My friends Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz have a long and marvelous (and I’m not just saying that because they are my friends) conversation about Alan’s new book, The Revolution Was Televised (about which more later) up at Press Play. And something Alan said helped a lot of my thinking about the era of anti-hero television over the last year or so snap into place. He told Matt:

When Carolyn Strauss told me that HBO’s decision of what to do as their first show after Oz came down to The Sopranos or something by Winnie Holzman, the creator of My So-Called Life, about a female business executive at a toy company, I immediately stopped paying attention to the interview for a good five minutes, because all I was thinking about was an alternate timeline where this Winnie Holzman show was the next big HBO show. I was asking myself, would the other show have spawned imitators? Or would it not have, because “Female business executive at a toy company” is not as inherently cool as “New Jersey wiseguy in therapy”?

It’s striking to me that while both of them talked about this alternate world, neither, at least in the edited version of the interview that appears online, mentioned Sex and the City. There’s no question that The Sopranos, which began airing seven months after the debut of Sex and the City in the summer of 1998, is the more formally ambitious show. But Sex and the City has never really gotten the credit it deserves for its deeply probing discussions of, among the factors my friend Emily Nussbuam at the New Yorker has identified, romanticism and cynicism, second- and third-wave feminism, and libertinism and prudishness, nor for its foundational role in the rise of HBO. Both in terms of acting as a destination show that brought viewers to the network while it elevated the traditional sitcom, and in the income it provided to HBO through syndication, Sex and the City deserves both critical and financial recognition for its role in elevating both the network and cable television in general.

And it, and the possibility of this long-lost Winne Holzman, raise the specter of an alternate universe of prestige television drama that’s dedicated to the rise and deconstruction of female fantasies in the way that shows like Breaking Bad or Mad Men paint glorious specters of masculine badassery that are the primary draw for some viewers, and then reveal the rot in them, a process that’s the primary draw for others. I can dream up a lot of the kinds of shows that we’d have in that bizarro world: in genre, the She-Hulk procedural I bring up so often I know it’s annoying, a functional version of Powers with Katee Sackhoff as Deena Pilgrim, in period shows, something about Helen Gurley Brown and the rise of women’s magazines, or a kicky vision of the seventies and eighties in Washington and New York through the eyes of a woman suspiciously like Nora Ephron, in crime, maybe a story about the DC Madam. I suspect the dynamics of this world would be similar: a period of establishing the competence and coolness of these women, followed by overreach, downfall, and accountability (arcs, by the way, that Sex and the City and Girls‘ most determined critics never give those shows enough credit for following). But the details would be different: we’d have to have audiences that accept private lives as important as power struggles, sex as something to be explored rather than simply had, frivolity as not more condemnable than violence or anger.

I wouldn’t want to have to choose between this fantasy world and the one we’ve got. I don’t want to give up Game of Thrones or The Wire for any of these other things. I just wish they could exist too, that Sex and the City wasn’t written out of history, and that Damages could have worked better on FX and on DirecTV, and that we weren’t still stuck on the idea that male fantasies are the stuff of literature, and female fantasies are treats.

I spent an hour yesterday considering how to tackle Stephen Marche’s calamitously awful piece for Esquire, “The Contempt of Women,” an attempt at cultural analysis in which he strawmans Girls, Sex and the City and Fifty Shades of Grey all in one paragraph, praises President Bush’s myopia, and literally cites declining sexual assaults rate as evidence of women’s contempt for men. It wasn’t that I didn’t have anything to say so much as I didn’t know where to start, at least until Marche tweeted “The women who show their contempt for my piece on the contempt of women prove my point by virtue of their contempt. Does that make sense?” It’s the perfect encapsulation of an idea that’s shows up in culture everywhere from the backlash against Anita Sarkeesian to the defense of comics who say that women aren’t funny: that women don’t have the right to determine what’s fit for judgement, particularly if their target is something admired by men or conferring of male privilege, and when they do, their judgement is inevitably tainted by self-interest or motivated by irrational contempt rather than the merits of the case.

