Will McAdam

‘Would you like a date?’ purred the beautiful Arab servant in Sex and the City 2. Oh no wait, sorry, he was Indian. And that wasn’t a proposition, that was a plate of dried fruit. Well, he’s in Abu Dhabi and brown, so potato/ potahto, let’s call a spade an Arab, yadda yadda, blah blah blah.

Casual racism, sexism, heterophobia are the staples of any up-and-coming cosmopolitan slaaag; and this is pretty much the moral of SATC2. So, you’d think this outlandishly controversial, subtly tanned columnist would love it. And so did I. So. Did. I. But this isn’t NYC, and I’m not a whiny, bitch of a wife with sinews for veins (that’s you, Sarah Jessica-Parker).

‘You need to reassess your life’ piped up some woman sitting next to me after the film had finished. It was the same woman who had periodically slopped her white wine spritzer in my lap, as she whooped and sistered at lives she never has, does, nor will ever live.

And as much as I hate to admit it, as much as it proves my self-knowledge is as deficient as that woman’s sense of sisterhood, she was right. She hit the nail on the head and hammered it into the wall of my subconscious.

Whereas a year ago, bright-eyed and keen to please, I was extolling the power-pulling strength of a stylish gayman’s thighs in my first article, I now find such assertions to be empty. I couldn’t give two shits that I’m pasty and thin. Those bad ass thighs got me to the library and back for three long years; and it turns out that’s all I really want them to do. I no longer want them to knock The Tab’s directors for six (which, undoubtedly, they did). I don’t care about that anymore. That’s right guys, I’m growing up: I’m going to have to get a job, and it’s no longer acceptable to drop a garish bagful of condoms in front of pious Sheiks. 

So, as the exams peter out and the days get longer, we suddenly realise that those people we’ve called friends for three years have never actually occupied more than a few hours of our time each day. And once we spend every day together, with no work to moan about or supervisors to deride, it’s tempting just to sit on the backs and bitch about some jubba in a punt with a muffin top and an ice-cream.

But, friends, let’s not. For too long I’ve been the black heart beating in the cynical breast of The Tab. No longer. Oh no. Carrie Bradshaw has shown me up for what I really am: a half decent person who likes a bitch, who then feels repentant the next day, but who doesn’t have the balls to fess up, say sorry and live a better life thereafter.

So, let me put my head above the parapet and be a bastion for all you fellow moralistas out there. It might not be easy, we might well have the occasional lapse, but let me make this quite clear: SATC2 is morally repugnant; and if you don’t come out of it and want to live a spotless and unsensationally moral life, you are a bad, bad person.

Take my hand: we’re real boys now.