Candace Bushnell: ‘Women’s real sexuality looks a lot like Samantha Jones’

Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell has said that “women’s real sexuality looks a lot like Samantha Jones”, the sexually liberated character played by Kim Cattrall from the hit TV series.

Bushnell, who wrote the newspaper column that inspired the franchise, was speaking with Meghan Markle in the latest episode of her Spotify podcast Archetypes.

Exploring women who “live outside the box”, the 63-year-old said: “My question is always: What is women’s real sexuality when you take away the ‘I am dependent on a man’ aspect?

“What if women had their own money, and they had their own power? What does their sexuality look like? It looks a lot like Samantha Jones.”

The journalist and author said that being single in New York in the 1990s and having lots of single friends “who weren’t dependent on a man for any reason” meant “there was a lot of sex going on and a lot of enjoyment of sex”.

She added that this experience taught her that “pretty much any of the cliches about women’s sexuality were just not true. And that was really the impetus for writing Sex and the City. It was to explore what women’s sexuality really looked like.”

Titled Beyond the Archetype: Human, Being, the penultimate episode in the series aimed to explore the freedom and fulfilment that can be found “when we live outside of the labels we’re given by society”.

Bushnell also said that despite her writing inspiring the award-winning HBO series, Sex and the City did not make her wealthy.

“Everybody thinks that my life changed? It did not,” she said. “I did not make a tonne of money from Sex and the City.”

When asked how that made her feel, she replied: “Angry. It makes me feel angry. And that’s one of the realities.

“The fact of the matter is, I’m fine, I’m OK, I’m doing OK, so I just keep working.”