“Sex and the City 2”? More Like “Friends And The Desert”

We’ve seen the Sex and the City 2 trailer and there seems to be no sex in that movie at all. I’m sure Kim Cattrall will rise to the occasion in a scene or two, as her character requires, but for the most part it seems sex is staying in this franchise’s back-burner.

That strikes a nerve with me–and bear in mind I’m going on a limb because I am basing all of this on a trailer that gives us very little information–I think sex is important and the Sex and the City franchise does it a disservice by emphasizing it during the characters’ frantic period of mate-seeking and then diminishing its prominence to zero once the girls have coupled up.

That implies sex is something we do when we’re lonely, something we do to catch a man, something that’s really not as important once we have him. But, oh, it is. Why would more than 50 percent of all married women, at some point, cheat on their mates if it didn’t really matter?

Who are we kidding? Sex is more than just a consummation of the chemical rush that we experience when we meet someone new. We need it to connect, to relax, to be happy, to be healthy, to remain a united front.

While I was married, if ever I confessed to any woman in my life that I was sexually starved, the answer never varied: sex isn’t that important, they told me. There are other things–respect, trust, love, connection.

I don’t know how sex, which once was only condoned after marriage, became divorced from the institution. Respect, trust, love and connection are all made manifest in sex. If anything, sex is the ultimate expression of these things.

The first movie touched on the disconnect between partners with the Steve and Miranda subplot, but it didn’t serve to highlight the importance of sex. “It was just sex,” Steve told Miranda when he tearfully confessed. Just sex.

That’s what they told me. It’s just sex. No one died from lack of sex.

But I did die–only it wasn’t a physical death. It was worse. And it did affect my marriage.

Marriage and relationships are work, they say. I think if we treated their components–all of them, including the sexual aspect–with the same commitment we do our jobs, we’d fare a great deal better.

But to do that, we have to stop saying, “it’s just sex,” and scream, “oh, God! It’s sex! Yes!”

Image from Sex and the City The Movie. Video via MTV.