It is, apparently, not okay for women to want clarity about the status of their relationships and sex that is fulfilling for them as well as their partners, as Hannah does on Girls, to attempt to negotiate the terms of their relationship as Anastasia Steele does in Fifty Shades of Grey, tease the president of the United States, who is also your husband and probably comes equipped with his own set of domestic idiosyncrasies and slight annoyances, or appreciate Louis C.K.’s self-examination. The thing is, there’s a lot of stupid in our culture, and contempt for women is embedded in that very stupid. I’m not sure why women are supposed to accord a heightened level of respect for narratives that tell us we should fall for inconsiderate schlubs whose inattentiveness is a theoretical down payment in future awesome, or the idea that sexual harassment is part of video game culture, or assertions that female incompetence is adorable and endearing. If people and concepts are going to treat women with utter, logic-boggling disrespect, I have no idea why I should bring deference to a contempt-fight.

But we are in luck! Because it turns out that even if I’m not supposed to feel contempt for things and behaviors, and men are supposed to ignore me, Marche is allowed to visit judgement down on his fellow men, and they’d do well to fall in line. “I suppose I should feel compassion, or some kind of weird gender loyalty, for the guys who can’t figure this out,” he writes. “In all honesty, I don’t. There is no masculinity crisis. There’s a crisis for idiots. The Tucker Maxes of the world are doomed. That’s not the end of men. It’s the beginning.” What a relief that someone is allowed to name nonsense for what it is! I hope Marche is ready and able to serve. Because I have a list of things I’d like him to hold in contempt for me.

The bridge is yours.

-Mo Ryan talks Game of Thrones changes with D.B. Weiss.

-Kim Cattrall approves of Girls.

-Can it be Vamps-o-clock already?

-Drama in the Archie Comics family!

-Tyler Perry is an evil genius for passing this off:

The writer Meg Wolitzer has a blockbuster essay in the New York Times Sunday Book Review about the differences between the ways fiction by men and women is marketed, reviewed, and received. There are a lot of elements there, and I’m sure it will be much-discussed, but what struck me most about it was Wolitzer’s explication of the way incentives systems work to reward consumers for reading novels by men and about “male” issues, and to reward female novelists for taking on male characters and “male” themes:

Stories, long and short, and often about women’s lives, suddenly mattered to the cultural conversation. This period, the 1970s and to an extent the early ’80s, initially appeared to create an entirely different and permanent reality for female fiction writers. Men were actively interested in reading about the inner lives of women (or maybe some just pretended they were) and received moral kudos for doing so…

Recently, when the novelist Mary Gordon spoke at a boys’ school, she learned that the students weren’t reading the Brontës, Austen or Woolf. Their teachers defended this by saying they were looking for works that boys could relate to. But at the girls’ school across the street, Gordon said, “no one would have dreamed of removing ‘Huckleberry Finn’ or ‘Moby-Dick’ from the syllabus. As a woman writer, you get points if you include the ‘male’ world in your work, and you lose points if you omit it.”

Lorrie Moore added, “A female scholar once said to me: ‘I already know what women think, pretty much. I’m more interested in reading books by men.” The problem with this statement becomes clear if you flip it. Were a man to say, “I already know what men think; I’m more interested in reading books by women,” he would be greeted with incomprehension. While there may be no such thing as “male” or “female” writing, to say that the emphases of male and female writers might sometimes be different doesn’t mean that the deepest concerns or preoccupations of women are inferior or any less essential. Literary women novelists can of course do very well without male readers. And some literary male writers have admitted envying women the “femaleness” of the novel-reading (and -buying) community — a community that, from my own experience with book groups and individual readers, I know to be attentive and passionate.

This is exactly what’s happened in television and the critical definitions of the so-called Golden Age. We’ve created the sense that the audience is morally sophisticated for emotionally engaging with the aberrant, sometimes abhorrent behavior with middle aged men (who, for the most part, happen to be white). To contemplate Tony Soprano makes you an ethically sophisticated thinker. To commune with Carrie Bradshaw makes you a consumerist flake.

