Don't ever say I don't go all out for you. Believe it or not, I gave up a large portion of my Saturday night so that I could see Sex and the City in a theater full of women. Usually, I hate seeing a movie in its opening weekend; actually I have a lot of problems just seeing a movie at all these days, but that's for another time. The truth is, Sex and the City had to be seen in a jam-packed theater, because the movie itself is only part of the fact that this is one of the most important events to ever happen to all of NYC's female population.

I wish that I had been able to get tickets to a sold out show in a gigantic theater, like at the AMC Theater in Times Square for example, but that didn't happen, by the time I got around to buying my tickets, every Friday night show in Manhattan was sold out. I really wanted to see the throngs myself, be able to bear witness to the masses that came out to see this. You see, I was much more interested in seeing how the women who love the show and can't wait to see the movie would react to it than to the film itself. In other words, I was hoping people would talk all the way through it because I just had to know what they thought. But instead, I ended up at an early Saturday night show at BAM in the Ft. Greene area of Brooklyn. I thought this would ruin my experience, since SATC is so inherently Manhattan-centric and one doesn't generally think of BK as the land of Manolos and Cosmos. And that's where I had a major realization.

But before I get into that, I want to back up a bit.

There had been, in the past little while, a fair amount of SATC backlash. An issue of Time Out New York ran the headline "No Sex!" and featured the four ladies of SATC dressed to the nines and gagged with duct tape. New York Times writer Manohla Dargis refuted that the characters are women at all, calling them "gay men in drag." The writers of Jezebel really tore into it, including an incredibly derisive and sarcastic "live blog" of a Friday AM screening which even included the writer leaving the theater to get some food in the middle of the movie. I mean, come on, even I managed to sit through the whole thing. Also, managing editor Anna Holmes was quoted as asking "What, pray tell, was so damn groundbreaking about a group of narcissistic rich white women with a love of shopping and gossiping about their sex lives?" This is a really interesting question and although it isn't posed to me, per se, and I probably shouldn't attempt to answer it I will. Because I was thinking about this quote as I sat in my seat and watched the theater fill up - it took me about three minutes to realize that the theater would not be filled with rich white women.

Instead, I sat in a room full of women, all kinds of women. Young and old, and all races, creeds and colors. Women whispered in three differing accents just within ear shot of me. Obviously SATC isn't entirely transcendent, it doesn't cross the gender divide, and I'm not going to try to talk you into believing that it is "important" by any stretch, but you have to admit that it appeals to a shitload of women. It's probably going to take in around fifty million in its opening weekend and that's because nearly every woman in the city with the slightest inclination to see it will.

What's interesting to me is that all of these women will probably love it, at least the people at my screening did. They whooped it up during the show, sobbed through the darker acts, and applauded wildly at the end. But, it's impossible to believe that they would do such a thing because it's good. It's not a good movie, it's not well written, it's not well directed, the characters have been reduced to the most clichéd versions of themselves. It's clunky and lumpy, not unlike certain fashions or body parts.

Really, you could make this argument about every episode of the show itself. It's often stolid and cheesy and predictable. It goes over the same material over and over. I'm not really breaking new ground to suggest that its first season was awkward and confused and that its late seasons limped over manufactured hurdles to a boring end. In the movie, there are moments so bad it defies logic. The whole plot hinges on Miranda making an off-hand comment to Big because she was mad because Steve cheated on her which would never happen because Steve wouldn't cheat, he has the role of saint in the series. Samantha chooses sex over love because love makes her subjugate her sense of self, which is simply crazy and never discussed. Charlotte literally does nothing but scream through the first half hour of the movie. Perhaps the only moment in the film that approximated any emotional truth is when Carrie removes her oversized sunglasses after a day of crying and we see just how bad Sarah Jessica Parker can look, though I'm sure a team of beauticians was hard at work on her even then.

Why then is this television show, and thus this movie, so loved? Why was the screen applauded wildly when I saw the movie? Simply, it's applauded because it's meaningful to these women and because something doesn't have to be good to be meaningful. Its quality is completely divorced from its impact and appeal in an almost wholly unique way. Two incidents from my viewing of the movie confirmed for me the idea that while people love this show, they might have not really watched it in the way that devotees of Lost, for example, do. The movie opens with a recap montage to let the audience know who the characters are and what their basic journey through the series was, although, one wonders why the filmmakers felt the need to include this at all? Shouldn't they know all about this stuff already? No matter, I guess it's fine to recap; in this recap, they also cut in some of the series' best lines. And guess what? These lines got the biggest laughs of the night. And they weren't just laughs of appreciation, they were deep and hearty laughs, the laugh of someone legitimately shocked by the hilarity of a joke. The second incident comes about twenty minutes in when Carrie is doing a little "revisiting the past" fashion show for her friends. The last outfit is the pink tutu contraption she wears during the show's credit sequence and there was absolutely no reaction in the theater at all. This is the indelible image of Carrie Bradshaw, in a pink tutu covered in puddle water. Yet nothing from the audience. I truly felt that I may have been the only one in the theater, or at least within earshot, who had actually seen the show.

So, the quality doesn't matter and neither does the context. What then is so loved here? The answer may be the same as why it is groundbreaking. Because it tells the story of women in a wholly general and completely unspecific way. It doesn't have to be good, it doesn't even have to be paid attention to, it just has to exist.

In all honesty, existence is much more meaningful for women than for men and surely that's because the canon is entirely man-centric. Got an anger problem? Read the Iliad. Interested in cheating on your wife? Read just about anything. Want to understand the world as it really is? Read Steve's Word. Women don't have this wealth of sympathetic literature to lean on and that's why the fact that SATC exists is more important than any idea expressed within it. It feels authentic and it feels true, even though it isn't. It's about women, but it's not by women - Darren Starr created and helmed the series before handing it off to Michael Patrick King, who also wrote and directed the movie, and perhaps the series' most interesting and poignant idea (the "he's just not that into you" revelation) was penned by Greg Behrendt. And that's why a close reading of SATC doesn't create an understanding of why it's loved, a mistake commonly made by writers attempting to examine the phenomenon at work here. To look at it closely actually makes one scratch their head and wonder about it, but looking simply at the fact of it leads to some understanding.

SATC is the story of every woman who sat in that theater with me, the story of every woman who dressed up and made a girl's night out of this movie's release. You know why that is? Because SATC is very simple and that's what makes it effective. All women wrestle with having to reconcile their desires with their expectations. And SATC doesn't try to be specific. The characters are more like caricatures - Charlotte is the dreamer, Miranda is the intellectual bitch, Samantha is the sexualized one, and Carrie is the emotional one. All women can read themselves into these roles, yet don't have to worry about being any one all the time. It's so ungeneral that it's actually wholly specific, every woman in that audience felt that they were being spoken to directly because their whole lives are in there - rampant and hot sex, the attempt to find and then to keep love, and, of course, their intense and meaningful female friendships. It is, without a high level of quality in any way, the story of every woman. You've been warned.