Last week I was killing time—which means I was reading Elle by myself at the Holiday Cocktail Lounge while waiting for a phone call—when I became completely captivated by their Candace Bushnell profile. I forgot about this until I saw this Q&A with the Sex and the City author in today's Atlanta Journal-Constitution: "What do you think about the commentary about you on Gawker [and other snark-sites]?" it asks. To be sure, Bushnell has a young blogger in her latest book, which she derides as a "striking out at the world instead from behind the safety of his computer." But we have actually, seriously, learned from Bushnell—not the TV show[s], and definitely not the movie, but as a self-made woman obsessed not with status, but with class.Americans don't like to talk about class, or at least not about how it plays into sexual relationships. Instead, people use euphemisms like, "He went to Yale Law" when you yourself are a twenty-year-old East Villager who would quite honestly like to be taken care of. But! Let's put aside for a moment giving Bushnell the responsibility for "thousands of gallons of vomited Cosmos" and shoe fetishism and even the tired "Can women have sex like men?" question. (Answer: yes, no, and sometimes.) Sunday eve, I was remarking on how I loved the Real Estate section of the Sunday Times because it was "like porn" as it showed things "I'll never have." To which someone joked, "You never know, you might meet a really rich guy," and I replied, "the better idea is the one where I make a shitload of money myself." Which, let's be honest, I probably won't. But I could. Whenever gender or class is brought up, I'm almost always brought back to the period of time I spent, OK, stripping. It's like the extreme sport where gender and class intersect—not that you're supposed to talk about that! Via Elle:

"A lot of [sexual] behavior is dictated less by gender and more by money, status, and power. Actresses in Hollywood have always had a lot of sex secretly. Why? Because they can. Because they're not reliant on a man to provide a roof over their head. That changes your sexual behavior. Because if you're looking for a man to provide for you, you don't want to be seen as a woman who sleeps around. Men object to it because you're not viewed as wife material."

During this time, Candy—can I call you Candy?—I quit my job on more than one occasion due to the rather vociferous protests of a boyfriend. On one hand, I don't blame them. On the other, it says a lot when these super-liberal outsider fuck-ups (I use that term affectionately) that were, in part, attracted to me partly because of my indiscretionary, up-by-the-bootstraps work adventures suddenly wanted to put the clamp-down on my "means of production" once things got, you know, serious. See above. (Candace eventually married a ballet dancer who makes less than her.) So while some may see Bushnell's ascension from scrappy go-getting party girl to "part of the establishment," others see someone who has, through sheer willpower and hard work, transcended her class. Which is—whether or not you want to live on the Upper East Side—the American Dream.