Sex and the City

Sex and the City follows Carrie Bradshaw and her three best friends, all single thirty-something women looking for love in New York City. In the series finale, Carrie's longtime love interest, Mr. Big, shows up in Paris, acting as her knight in shining armor, Prince Charming and savior all rolled into one. He whisks her away from her current boyfriend back to New York where they can be together. Carrie's strong feminine character succumbs to society’s pressure for women to be married and nurture others. Unmarried women are seen as a “cat lady” or a “spinster” where as an unmarried man is a “playboy” or “bachelor”. In "Women Read the Romance" by Janice A. Radway, she states that "...women have been taught to believe that men must be their sole source of pleasure." (Radway, 71) Radway argues that in romance novels when a man expresses his love for a woman, "...she is gently caressed, carefully protected, and verbally praised with words of love." (Radway, 73) Sex and the City is similar to a romance novel in the sense that the main characters are looking for love and "the One". Readers of romance novels prefer a plot where "[the heroine is attended to] by a man who reassures her of her special status and unique identity." (Radway, 71) Mr. Big is definitely attending to Carrie in this clip from the series finale, which shows her falling into his arms and breaking into tears at the sight of him.