A brief scroll on Tiktok and it’s not long before I stumble across the words ‘Carrie Bradshaw toxic’ in the app’s ‘top searches’ feature. I watch a plethora of scenes from Sex and the City, where Carrie’s behaviour is denounced by content creators and commenters alike. Yet, though Carrie-hate is trending and topical, with another season of the spinoff show And Just Like That currently being filmed in New York, it is not a new, or even revolutionary, sentiment; women have been contemplating Bradshaw’s flighty tendencies and ill-judged decisions for decades. The Hollywood Reporter’s 1998 review of SATC described Carrie as ‘mouthy’ and as a ‘twisted image’ of columnist Candace Bushnell (upon whom her character is based), and Thought Catalog published an article in 2014 entitled ‘Why Carrie Bradshaw is the worst possible person a woman could idolise’. Clearly, this critique has been brewing for some time. What makes the dislike of Bradshaw so acute amongst Gen-Z women, however, is perhaps the fact that now we have the vocabulary with which to substantiate and clarify our aversion. Gen-Z’s labels and identifiers mean they can diagnose and distil Carrie’s problematic behaviours into the following maladies:

“Carrie may be an attentive and doting girlfriend, but she is certainly not girl-friend material”

Not a girl’s-girl

Carrie may have close female friendships but she is fundamentally not a girl’s-girl. The times that she hijacks the conversation with her friends to recentre it on her own concerns are frankly innumerable, and there are striking examples of Carrie putting her needs far above those of her friends. In season two, Carrie unceremoniously ditches dinner with Miranda to see Big, and in season four, sends boyfriend Aidan in her place to help an injured Miranda who is lying nakedly, undignified, on her bathroom floor. Contrastingly, Carrie’s friends are wholly, consistently there for her– they allow Carrie to talk about her situationship with Big ad nauseam, Charlotte gives Carrie a large sum of money to buy her apartment, and they all instantly drop everything to help Carrie recuperate following her jilting. As Carrie’s self-absorption becomes tantamount to selfishness, her friendships become grossly asymmetrical. Carrie may be an attentive and doting girlfriend, but she is most certainly not girl-friend material.

Pick-me girl

Carrie is undeniably ‘pick-me’–though she would never choose a Moretti over some Manolos, Bradshaw’s being is anchored in the need for male approval and validation. Carrie may be an independent, working woman making a name for herself but she, and her column, centre men entirely. Equally, Carrie possesses the pick-me ‘I’m not like other girls’ complex, whether that be regularly claiming that she is not fixated on the conventions of marriage or having children like Charlotte is, or deliberately distinguishing herself from Big’s ‘Park-avenue-princess’ type. Though Carrie’s search for male validation is masked as sexual liberation, it is clear to the modern viewer that Bradshaw is not quite as emancipated as she might think.

Victim of the ‘mid’ man epidemic

What made Carrie so attractive, and revolutionary, as a female protagonist of her time was her autonomous, career-driven existence; rather than be defined as a wife or a mother, Carrie was free to be entirely her own person. So, when Carrie compromises this aspirational labelless-ness whenever she gets a boyfriend it frustrates the modern viewer, especially when the men she puts her life on hold for are so incredibly mid.

Put simply, Big is man-child and commitment-phobe to the highest degree–he puts Carrie through utter emotional turmoil, refusing to commit to her but simultaneously interfering with any subsequent relationship she starts, both directly and indirectly. Equally, Aidan is not all that either–he takes Carrie back after she cheats on him, but only lets his anger stew and ultimately boil-over in a physical punch-up with Big a few episodes later. The emotional immaturity and unavailability of both men makes them heartily undesirable, if you ask me. As Carrie allows herself to be derailed by the most average of men, she is far from being an idol in the eyes of self-worth-knowing Gen-Zers.

“she harmfully undermines the true capabilities of the modern woman”

Homewrecker

After starting an affair with Big and consequently ending his marriage with Natasha, Carrie can be classified as a homewrecker pretty unequivocally. Equally, when Carrie apologises to Natasha, it is not truly for Natasha’s benefit, but rather only to soothe Carrie’s superstitions about karmic retribution. And, to add insult to injury (quite literally), not only does Carrie break the couple up, she also causes Natasha to break her tooth as she falls whilst running after her as she cowardly flees Big’s apartment. Yet worse still, she keeps her infidelity a secret from Aidan, leading to a catastrophic downward spiral of deceit and self-loathing in which no one is left unscathed. Though it takes two to tango and Carrie alone is not at fault, ignoring the cardinal rules of girl code firmly diminishes her female role-model potential.

Archetype of harmful ‘girl maths’ phenomenon

One of Carrie’s most famous lines reads as so: “When I first moved to New York and I was totally broke, sometimes I would buy Vogue instead of dinner. I felt it fed me more”. Here, Carrie demonstrates her enthralment with the world of fashion; she also paints herself as frivolous and superficial. The concept of ‘girl maths’ began innocently enough, with women jokingly finding loopholes of logic with which they could justify unnecessary or excessive purchases e.g. ‘If I don’t buy anything today I can buy more tomorrow! ’ However, the trend also sustains misogynistic preconceptions, perpetuating a view of women as careless spendthrifts lacking worldly knowledge. Carrie embodies this image several times throughout the show, admitting that she doesn’t vote, wittering away $40,000 on designer shoes, and neglecting to back up any of her work on her computer, even though she is a writer by trade. As Carrie unashamedly flaunts her political, fiscal, and technological ignorance, she harmfully undermines the true capabilities of the modern woman.

Carrie’s prognosis is clear as day: for Gen-Z she will not become immortalised as an It-girl, but rather as the antiheroine of the Sex and the City universe.