“Sex and the City” author says success is new sex

By Claudia Parsons

NEW YORK (Reuters) – “Sex and the City” author Candace
Bushnell has a reputation for breaking taboos with talk of sex
toys and intimate acts but she says readers shouldn’t expect
too much sex in her new book, “Lipstick Jungle.”

“‘Sex and the City’ to me never really was about sex, that
was kind of the icing on the cake,” Bushnell told Reuters in an
interview before the September 6 publication of her new book.

“Success is the new sex,” she said, adding that the women
she knows spend more time talking about their careers than
their love lives, and the new book reflects that.

That may come as a surprise to viewers of the HBO series
“Sex and the City,” in which journalist Carrie Bradshaw and her
three girlfriends regularly divulge the most private details of
their sexual exploits over brunch or cocktails.

From one-night stands to love-making techniques, “Sex and
the City” never shied away from shocking its audience.

But Bushnell, now 46, said it was possible to have too much
of a good thing. “Sex in a book has to be used judiciously.”

“Certainly when you’re in your twenties and thirties, yes,
you spend a lot of time thinking about it but when people get
older there are other things that are more important,” she
said. “The reality is most women have to work.”

“Lipstick Jungle” is the story of three successful career
women in New York — a magazine executive battling her way up
the corporate ladder and having an affair with a young
underwear model, a film producer whose marriage is in trouble,
and a fashion designer who dates a billionaire.

“It’s really the next step after ‘Sex and the City.’ It’s
basically what happens to all of those great single women in
their thirties when they get to be in their forties.”

Bushnell is in talks to turn the book into a television
series though she said nothing had been finalized as yet and it
was too early to say who might play the three main roles.

“One character is an executive, the cool calm always
collected always under control executive kind of business
woman,” Bushnell said.

“The second character is Wendy, she’s the earth mother girl
next door who happens to find herself as the president of a
movie company. And the third character, Victory, is the free
spirit, she doesn’t want to be part of corporate America.”

The Wall Street Journal lamented that “calculating,
arrogant females are not more likable than calculating,
arrogant men. ‘Lipstick Jungle’ is either a sour feminist rant
or a satiric comment on sour feminist ranting.”

The author said “Lipstick Jungle” was “a pretty
philosophical kind of book” that offered some alternative role
models to the caricature of tough and unpleasant businesswomen.
like Alexis Carrington in the 1980s soap opera “Dynasty.”

“The idea of feminism is certainly one that I’ve embraced
my whole life,” she said. “Of course our modern day idea of
feminism is probably a little bit different than it was in the
70s where you weren’t supposed to shave your legs, you would
never wear high heels, all of those kinds of fun things.”

She said the reality for women was that there is a price to
pay whether one chooses a career or not.

“I try to show my readers what real life is really like, as
opposed to the fairy tales about what life is supposed to be,”
Bushnell said. “It shows the realities of life and some of the
realities of being successful but it also shows the upside to
it and how the struggle is really worth it.”