But what’s so critically important about Wolitzer’s point here is that this is not a natural or permanent state of affairs. If the rise of feminism created a space where the incentives were shifted, and where men got credit in conversation and in their personal relationships for reading fiction that explored the rich inner lives of women, we could create that kind of environment again. Some of that requires some of the right, big books and movies and shows to come along—I wish Karen Russell’s phenomenal novel Swamplandia! had made it further in the Tournament of Books in a way that might have given it some slingshot momentum, and I thought Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones was an unfortunate missed opportunity to give that director credit for his long-standing interest in the inner lives of women and girls. And some of it will require critics, male and female alike, to work together to forge a new consensus. The strong reception Lena Dunham’s Girls has been receiving from the kind of male critics who are at least semi-reflected in many Golden Age shows gives me hope that we might be at a sort of tipping point in television.

The bridge is yours, especially if you’ll tell me which new TV shows you’re excited about.

-Cancellation bear!

-Totally called it with the Sex and the City prequel on the CW. It’s a go.

-Do movies have to justify the costs they run up, or does it just not seem like they do?

-Celebrities and children’s books.

-Welcome to the new economy, funnier than the old economy:

Because I like subjecting myself to terrible things for your amusement, I spent a bunch of yesterday watching the first dozen episodes of Entourage in an attempt to figure out what the deal is, or was, and because we’ve been talking about female fantasies a lot lately, so I figured I’d drop in on a male one.

The thing that mostly strikes me is how mundane and repetitive so much of the lifestyle nonsense is — and by extension how much of the main characters’ lives are. Sex and the City works, I think, because the show has stuff happening all the time. All four of the main characters have different jobs that they care a lot about and that fuel numerous plots, whether Carrie’s interviewing a subject, Charlotte’s getting involved with new artists and patrons through the gallery, or Samantha and Miranda are dealing with clients. They sometimes have activities, whether Samantha’s getting herself in trouble trying to get involved with a charity function or Carrie’s doing fundraisers for the NYPD. And they have large and variegated social circles we drop into from time to time. The world is big, and we’re just dropping in on some of it. By contrast, the guys from Entourage do essentially the same things over and over again, looping the eternal mobius strip between the Coffee Bean, Ari’s office, Vince’s house, and various identical-looking parties. This is their whole world, airless and airbrushed.

Secondly, Eric’s the actual hero of the show, right? He’s as close as there is to a sympathetic character among the main four. Unlike Ari, who knows all, E has actual things to learn. Unlike Vince and Johnny, his career isn’t time-limited. Unlike Turtle, he has actual sense. That’s not saying much. When I joked about starting watching the show, Ta-Nehisi warned me that I’d regret it: “What an awful, condescending reflection of male identity.” And maybe E resonates with me because his ambition makes him feel more like a Sex and the City character who has places to go and people to see, than he does like Turtle hustling store credits so he can buy cashmere pajamas.Entourage looks more like a vacation than a fantasy to me: fun for a couple of weeks, but ultimately pretty deadly if you have to do it year after year.

There’s been a lot of discussion about whether the planned Dirty Dancing remake will keep the abortion subplot from the original. But there’s been surprisingly little speculation about whether a planned Sex and the City prequel will include Carrie and Samantha’s abortions as plot points. The original show had a fairly nuanced perspective on abortion,* embodied most notably by the storyline in the fourth season where Miranda got pregnant accidentally and decided to keep the baby, as Carrie worried about telling Aiden that she’d had an abortion after careless, condomless sex at 22:

We also know that Samantha had one abortion while in college and one later. If the show is an origin story, showing us how the characters met when they were in their early 20s, it would include the years when Samantha and Carrie terminated their pregnancies. I don’t now whether the CW, which is apparently developing the prequel, has the bravery to do this, but it’s important to show heroines not just helping other women get abortions if they need them, but having abortions themselves and moving on to have healthy, fulfilled sexual and emotional lives.

*Relatedly, it drives me insane that Sex and the City is never really in conversations about the revival of television as a medium. I imagine that’s in part because its run mostly overlapped with The Sopranos, which laid down the anti-hero template that’s become so popular in the shows that followed, but I think it’s also because it’s a comedy aimed at women. But it is, for the most part, excellent, and a decent thing for guys to watch if they want to understand the ambitions and anxieties of smart women. Also, I am SO a Miranda despite the whole writer=Carrie thing.

