I saw Sex and the City last night, and hated it. It made me so sad. I felt the movie was what would happen if a gay fashionista and an 18 year old girl got together and wrote Sex and the City: The Movie. I can’t imagine a grown up woman would honestly embrace the film. It was an unfeminist, materialist montage that had more to do with pushing Louis Vuitton and Vitamin Water than portraying our favorite quartet of girlfriends and their travails.

Mostly, I wanted the movie to show the girls a little kindness. The blue palette and harsh lighting did nobody any favors. The film reflected a lot of what’s awful about fashion and the men who run it. Anorexic looking Carrie in her weird outfits, harsh hair, beaky makeup and super labels betrayed very little femininity to my eye. I felt as I often do when I see models on the runway these days: who is art-directing this and please tell me they don’t have ovaries and hope to bring children into the world.

As for the teenage girl part: I take SATC seriously. It was a friend to me all through my twenties and while it often depressed me, I always felt like the essential character of the characters shone a light. There is one scene in that last season that highlights the maturity of the women, the fulfillment of not only their quest for love but their quest to learn how to love. Miranda searches for Steve’s elderly mother in the streets of Brooklyn, finds her, bathes her, comforts her. Magda, Miranda’s long-suffering nanny says something like, “You know how to love.” I cried like a baby in that scene, seeing one of my screen heroines in the fullness of her life. So when in the film Miranda moves out and goes silent on her husband of five years, father of her child, I thought, really? Have two educated New Yorkers in a committed relationship never heard of therapy (apparently there’s a six month lead time required to begin couples counseling in their world, because that’s how long it takes them to make it to the couch). When Carrie and Mr. Big split and go radio silent after his moment of indecision…well, whoever’s been about to head down the altar must have shook her head twice. Maybe it’s because Big was about to marry Andre Leon Talley’s devil creation rather than a real woman.

I didn’t want SATC to be a Vogue story. I wanted it to be a human story.