Study Finds Men Didn’t Like Sex and the City So Much

If you have the attention span of a meerkat and can’t stand data, the gist of a deeply researched article on FiveThirtyEight.com is that men give crappier IMDB reviews to female-skewed shows than women give to male-skewed shows and therefore IMDB user ratings punish shows aimed at women. The author’s premise is that Sex and The City won many Emmy’s and millions of women came while wondering if they were more Carrie or Samantha and therefore it’s below average review rating must be invalid. That seems flimsy.

The gender IMDB ratings gap doesn’t seem the least bit important, but anything gender inequity is pretty hot these days. A lot of time went into studying why men give shitty reviews to Keeping Up with the Kardashians and The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, though none involved questioning whether these shows are just objectively shitty and men are really ace reviewers. It’s likely that women are more reluctant than men to give harsh reviews to shitty shows aimed at guys. Or they just have better things to do with their time than watching Korean perfunctory animated half-hours based on comic books and video games. Like mending things and menstruating. 

Sex and the City was wildly commercially successful and spawned a shit ton of syndication dollars and movie rights and spin-offs. Everybody got super fucking rich pretending Sarah Jessica Parker was sexually desirable. Everybody pretty much discounts users reviews and Yelp and Amazon comments. Are IMDB user ratings vexing your ability to dial into a night of the CW and some Triscuits? There will never be gender equality until we artificially enforce it to an arcane and absurdly arbitrary degree. Unisex smocks are the dream..