Miranda Hobbes.

We meet the character in her mid 30s. She’s a successful lawyer living in Manhattan. She is Carrie Bradshaw’s BFF. She is single and dating, and dating poorly most of the time we see her on the show. In the second season she meets Steve Brady. She intends for him to be a one night stand, instead they have an on/off relationship. She ends up pregnant, she marries Steve, they move to Brooklyn.

When we meet her again in the revival show, she’s in her 50s, still married to Steve.

In Sex in the City, not many people liked Miranda at first. Before she was ‘in love’ with Steve she was unliked. Too cynical, too independent, she was the least liked of the four. I get it. She was too much outside of the comfort zone of women everywhere.

We are slaves to patriarchy and Miranda was the anti.

Miranda began to be liked when she was pregnant. She was finally doing something ‘womanly’. When Brady was born and she admitted she was in love with Steve, suddenly she was the perfect character. Suddenly she was likeable.

In the revival we meet Miranda again married almost 20 years in a sexless marriage with Steve. She finds herself attracted to a woman who is non binary and all of a sudden she is hated again. Where is the Miranda we loved?

She’s still there.

The Miranda who went back to Steve after he cheated on her is the one we did not know, this one? We know her and surprise she is not liked again.

Miranda woke up at 50 and realized her life was lacking. She was not doing work that made her happy, she was spending nights on the sofa with a husband eating ice cream and not experiencing desire or passion. She re-entered school and found it to be light years different than she was used to.

Miranda is what men fear.

That women will wake up one morning, realize that there is more to life than them and act like it.

It doesn’t matter much that Miranda and Chey broke up, what matters is that she had the audacity to say this is not enough for me.

The Internet is full of men reminding women who are not young, who educate themselves, who work and are successful that no man will want them. Full of men telling women in their 40s and 50s that they are old and washed up and no man of ‘value’ wants them.

The Internet is full of lying men.

When The Man and I reunited for the final time I was just turning 40. Wow a decade ago. I can recall how relieved I was that I was finally getting the ‘relationship’. Needless to say that did not work out. I can recall how happy I was to be moving out here to California. The ‘relationship’! YAY! Ahem ….that did not work out either.

I was so off kilter after the break up I never had the time to worry or mourn that I didn’t have the relationship, I was in full blown survival mode. By this time last year I was fucking again and didn’t need a relationship. Now? I kinda don’t want one. I mean I have one, just not one that looks like anything I thought it would. With a person I did not expect. I am thankful to the bone marrow for it, but it wasn’t what I thought, because…patriarchy.

I bought into the idea that I have to have a significant other. That it has to be male. That I have to submit.

None of that is necessary. I might still want variations of it, but need it? No.

It makes me pity someone. That they won’t ever have that freedom. That they will remain where they are out of fear of being alone. There is no penalty for being alone, especially when you get to have self respect along the way. What they’ve been through? I would have left eventually. Not right away, that is not how I am wired, but after the 6th or 7th time of this shit? Bye.

When taking a shot at me I was ‘reminded’ that the older I get the more I will need the protection of a man, and who I am is undesirable. Lies.

Until the United States goes full Gilead I am good. I don’t need the protection of a man this is not 100 years ago. Would it be nice to have a partner? I have one. Someone I don’t have to worry about changing their mind, what a concept.

I can drive, I can work, I can shop, I can purchase property, I can vote. I can take out my own trash, and if something needs to get assembled? I can pay someone to do that for me. Or I can flash a titty. That is the irony, that patriarchy I mentioned leaves the males of the species vulnerable to titties. Why are we letting them lead again?

I am a fat Black Queer kinky woman, I don’t ‘need’ to fit into a definition or mold.

There are some who do, and I hate that for them.

When there are 3 billion Nicoles, you will have to figure out who you are.