It’s very good news that the Affordable Care Act might eliminate copays for birth control—as Matt singles out, even the relatively small cost of those copays can be an obstacle to use. But I think making contraception cheap and readily available is only one part of the use equation. And one thing that would be incredibly useful is if pop culture showed more people actually using contraceptives.

I really like Love & Basketball for many reasons, including that it ends up being a story about a man who supports his more successful wife’s career, but the thing that’s stuck with me most is the fact that when the main characters, Monica and Quincy, have sex for the first time, the movie doesn’t cut away during foreplay, but shows Quincy getting a condom out of his dresser drawer and putting it on (SF my W, but your mileage may vary):

Sex and the City, which is theoretically super-frank about sex, shows condoms in Carrie’s purse and stored by Steve in Brady’s diaper bag, but I don’t remember a sex scene that actually includes a man putting one on. There’s one episode where a potential partner wants Samantha to have an HIV test before he’ll sleep with her, and of course Miranda and Steve don’t use protection when they have the sexual encounter that results in their son. But for characters who have as much as sex as they do, contraception and condoms are a surprisingly small part of the conversation.

Judd Apatow’s movies make contraception seem kind of bizarrely complex, whether it’s Ben, who’s too drunk to get a condom on in Knocked Up (and it makes no sense that Alison isn’t on oral contraception), or Andy, who finds condoms totally mysterious in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. It’s a confusion that sort of emphasizes the man-child nature of the characters, but that none the less doesn’t read as particularly true.

It goes without saying that most movie sex scenes aren’t particularly realistic period, nor are they particularly complete. But it would be pretty easy to incorporate that step into movies, or to have characters ask if someone’s on the pill when they sleep together for the first time. And even if stories aren’t romantic comedies or dramas, to include the fairly routine popping your pill before you brush your teeth or before dinner in the infinite montages of characters getting ready in the morning. Background is important here, and safe sex is both about the heat of the moment and about routine.

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about the way pop culture in the recession, rather than defining what our aspirations should be, is helping reconcile us to our compromises. So it was with that in mind that I absorbed the news that Bridesmaids has finally beat out Sex and the City at the box office, becoming the highest-grossing R-rated comedy starring women ever made.

Vats of ink have been spilled condemning the consumerist ethos of Sex and the City and of fans who aspire to relive the show in every last detail, fetishizing the mediocre cupcakes of the Magnolia Bakery, ponying up for Sex and the City tours and experiences. I do think that the first Sex and the City movie is better than it’s given credit, both as a portrait of friendships and as a rejection of the series finale’s awkward embrace of monogamy for all. But the movie’s consumerism hit new heights, with all couture dresses, overreaching on real estate and abandoned hideously expensive pairs of shoes, and a subplot that treated one character’s obsession with expensive clothes and public displays of wealth as the cause of the downfall of her relationship acting more as a minor moral correction than a permanent adjustment. Yes, it might be a cute gesture to get married at the courthouse in a vintage store suit, but it’s not meaningful if you’re going home to that hedge fund penthouse.

Bridesmaids isn’t exactly where I’d like lady comedies to be either, in that at the end of the movie, the main character’s capacity for romantic connection is revitalized, while the question of whether she’ll revive her small business and her professional ambitions is essentially unaddressed. Maybe having Annie give running her bakery another try and getting the guy would have been too much. And maybe having her get the bakery and not the adorable Canadian-accented cop would have confirmed stereotypes about career women and their inability to get dudes. But I think it’s as much of a fairy tale to suggest that ending up with the right dude will resolve everything as either of those two options are. Bridesmaids could have resurrected Annie’s professional confidence tentatively, perhaps via a loan from Megan, with the affirmation that it’s going to be very hard, but that it’s worth persisting. As we figure out what’s going to happen to us in which I’m increasingly sure is going to be a permanent period of economic readjustment, we’re going to have to balance between pop culture that encourages us to want too much, and pop culture that suggests we’d be better off not hoping for anything at all, even through hard work.