Yahoo Finance Candace Bushnell: Grindr is great – I don’t want to travel for sex
Sex and the City creator Candace Bushnell looks back on Carrie Bradshaw, and discusses why gay guys do dating right as she gears up for her debut London show
Candace Bushnell was responsible for the dawn of a new era of feminism in the 1990s when her debut novel, Sex and the City, reignited conversations about women and society. More specifically, it addressed the destigmatisation of sex and how the messier parts of our private lives could be represented in the mainstream.
Now aged 65, Bushnell is promoting her debut London stage show, but a minute into our interview she displays the glint of the fire – and passion for levelling the playing field – that presumably got Sex and the City in front of publishers in the first place. I ask what younger audiences can learn from Bushnell’s soon-to-come reality show about dating for women over 50 and she shifts in her seat, then she says: “I really want to slap you for that question.”
New Yorkers can seem acerbic, but this is not Bushnell’s intention. “No no no,” she protests when I ask if she misheard my question. “I’m just saying that it doesn’t really matter what young people are going to learn. It’s really about women seeing themselves reflected. And there’s a huge audience that’s just gagging for representation. The problem is going back to young people.”
I apologise if I caused offence. “No no, it’s fine, everybody’s always like, young people. It’s like, who cares! This interview’s not about that,” she adds, leaning into the ‘about’. “So let’s talk about True Tales of Sex, Success and Sex and the City.” Let’s. Bushnell is such an iconic New Yorker that she is arguably responsible for birthing the career of the most iconic New Yorker of the modern day, Sarah Jessica Parker.
Candace Bushnell’s life story is a good precis for a show, and premiering in London this February, there should be some delightfully elicit nuggets: she first began her Sex and the City column in The New York Observer in the early nineties, writing the titular novel and selling the concept to HBO, before consulting on the first two televised series of Sex and the City. She has written other novels and is a doyenne of the Manhattan scene.
“It’s about how I created Sex and the City, how hard I worked to get there, why I invented Carrie Bradshaw and what happened to me afterward,” says Bushnell. “It’s my life story combined with the Sex and the City origin story and a few saucy sex stories thrown in for good measure.” Twenty seven years on from her original book, Bushnell is still adept at dishing out observations about contemporary dating. In 2019 she wrote the book Is There Still Sex in the City?, a rumination on what Carrie Bradshaw might be like in her 50s.
Her forthcoming dating show, produced by the team behind The Kardashians, is proof that Bushnell still has fire in her loins. Not that you need to read between the lines. “I date men of all ages,” she says. “Usually you see someone once or twice and that’s it. Dating these days has much less to do with how old you are.” Like Carrie in SATC spin-off And Just Like That, she’s on dating apps as well as meeting guys in-person.
London is more relaxed than New York. Guys are fabulous and cosy – they take baths!
Candace Bushnell
“It’s just another social thing to do,” she says of swiping. “And there are other dating apps where it’s overwhelming. Messages from a thousand guys. No, I’m not doing that. “Also if I’m with somebody I want them to be in my world and I want them to actually live close by, because I don’t want to have to travel for sex,” she says, pausing. “I can’t believe I just said that! Now that’s going to be your headline: ‘Candace Bushnell: I don’t want to travel for sex!’” The LGBTQ dating app Grindr, which shows matches by their physical proximity, appeals. “I was discussing that with some girlfriends and we were like, ‘Why don’t we have that app so when you’re in a bar you can see if there’s somebody there!’”
Fifty minutes of Bushnell’s company over Zoom and a night in the theatre feels like a solid investment. If not to sort your own dating game out, for the SATC nostalgia. Recent projects including her 2019 book have made Bushnell revisit threads from the nineties and she’s still coming to new SATC realisations. “When writing True Tales I did go back and read Sex and the City and I guess one of the things I did realise was that I probably could have married my Mr Big, but I’m really pretty bratty,” she says, giggling in an endearing schoolgirl way.
In a fluke of timing, Bushnell will be treading the boards in our capital at the same time as Sarah Jessica Parker, also making her West End debut in an adaptation of Neil Simon’s Plaza Suite. Bushnell is at the Palladium and Jessica Parker is nearby at the Savoy. “You know what, I could send her a text!” says Bushnell. “Say, ‘if you have any free time maybe we could meet!’” The two have never been close; Bushnell cites city life as the reason. “I see her occasionally, but whatever, she’s married, she’s got kids. It’s a whole thing.”
Bushnell has a soft spot for Londoners, whom she finds more laid back than New York men. “I did a story about dating in London back in the 1990s and I found all kinds of fabulous guys that were cosy, and people take baths a lot,” she laughs. “Getting your hair done, that’s something that people do in New York. It seemed to me that London was a little more relaxed.” How would Carrie Bradshaw fare in London? “I think she would have gotten on very well. Maybe she wouldn’t do so well with the animals and the farms…”
Describing herself as “a bit of an anglophile,” she calls London “a glamorous place. I was reading about it when I was a kid and it always seemed like such a creative place, and the writing’s really quite good.”
“The writing part, they really have that down, even the Daily Mail. They’re great with the stories. I used to love to read the Daily Mail before it went online and it was huge. Going to England and just reading all the tabloids. We don’t really have that here and they’re addictive. They actually make real people into characters.
“You can read things about yourself in the Daily Mail that are completely untrue, and you realise, ‘oh I have just been turned into a character.’”
Some people really hate the Daily Mail, I say, as if the journalist who realised TV’s most famous columnist didn’t know something so obvious. “Oh I know,” Bushnell purrs back. Then she smiles, leans forward, and lowers her voice to a just audible whisper: “But it’s not real.”
Candace Bushnell’s show is at the London Palladium Wednesday 7 February 2024. Book tickets online at candacebushnell.entertainers.co.uk/
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