Jennifer Horgan: Co-parenting Aidan Shaw is my feminist hero of the year
Aidan Shaw (played by John Corbett) in ‘Sex and the City’ is an active father, a primary caregiver, and a human being with an awareness of familial responsibilities.
All the hype may have buzzed around Samantha’s video call to Carrie this season — but for once, and I say this as a Samantha fan, the glamorous trailblazer deserves less attention than she’s getting.
Because Samantha is not the feminist we need most right now. The feminist of the moment is Aidan Shaw, an active father, a primary caregiver, and a human being with an awareness of familial responsibilities.
Literally. Sure, Steve gets a nod for sharing the screen with his son every so often, but for the most part, parenting in the show is a gruelling job performed only by women.
It is a job of clothes-washing, pick-ups, tantrums, heartbreaks, worries and chores, entirely undertaken by mothers.
Until Aidan. In last week’s final episode, he announces to Carrie: “There’s only one thing I love more in the world than you, and that’s my boys.”
He explains he can’t be with her until the youngest one becomes an adult in five years’ time, describing himself as "home".
Aidan earnestly conveys that this has always been the case, that whenever his ex-wife travelled here or there, he stayed. The man (who gets even more gorgeous as the scene goes on) is choosing his children over his lover because he is man enough, (sexy) man enough, to care.
I cannot think of a similar storyline in any other popular show I’ve watched, can you? The only characters that come to mind are comic and ridiculous, implying that a man as a primary caregiver is exactly that.
Robin Williams in Mrs Doubtfire? The man must become a woman with flammable boobs to get the gig of mothering.
Daddy Day Care? OK, but it’s depicted as a fate worse than death until they can spin a profit out of childminding. I also dump Mr Mom, Motherland, and Big Daddy onto the same comic pile.
I could shift into the horror genre: The Shining? Jack Torrance brings his family to work after all, before trying to bludgeon them with an axe.
Beyond the realms of comedy and horror, stands Aidan — a serious character in a drama about sex and relationships, who is willing to put his children before his libido, who understands that there’s no such thing as having it all and being a parent.
And the greatest, most important thing is that Aidan isn’t even a fiction — not anymore. I know plenty of men in real life who co-parent. I know a few who could even fall into the primary caregiver category, my own husband among them.
Aidan is a hitherto absent cultural reference point for flesh-and-blood men, so rarely represented on screen.
He is also a role model for any dad brave enough to join their child’s school WhatsApp group along with all the mothers, or a dad who might dare to go to the class picnic after school, again, with all the mothers.
He’s a symbol for a different type of family and a different way of being for women — you know, for those women who might not feel the need to remain permanently attached to their children.
As it happens, Sex and The City is doing exactly what the smash hit global phenomenon (and Warner Bros highest grossing film of all time) Barbie fails to do.
Through Aidan, it dares to present parenting in a non-gendered way. The really disappointing thing about , fundamentally a film about mothering, is that it fails to do anything helpful with its subject matter.
The mother-daughter relationship in the real world of Barbie is difficult and upsetting. The mother is miserable in her role; it takes her dalliance with a fictional character from Barbieland to find her joy again. Where is the bloody father? That’s what I’d like to know.
But in both worlds, parenthood is presented as a woman’s job. Ken and his band of plastic bros exist beyond the whole conversation and there doesn’t seem to be any fear of them suffering any kind of existential dilemma on their own, without the influence of the Barbies.
Barbie ends up parenting Ken if anything, another nail in the coffin of women’s liberation.
And then, to fully denude women of any selfhood in the role of mother, comes that line, that dreadful, excruciating, unforgivable line. I genuinely don’t think I will ever watch a Greta Gerwig film with as much enjoyment again. That line has ruined her for me forever. How it got past the creative team, I will never understand. It is a line belonging to a 1950s' ad for Hoovers.
It comes as part of the denouement when stereotypical Barbie meets the character of Ruth Handler, Mattel’s founder and played by Rhea Perlman:
“We mothers stand still so our daughters can look back to see how far they’ve come.” What?
Do we?
I don’t. I’m running like crazy. I hope my daughters grow up and run like crazy too.
Media scholar Aviva Dove-Viebahn does her best to defend the clanger by claiming the film is about presenting “multiple perspectives on motherhood”. Poppycock. In one sentence Barbie ‘kills’ the mother just as popular culture, most children’s films, and pretty much all of western civilisation demands.
steps back exactly where steps forward.
I’m thrilled there’s going to be another season of . Will Aidan stick to his responsibilities? Will Carrie, now in the traditionally male role of the lover without responsibilities, wait for him? Will the creators give the other fathers in the show an opportunity to step up and parent?
I never want the new series to end. I want Carrie to float in heels, beneath billowing clouds of taffeta and silk forever and ever. I don’t care that the show is completely ridiculous and over the top. It’s television. And it’s still managing to do the heavy work of depicting a less gendered world.
Forget Barbie, Aidan is my feminist hero of 2023. Roll on 2024.
