Sex in the City Vs. Sex in the Suburbs

It is remarkable how two shows can be about roughly the same subject matter while still being pretty much completely different. While both shows take a look at a group of same sex friends in their often ill fated attempts at serious relationships with men, how the characters are represented is vastly different.

A gender role reversal is often evident. Since the medieval England laws of "Femme Covert" (which states that once married, a woman has no rights and is actually the property of her husband) to current day, women have had to face unfortunate collective unconscious thoughts that women are overemotional, over-the-top, passive, nurturing, and often irrational. Very frequently while watching these two programs, we see the opposite characteristics coming out of the characters. Take, for example, the man who has to be approached at the bar in "Queer as Folk," or the other character who makes a very dramatic (and emotionally driven) scene at his son's Brice while the females at the event try their best just to calm him down so they could talk rationally. In "Sex and the City" there is the woman who definitely does not get overemotional, which would be pretty easy to do, when her lover goes off on a Turret's Syndrome-like rampage at the point of orgasm.

It even goes beyond the on-screen actions of the characters. It's also evident in the style in which the mature sitcoms are written. "Sex and the City" is written very maturely, and the humor is often very subtle. Whereas, "Queer as Folk" features jokes that are very over the top and tasteless. It is "Sex and the City" that is mature and refined, while "Queer as Folk" tends to be overindulgent.

A look at the writing and directing pools of these two shows yields some pretty interesting results. The show about men, "Queer as Folk," has a writing and directing staff comprised by only men; 100%. The show about women, "Sex and the City," has a directing staff made up of only about 30% women, while there is only one writer who is a male. This writer Darren Starr has experience writing for shows where the primary audience is female; he was a regular writer for "Beverly Hills 90210," and he wrote fifteen episodes of "Melrose Place" from 1993 to 1995.

As easy as it could be, we cannot point to the sex of the creators as being the driving point behind the differences in how the sexes are represented in these two vastly popular premium cable series.

Though the two shows occasionally enforce the collective unconscious of how gender roles are believed to actually be, and though they're always entertaining, the real high point of both of these series comes when gender roles are challenged. Society is able to see that a man and a woman can be represented and even act in real life in ways that challenge the common ideology.