Sex Tourist
by Rax King
In an early episode of Sex and the City, the girls leave Manhattan to visit their pregnant friend Laney at her mansion in Connecticut. At the baby shower, Laney derisively asks, of promiscuous Samantha, “Is she still bar-hopping and bed-hopping? Isn’t it sad when that’s all you have?” Her point, with which the show’s protagonists would contend over and over again, was that sportfucking bartenders was like chasing shadows on a cave wall; only in a monogamous marriage with children, like her own, could one hope to step into the sun.
Only a couple years before, she was the one partying across Manhattan in between arduous days at her A&R job. Now she’s been claimed, domesticated, and bred. The envy is palpable in her pious dig at Samantha: she needs to believe that bar-hopping and bed-hopping is something she’s simply too mature for now.
We’ve changed since that 1998 episode. My fellow slutty girls are wearing fewer scarlet A’s than they used to, and anyone who wants to know whether women can “have it all” knows to ask it ironically, with scare quotes. Still, it’s been tough to shake the pernicious idea that bar-hopping and bed-hopping are mere recreational activities, especially for women. Bars and beds are where we hide from our responsibilities. Where we go to delay “growing up.”
Unfortunately, this idea pairs well with the mounting pressure for women to get back in the kitchen and stay there until their nests are empty. Even people who don’t explicitly believe in such regressive notions may struggle to avoid practicing them. During the pandemic, women were overwhelmingly the ones who left their jobs to tend the home and children, a sacrifice few men even seemed to notice. Presumably the 2,200 people surveyed by Morning Consult in 2020 were all over the cultural and political spectrum, not just in the swampy basements of the manosphere or mommy-bloggish McMansions like Laney’s. But the results of the survey would seem to assert that, for women, the party is over. Time to pick a bed and stay there like a mature adult.
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