Girls Gone Mild

"I know it might be overwhelming," says Emily Sproch, 28, the earnest tour guide standing at the front of a bus rolling slowly through Manhattan's West Village, clutching a microphone. She places her hand over her heart as her tone grows serious, almost reverential. "I might see a few tears walking down there. It's a magical place. But try to stay calm, and quiet." The bus stops, and Sproch, wearing a pretty, pale summer dress, steps out, leading her group—an odd assortment of women of varying ages, a gay male couple and some bored-looking boyfriends—past the sickly-sweet smells of Magnolia Bakery and on to Perry Street. The crowd stops at a pretty brownstone with a tall stoop. Here it is: Carrie Bradshaw's house. Or at least the façade that producers pretended was located on the Upper East Side. The place where the lead character on "Sex and the City" bid her dates farewell, spiky heels clicking on the stairs—or where she allowed them inside, where she decided whom she was going to sleep with. It was the border, the gateway, Mr. Big's Berlin wall. The place where she sat and smoked and drank and argued and cried. Carrie's stoop. The crowd stands, silent, then quickly begins to take photographs. The stoop, the door, the tree. Themselves in front of the stoop, the door, the tree. Many simply stand before it and weep. An estimated 50,000 people from countries as distant as Australia and Japan make the pilgrimage each year to the shrine of the sexy single woman who came to symbolize, for a generation of women, independence, assertiveness and style.

What's striking about the intense interest in "Sex and the City," particularly in the lead-up to the release of the feature film, is how many people speak of it in hyperbolic terms: as a revolution, a phenomenon, a cataclysm, almost an insurgency. As a show, it was remarkably successful. It ran on HBO from 1998 to 2004, winning seven Emmy Awards—the first cable program to win best comedy—and has been broadcast in 200 countries. It is still watched, in reruns on TBS, by an average of 2.5 million viewers every day. Ten years after the show debuted, the audience is expanding, even though its sassy thirtysomething heroines are now in their 40s, and one is in her 50s. For many women in New York and beyond, the release of the film is a major social event. For when women watch it, they see themselves. Older, younger or imagined selves, perhaps, but themselves nonetheless.

Yet for all the hype and adoration, was "Sex and the City" really all that revolutionary? The show definitely, and loudly, explored uncharted TV territory. It was naughty and bawdy and was one of the rare shows—along with "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and "Murphy Brown"—to ask the provocative question: is it OK for a woman to be alone? The fact that the four characters—the thoughtful writer Carrie, the razor-witted lawyer Miranda, the defiantly romantic Charlotte and the sexually voracious Samantha—demanded sexual satisfaction was refreshing, even empowering. But the fact is, the show really only asked questions. When it came to answering them, the result was, well, old-fashioned. By the end of the series, all these women had husbands or lovers. The buildup to the movie has been based almost entirely on whether Carrie and Big finally get hitched. When you look back on it all, this doesn't seem like the stuff of a revolution. By its conclusion, the show was not so much about being single as searching for The One.

The movie doesn't really change those ground rules. Ten years on, the women are still funny, cutting, narcissistic, materialistic (the labels!) and loyal. There is not a whiff of anything subversive in the entire film, unless you count those scenes where Carrie (and Parker) doesn't wear any makeup—curiously, by the end of the series the women looked younger than when it began. Sure, Samantha still has an insatiable sexual appetite at 50, but today she seems like just another cougar. The friendships are strong, and important. But by the end of the film (spoiler alert), only one woman remains single. The only character struggling with the idea of marriage is a man, Mr. Big, an irony that seems to escape Carrie and her protective bridesmaids. It is only good guy Steve's infidelity, and the question of whether Miranda can forgive him, that gives the film real depth. There is still no suggestion that you can carve out an identity outside of the realms of sex, love and men. Perhaps few of us want to. Still, you can't help but wonder how hard it would be to have just one of the characters find meaning in her job, study or even aid work. Or something else beyond the movie's heavy investment in what you might call a Cinderella complex.

Then again, "Sex and the City" is hardly the first time we saw women considering what it means to love and to lust. The idea that love should be a part of marriage was introduced during the Enlightenment. Ever since, the institution of marriage has been considered more optional—and therefore more fragile. When love is part of the equation, the choice and intangibility of the standard heighten the anxiety. In the 1800s, the exaltation of romantic love made many more women hesitant to commit, according to the historian Stephanie Coontz, author of "Marriage: A History." They went through "marriage trauma" as they fretted over "what would happen if a spouse did not live up to their high ideals." The questions seem perennial—are single women too picky? And an even more "SATC"-type question: while waiting for those ideals to be fulfilled, is it OK to have sex? A lot of sex?

In the 18th century, one catchphrase went "Better single than miserably married," but few believed it. Bachelor women were occasionally called "extra women" or, most often, "spinsters." Whatever the word, they were both ridiculed and much discussed from then on. In 1936, Vogue editor Marjorie Hillis wrote that "So many volumes have been written on the Sex Life of the Unmarried Woman in the last twenty years, and so many thousand cases listed, that if you waded through them you would emerge feeling that you were the sole surviving virgin." Her best-selling book "Live Alone and Like It," inspired by the burgeoning numbers of single women in New York, is still selling copies—it will be published in paperback next month.