i agree with kriston about the various critical analyses of sex and the city that have been floating around since the finale, although he expresses himself much more coherently and with much more complex sentence structure than i could. and i haven't seen the finale yet, but i've read enough to get a sense of what went on.

all the articles are just tiring and pointless, to me, and end up probably saying more about the critics who wrote them than the show. people forgot that there are real women out there, doing real things, and maybe they should be looking at that instead of writing lame articles about what was, in the end, just a tv show. i mean, i also think it's important to think about how or why women were influenced by satc, but i really think you can only go so far in analyzing a tv show. really, a ton of these writers were stretching - carrie as a jane austen character? satc ends up punishing each woman? (that was a really terrible article, in my opinion, and completely untrue.) and then everyone is SOOOO MAD that carrie actually ends up with a man instead of embracing the single life and carrying on and proving that a woman doesn't need a man, she just needs herself and her friends and BLAH BLAH. you know what? sometimes a woman needs a man! in fact, i think most of the time a woman needs a man, or a significant other! why is it bad that carrie found real love at the end of it all? the show came out and essentially said, you know what, loneliness sucks. life IS better with love. life IS better with someone who will chase you to paris and say you're the one and then take you home and cook with you and take you to movies and put up with the fact that you're a screechy, self-absorbed, annoying sex-columnist retard diva. it may be arrogant, it may be hard to accept, but i think it's true. and that, in my opinion, was a brave way to end the series. it's not a bad thing to admit that you want love in your life, and it's not a bad thing to hope that prince charming will come along. what wouldn't have been brave was to have carrie end up single, yet happy and satisfied with her friends and the city, because honestly, in a show that was ALWAYS about the search for love and satisfaction, i think that would have been a farce.

the ending WASN'T about how incredibly pathetic it would be to have had these middle-aged women remain single. it WAS about love. love of all sorts: of a place, of friends, of possibilities, of men, of women. and it wasn't like the characters settled; for six years now they've been through divorces, miscarriages, unplanned pregnancies, heartbreaks, cancer, bad sex, good sex, infidelity, death, always searching. and they ending up finding happiness in uncommon places. to me, the finale of the show said not: Being single is sad. it said: Love and hope is good. and that was a perfect ending.