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Sex and the City creator Candace Bushnell suffers consequences of choosing career over family – LifeSite

(LifeSiteNews) — Candace Bushnell, an American journalist, novelist, and television producer, is best known for her smash-hit anthology Sex and the City, a collection of her New York Observer columns based on her dating experiences and those of her friends. That anthology was turned into the HBO hit series Sex and the City (1998-2004), which followed the lives of four women as they navigated the modern dating scene. The message of the show to young women was that they could have it all, no matter what. The main character, Sarah Jessica Parker, is a New York writer who decides that her career is more important than motherhood.

Bushnell herself, it seems, is having second thoughts, and says she regrets choosing a career over children. From the Daily Mail:

Miss Bushnell divorced her husband – ballet dancer Charles Askegard – in 2012 and said it made her realise the importance of starting a family. The former sex columnist, who is worth around £18million, told the Sunday Times: ‘When I was in my thirties and forties, I didn’t think about it. Then when I got divorced and I was in my fifties, I started to see the impact of not having children and of truly being alone. I do see that people with children have an anchor in a way that people who have no kids don’t.’

Bushnell is living precisely the lifestyle she championed. She splits her time between her new partner’s penthouse suite on the Upper East side and her own place in the Hamptons. She has Botox frequently and is putting out a new book, Is there still Sex in the City?, in August. That book will deal with “middle-aged sadness” and “the difficulties of bouncing back in your fifties.” She thinks dating these days is much more difficult for women.

Considering that the TV show she helped create has become both iconic and incredibly influential, Bushnell’s admission should be big news. It is one of the sad ironies of the sexual revolution that those who served as its most effective propagandists often discover, belatedly, that nobody can have it all. Not women; not men; nobody. Relationships and families take a tremendous amount of sacrifice, and to claim that anyone can “have it all” is to ensure that the sacrifice will be at the expense of relationships rather than in service of them.

As I noted last year when Jennifer Aniston, one of the leads in another New York sitcom that helped to mainstream the new sexual morality, talked about her sadness about not having children when she was younger, we simply do not know, when we are young, what we will miss when we are older. One of the great lies that the sexual revolution sells — not overtly, but implicitly — is that we will always be young. Fundamentally, marriage and family are long-term propositions. Forgoing decades of nightclubs, promiscuity, and interchangeable partners in favor of a husband or wife is, one hopes, investing in a future with someone who will love you more when you are old and gray, and your looks are not what they were.

Those who choose to “play the field” will realize, at one point or another, that the field is occupied by the young and that there is an imperceptible line that everyone must cross in the sexual hunger games played by the porn-fueled youth — a line that divides the players and the pathetic; the charming from the creepy. Because to answer Bushnell’s question, there is, of course, plenty of sex in the city. But someday very soon, people will no longer want to hear about it from her. At that point, as she herself says, she and many others face the fact that they may be “truly alone.”

Jonathon Van Maren is a public speaker, writer, and pro-life activist. His commentary has been translated into more than eight languages and published widely online as well as print newspapers such as the Jewish Independent, the National Post, the Hamilton Spectator and others. He has received an award for combating anti-Semitism in print from the Jewish organization B’nai Brith. His commentary has been featured on CTV Primetime, Global News, EWTN, and the CBC as well as dozens of radio stations and news outlets in Canada and the United States.

He speaks on a wide variety of cultural topics across North America at universities, high schools, churches, and other functions. Some of these topics include abortion, pornography, the Sexual Revolution, and euthanasia. Jonathon holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in history from Simon Fraser University, and is the communications director for the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform.

Jonathon’s first book, The Culture War, was released in 2016.

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