Sex and the City has done for single women what Blanche Devereaux and The Golden Girls did for hot flashes and cheesecake. Sex's impact reaches far and wide: academic roundtables, women gab sessions, and, hey, maybe even your own bedroom. It showed women everywhere the importance of emotional honesty leading to closeness in relationships, according to Dr. Joyce Brothers (now, there's a voice of authority). And all of this packed into an entertaining half-hour package.
Even if you indulged in the show only for the steamy sex and bare-ass shots, it probably left its mark. Did you maybe learn the proper etiquette for oral sex from what fans fondly remember as "the glazed donut episode"? The penis jokes alone are enough to live on in video history. Who can forget the line, "So much skin, it was like a Sharpei puppy"? Besides having inspired the television show, Bushnell's book spawned imitations, like Lauren Weisberger's The Devil Wears Prada, Jennifer Weiner's Good in Bed, and numerous others whose cover art showed women plopped next to a journal. Having energized the independent ladies' writing revolution, Bushnell has also written her latest novel, Trading Up. She appears in person this week as part of the Women's Club series.
