Why is And Just Like That so afraid to let its older women characters have sex?

Rolling Stone

For a sequel to a show that broke boundaries about sex, it's befuddling that there is only one sexy scene in the first four episodes, says EJ Dickson. "What these early installments of the series do offer is a lot of awkward dialogue on race and several mentions of a prominent at-home fitness brand — but, so far, no actual sex," says Dickson. "This paucity of pelvis-bumping has been attributed largely to the absence of Samantha, the excessively randy cougar played with aplomb by Kim Cattrall, who bowed out of the reboot due to her chilly relationship with the rest of the cast. But the truth is that while Samantha certainly provided a healthy injection of sensuality into Sex and the City, there was no shortage of relatable, NC-17 storylines featuring the other women as well. It was Charlotte (Kristin Davis), for instance, who famously copped to performing tuchus lingus on Trey, while Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) grappled with the ethics of post-cunnilingus makeouts, and Carrie briefly debated whether to partake in urophilia. While none of the above three storylines would be considered especially groundbreaking in today’s prestige-TV landscape (on The White Lotus, for instance, an a**-eating scene barely qualified as a footnote in most write-ups of the show), they were highly controversial at the time Sex and the City first aired. Which is why the absence of any sexual content in the show’s early going has been so glaring. While Sex and the City was never so much 'about' sex as it was about the female friendships at its center, the show’s refusal to respect traditional sex-on-TV boundaries was so braided in its DNA that it seems odd that And Just Like That would be less horny than the average Folger’s ad. To an extent, the lack of overt sex on the show makes some sense. And Just Like That is focused on three heterosexual women — two of them mothers of tweens and teens — navigating the vicissitudes of middle age, and as our lives expand to include myriad obligations stacking atop each other like Pringles in a can, it’s true that sex can become less of a priority. As a working mom in my thirties, I spend far less time caring about things like multiple orgasms and eating ass than I do worrying about, say, getting my son out of the house in time for school without either of us breaking down in tears. Yet the producers of And Just Like That also have a unique opportunity to shatter an entirely new set of boundaries by depicting an experience that’s rarely shown in most media: what it’s actually like for couples in their fifties and sixties to f*ck."

ALSO:

• Cynthia Nixon says And Just Like That offers an opportunity for a different portrayal of menopause: "The show has always been very great about letting us evolve and change and age, and so we certainly wanted to do that much more," she says. "These characters are in menopause, and menopause gets a bad rap, and it has many unpleasant parts of it, but it's a real opportunity. It's an age of opportunity — I think almost like a second adolescence where, you know, maybe your kids are largely grown and maybe you have the bandwidth to change a career or to go for something in your career that you've never been brave enough to try before. That's what's happening with Miranda. The Trump years and the Black Lives Matter movement really were a wake-up call for her. There's more life behind her than there is ahead of her, and she doesn't want her tombstone to say, 'Here lies Miranda. She was a corporate lawyer.'"
• Carrie Bradshaw's viral paisley maxi dress only cost $5 to $6
• And Just Like That fans notice a plot hole involving Carrie's purple sequin Fendi baguette bag