The Samantha Principle
Early in Sex and the City, Samantha spends an entire day masturbating, hunting for an orgasm she lost somewhere. It sounds ridiculous, but the shamelessness of it—the commitment to a feeling without any narrative, any apology, any wellness-speak around it—that’s her whole thing. I watch that scene now and think about all the years I spent around people who would never, not because they couldn’t, but because they’d have to explain it, justify it, frame it as something respectable. Samantha doesn’t do that. She doesn’t soften or perform or make it smaller than it is.
The show’s twenty years old this year. I rewatched some episodes I hadn’t touched in a decade, and what gets me now isn’t the fashion or the dating disasters—it’s how uncompromised the characters sound when they talk to each other. Carrie and Stanford just tear people apart with no filter, purely because it feels good and it builds something real between them. Samantha does this constantly, about everyone, and people call her cruel. But there’s something cleaner about it than all the polite conversation in the world. You know where you stand. No pretense.
Carrie opens one episode saying she wants to put a gun to her head because she got dumped, or because life’s just exhausting. Dark stuff, but true. That’s what we’re all thinking. That casual suicidality between morning coffee and the rest of the day. Charlotte wants the same thing as Samantha, actually—just to be properly fucked by someone who gives a shit—and when that doesn’t work out, she just keeps going. They all do. There’s no scene where everything changes. You don’t fix it with therapy or a new job. You just live it.
Then Big marries someone else, and Carrie walks out with a hairflip. Not wounded, not angry, just cool about the whole thing. The loss looks good because she carries it that way. Later she tells him exactly what she thinks—the perfect response to the kind of gaslighting every man does half-conscious, calling someone difficult for being honest about what they need. She doesn’t soften the edges of it. She just says it.
Berger breaks up with her on a Post-it, which is the kind of casual cruelty that’s almost funny if it didn’t hurt. I got dumped once through Facebook by someone I’d never even met, just a message from a mutual friend saying it was over. Humiliating in a way that stuck, but at least not on a Post-it. Though Berger wasn’t worth the space in her head anyway. He never was.
Samantha dumping Richard broke me more than The Notebook ever could. She was in love with him—real love, not the Samantha version where she’s pretending not to care—but she left him anyway. Not a speech, not tears, just a clean exit because she knew better than to stay. That takes a kind of nerve that most people don’t have.
There’s a scene where Carrie orders a Cosmopolitan at a drive-through like it’s a nightclub, and I tried the same thing at McDonald’s with a beer once because someone told me they had it if you asked right. It was bullshit. They don’t. The image stays with me—that hopeful stupidity, then the deflation of being wrong about something small and stupid.
Samantha shops for one simple reason: to be attractive. We pretend shopping is about self-expression or personal growth, but really we’re just trying to look fuckable without looking desperate about it. The outfit does the work while you stand there like you didn’t think about it at all. That’s the game and she knows it, so she plays it without the pretense.
I wear the same sweatpants most days of the year. Carrie wore a different outfit every single episode for six seasons and would’ve looked at me with pure disbelief if she could see what I’ve become. But I’ve made peace with it. I’d rather have nothing on than spend energy figuring out what to wear, which is probably the most Samantha thing you can do without actually being Samantha.