Is There Still Sex in The City?

Twenty years after her first book “Sex and the City” reshaped the landscape of pop culture and dating with its fly on the wall look at the mating rituals of the Manhattan elite, the international best-selling author, Candace Bushnell delivers a new novel on the wilds and lows of sex and dating after fifty.

In this new novel, “Is There Still Sex in the City? (not out yet, but it has already been signed to be turned into a TV series with Paramount Television), Bushnell looks at love and life from all angles: marriage and children, divorce and bereavement, as well as the very real pressures on women to maintain their youth and have it all.

At one time, 50-something meant the beginning of retirement— she said – working less, spending more time on your hobbies, with your friends, who like you were sliding into a more leisurely lifestyle. In short, retirement age folks weren’t meant to do much of anything but get older and a bit heavier. They weren’t expected to exercise, start new business ventures, move to a different state, have casual sex with strangers, and start all over again. But this is exactly what the lives of a lot of 50 and 60-something women look like today and I’m thrilled to be reflecting the rich, complexity of their reality on the page and now on the screen.

Set between the Upper East Side of Manhattan and a country enclave known as The Village, “Is There Still Sex in the City?” gathers Bushnell’s signature short, sharp, satirical commentaries on the love and dating habits of middle-aged men and women as they continue to navigate the ever-modernizing world of relationships.

Throughout, Bushnell documents 21st century dating phenomenon, such as the “Unintended Cub Situation” in which a sensible older woman suddenly becomes the love interest of a much younger man, the “Mona Lisa Treatment”, a vaginal restorative surgery often recommended to middle-aged women, and what it’s really like to go on Tinder dates as a fifty-something divorcee. Bushnell also updates one of her most celebrated stories from Sex and the City, “The Bicycle Boys”, a breed of New York man who was always trying to bring his bike up to women’s apartments. Once an anomaly, Bushnell charts their new ubiquitousness, in addition to where, and how to do your own man stalking via bicycle (and whether or not it’s worth it).