, April 21st, and releases nationwide April 24th, 2026, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
Several private equity firms and Hollywood power players, including United Talent Agency and longtime agent Patrick Whitesell, have expressed interest in buying parts of Casey Wasserman’s music and sports management firm after it abruptly went up for sale.
Wasserman became ensnared in controversy earlier this year after his salacious decades-old emails to Ghislaine Maxwell, an accomplice of child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, were released as part of the U.S. Justice Department’s trove of Epstein files.
The agency auction is in the early stages, according to three people close to the process but not authorized to comment.
Earlier this week, several interested parties submitted proposals to meet a preliminary deadline in the auction, two of the sources said.
The company, which changed its name to the Team last month, is expected to be valued at around $3 billion.
Providence Equity Partners holds the majority stake. The private equity firm has discussed selling the entire company or carving off Wasserman’s minority interest. Providence also has considered selling the bulk of the firm and staying on as a minority investor, one of the sources said. Another scenario could involve separating, then selling the individual business units that make up the Team.
Wasserman and Providence’s company boasts an enviable roster of music artists, including Kendrick Lamar, Coldplay and Ed Sheeran. Its sports marketing practice is viewed as particularly lucrative and has potential to grow in value as big dollars flow into sports that draw large crowds.
Wasserman, who declined to comment, has a veto right over any sale of the company that he has spent a quarter of a century building.
UTA, which also declined to comment, is among the most aggressive suitors, the sources said. The Team’s sports marketing and music representation divisions would dramatically boost the Beverly Hills agency’s profile and client roster.
Whitesell, former executive chairman of Endeavor, separately has been motivated to make investments in sports, media and entertainment since last year when he left the talent agency that he and Ari Emanuel built. Whitesell launched a new firm with seed money from private equity firm Silver Lake, and last spring he started WIN Sports Group to represent professional football players.
Whitesell wasn’t immediately available for comment.
European investment firm Permira also has expressed interest, according to a knowledgeable source. Permira declined to comment.
The New York Times first reported that Permira, UTA and Whitesell had expressed interest.
The sales process is expected to stretch into summer, the knowledgeable people said. The auction could become complicated particularly if Providence decides to unwind the business.
For example, UTA could not buy the entire company because of the Brillstein television unit. The agency is bound by an agreement with the Writers Guild of America that prevents it from owning television production.
Investment bank Moelis & Company is managing the sale. A representative of the firm declined comment.
Wasserman also is the chairman of LA28, the nonprofit group that will be staging the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles in two years.
Following revelations of Wasserman’s 2003 emails with Maxwell, several musicians and athletes — led by pop artist Chappell Roan and soccer star Abby Wambach — said that, to stay true to their values, they would leave the agency then known as Wasserman.
Wasserman apologized to his staff for “past personal mistakes” and said he would sell the agency.
He had limited dealings with Epstein, flying on the financier’s jet along with former President Clinton for a September 2002 humanitarian trip through Africa.
Wasserman, a prolific Clinton fundraiser whose legendary grandfather, Hollywood titan Lew Wasserman, helped the Democrat win the 1992 presidential election, was joined on Epstein’s jet by his then-wife, Laura, actor Kevin Spacey, Epstein, Maxwell — who was convicted of sexual abuse in 2021 — and others, including security agents.
The LA28 board’s executive committee unanimously voted to keep Wasserman as chairman, citing his “strong leadership” of the Games.
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