Why Do We Care So Much That Kim Cattrall And Sarah Jessica Parker Aren’t Friends?

Ever since a grieving Kim Cattrall called Sarah Jessica Parker out as a ‘hypocrite’ on Instagram following the death of her brother, there has been a rush to take sides. In a classic Internet ‘either/or’ scenario, people are either team Carrie or team Samantha.

On the face of it, you could very reasonably side with either of them. If, as Cattrall says, Parker was using her brother’s death as an exercise in personal PR when she reached out over Instagram (despite the well-established rumours that the two of them never got on) then, of course, that’s fairly abhorrent. However, you could equally reasonably conclude that Parker was just ‘doing the right thing’ and showing her support for someone she has known for a long time who is very clearly going through one of the worst things that can happen to a person: the death of a loved one.

The interest in Parker and Cattrall’s relationship is unsurprising, everyone loves a good cat fight. Particularly when said catfight involves two women who are clearly talented and successful – one of them must be a massive bitch, right? Why? Because – misogyny.

Our society doesn’t like it when women, like Parker are successful on their own terms. We are encouraged to assume that there must be something wrong with powerful women, that they fulfill the ‘difficult woman’ or ‘bitchy woman’ stereotype.

There is a long history of public contempt for Sarah Jessica Parker which has ranged from cruel deconstructions of her physical appearance (remember when Maxim dubbed her the ‘unsexiest woman in the world’ in 2007?) to unfettered sneering at the success of Sex and The City.

The snobbery, criticism and refusal of many to give Parker credit where it is so obviously due is predictable. The show itself suffered the same fate. It was, as New Yorker TV Critic Emily Nussbaum has put more articulately than anyone else, as groundbreaking, radical and prescient as The Sopranos but credited far less because it was about women, dating and sex – low brow girly stuff.

When we think of Sarah Jessica Parker, we think of Carrie Bradshaw. When we see Kim Cattrall, we forget that she is not actually Samantha. Sex and the City is now so iconic that there are entire instagrams dedicated to it which still, years after the show ended, spawn think pieces and articles about their style. It is because of the show that we care so much about whether Cattrall and Parker are friends in real life. Nobody believes that women could work so closely together for so long without secretly hating one another, bitching, back stabbing and vying for one another’s success. Indeed, this is the thesis of a much-circulated NY Post article about the ‘mean girls culture’ which ‘destroyed Sex and the City and prevented a third film being made.

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Last November, when it was announced that there would be no third film, the article supposedly lifted the lid on the rift between the two actors. It described a fall out over ‘jealousy, rivalry and money’ between Cattrall and Parker as ‘a long time coming’ and the final ‘nail in the coffin’ for the Sex and the City franchise. According to various sources, both Cattrall and Parker were cast evil villains with huge egos in their own right who had deprived the public of another installment of its favourite girl gang.

While we can all agree that it’s definitely for the best that the world was not subjected to another Sex and the City movie (because you can have too much of a good thing and we all needed to move on), there is a serious point about the show’s legacy which is bound up in our inability to look away from Cattrall and Parker’s now very public un-friendship.

It is now obvious and hackneyed to point out (but nonetheless necessary) that the enduring storyline of Sex and The City was actually that of the friendship of its four protagonists and not their respective searches for love; as Carrie says in Season 3 ‘it’s hard to find people who will love you no matter what. I was lucky enough to find three of them’. However, at no point did the show ever suggest that friendship was easy, ever perfect or without the same trials and tribulations that we experience in our romantic relationships.

Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte didn’t always agree with each other and they didn’t always get it right for one another. Miranda felt let down by Samantha when she had a baby, Carrie was terrible with money and narcissistic to the point that her friends had to tell her to sort it out more than once, Miranda and Carrie had an epic falling out in Season 3 and Charlotte stormed out on her friends in a judgemental moralising storm more than once. As Nussbaum puts it the characters of the show were ‘difficult women’, trail-blazing because they were anti-heroines and anti-role models which, Ally McBeal aside, hadn't really been seen on TV before.

Of course, Sex and the City was fiction so, in the end, nobody actually got ghosted. Instead, the loose ends were all tied up but real life doesn’t work like that. We don’t get on with everyone, we aren’t always ‘nice’, friend fall outs aren’t always resolved and we don’t all keep the same people close to us throughout our lives.

Social media makes everything seem completely binary and has made it difficult for us to hold two contradictory ideas in our minds at any one time. Consider this: could it be that both Parker and Cattrall are both in the wrong? They’re equally talented actors who, at times, can both be equally difficult to work with and, maybe, just don’t get on? They did their jobs on Sex and the City and they did them well, that’s all what matters. Whether or not their friends in real life has nothing to do with their ability.

We love to put women in boxes, applying the age-old labels of Madonna and whore because we still can’t cope with the fact that women are complex, imperfect and just as difficult as men.

If Parker and Cattrall were male actors who had disagreed because of creative differences or pay packets would we care as much? Would we be so quick to try and cast one of them as a bitch while lifting the other onto an angelic pedestal? Would we delight so much in the fact that they are arguing at all and, as one commenter did on Cattrall’s Instagram smugly scald them for being ‘immature’? No, we’d laugh, call them both idiots while muttering something about talent and big egos and move on.

Follow Vicky on Twitter @Victoria_Spratt

This article originally appeared on The Debrief.