Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), who has hardly ever been what one might call a “women’s advocate” (see: defending sexually predatory behavior), once famously shamed Charlotte York (Kristin Davis) for willingly becoming one of those women. You know, the ones who have the kind of free time for self-enrichment that allows them to take pottery classes in the middle of the day. Well, not a class, per se, so much as a jaunt into Color Me Mine, a real place that probably reached its pinnacle around the same time the episode in question, “Time and Punishment,” first aired in 2001. Because this was also the height of the Petroglyph era in California. Commercializing and mass-marketing pottery and ceramics classes perhaps in an avant-garde bid to teach something like mindfulness in an evermore mercilessly capitalistic world…long before the pandemic forced (some) people to slow down and reflect. The irony being, of course, that you still have to pay to be “mindful.”
In fact, that’s precisely what Charlotte wants to do with her newfound freedom when she quits the gallery in season four: glaze a motherfuckin’ pot at Color Me Mine. But, to Carrie, that’s deemed somehow frivolous, purposeless and, for some reason, not “artistic” enough. It seems, however, that part of the reason Carrie exhibits such judgment about it (granted, as she does about many things) is because it probably hits too close to home. This idea that if you’re not working a “real job” that comes complete with an office space or “stationing” within some kind of edifice beyond your own abode, then you’re not actually working (which means, technically, going to Color Me Mine should count as a job). For Carrie, deep down, must have felt some level of “pinch me” guilt for being able to translate her sexual exploits/party girl ways into something like a regular paycheck (though, as it has been pointed out many times, certainly not the kind of regular paycheck that could afford Carrie her haute couture-drenched manner of living).
Because yes, many a “single gal” before and after her has tried to do the same (and do it better), only to be met with no such financially tantalizing offers for detailing their “rock n’ roll lifestyle.” Thus, perhaps mocking Charlotte for wanting to become a woman who glazes and lazes is a reflection of the underlying belief that “being a layabout” posing as an artist is, in actuality, what Carrie is doing too. That is, in her role as a “writer” a.k.a. sex columnist. Because even the most “legitimate” (whatever that really means) of writers struggle frequently with severe bouts of impostor syndrome. Especially ones who are entirely dependent on the lives of others for their “inspiration” (read: material). Which Carrie very much is, what with her vanilla predilections in the boudoir. Shit, even Charlotte comes across as more adventurous in the long run, almost becoming a rug muncher before Samantha in season two’s “The Cheating Curve” and kissing the hot gardener as a married woman in season three’s “What Goes Around Comes Around.” Carrie would never (mainly because she’s more classist than she lets on). And, obviously, Samantha is the primary source of fodder for Carrie’s column drawing so many eyes (or rather, so many eyes for a local rag).
Yet even Samantha, for all her “progressiveness,” gives Charlotte flak for her announcement, assuming, “Did you get a better offer from another gallery?” and, later in the conversation, “Well, be damn sure before you get off the Ferris wheel because the women waiting to get on are twenty-two, perky and ruthless.” As for Carrie, her thinly-veiled harsh words come in the form of, “Sweetie, if I was walking by [Color Me Mine] and I saw you in there, I’d just keep on walking.” The implication being that, unlike Charlotte, she sees no “nobility” or “value” in art for art’s sake. Or doing anything, really, that doesn’t have some specific “purpose” (even fucking has a purpose for Carrie: her column). This being such a New York outlook on life that it practically makes one want to vomit over how many people living in that city share such a view. In contrast, Charlotte previously tells her friends of spotting a so-called deadbeat/kept/unemployed woman, “Sometimes I’ll walk by one of those Color Me Mine pottery places and I’ll see a woman having just a lovely afternoon glazing a bowl.”
When Charlotte is met with nothing but crickets and blank stares, she feels the need to further justify “not working” (this phrase always designed to diminish the things one does and actually enjoys doing for no money). To do so, she also assures them, “And I wanted to volunteer at Trey’s hospital. And help raise money for the new pediatric AIDS wing.” Upon hearing that, Carrie “indulges” her friend’s “whim” by encouraging, “The cooking and the AIDS stuff is great…” only to gut-punch Charlotte with the aforementioned insult about “just keeping on walking” if she saw Charlotte glazing a bowl at midday.
Of course, that’s just called jealousy. For all working people are fundamentally derisive and judgmental toward those who “don’t work” (a.k.a. are just doing things that make them happy without placing a monetary value on it). Wishing they, too, could live such an unburdened, unbrainwashed life. But even Charlotte can’t deprogram from the idea that she has to be “useful” in some alternate fashion, like child-birthing. Continuing a new generation of Worker Soldiers who will also believe in the religion of Capitalism. Whether they’re forced to (by circumstance of birth) or not (also by circumstance of birth).
Oddly, though, Charlotte chooses to take out Carrie’s judgment on Miranda by calling her the next morning and saying, “You were so judgmental at the coffee shop yesterday. You think I’m one of those women.” Genuinely confused, Miranda asks, “One of what women?” Charlotte snaps back, “One of those women we hate, who just works until she gets married.” The guilt over being “indulgent” enough to quit her job and take a risk on pursuing something less “directed” than working as an art curator/dealer has clearly gotten to her. And it’s not because she herself is questioning the “choice she chooses,” but because the lack of support from her friends, to her, signifies the lack of societal support for any woman who would dare to quit working. This, in effect, shows how far capitalism—not feminism—has come in indoctrinating people of all genders to believe that their primary value is in the amount of money they can bring home. So while Sex and the City disguises this as a mark of how the tables have turned on homemakers being the “freaks” instead of the working girls, it’s actually more telling of how women have been as subsumed by capitalism as men. Entirely taken with its seductive tenets, the top of the list being “independence.” By becoming a slave to whoever employs and underpays you.
At the end of “Time and Punishment,” Charlotte remains slightly ambivalent about her decision, snapping at the girl she’s hired to take over for her by barbing, “You’re twenty-two, what do you know about life?” Realizing her temper got away from her, she apologizes and explains, “I’ve been working my whole life, this is a big transition.” The twenty-two-year-old replacing her finally justifies her action by remarking, “If it’s any consolation, my mother worked all the time. It would have been nice to have her home.” Nonetheless, when Charlotte first told her replacement she was quitting to focus on motherhood, the girl looked at her with just as much horrified incredulity as Carrie (who, again, was way more judgmental than Miranda, despite the episode quickly centering the yin and yang “rivalry” between single women who work and married women who don’t on Miranda and Charlotte). So it is that Charlotte adds, yet again, her claim of being very focused on pediatric AIDS research. Because a social cause is better than no cause at all…if you have to confess to “not working.” A phrase that, to reiterate, not only belittles artists, but also domestic labor that is billed as somehow “lesser than” the non-“pink collar” jobs of this money-grubbing world.
And yet, what Charlotte ultimately proves by walking out of the job anyway, despite all the glares lobbied against her, is that nothing “tastes” as good as “not working” feels. Plus, it makes capitalists so very uncomfortable, something they ought to experience far more often than they’re made to. The dichotomy being that Charlotte has the luxury of being the most anti-capitalist of her friend group perhaps precisely because she’s benefited the most from capitalism via her inherited wealth.
