Pink stilettos rock.

How Sarah Jessica Parker helped shatter a cliché.

She’s articulate, charming and funny. Oh and SJP’s shoes are still the stuff of envy. But besides that, Parker helped knock the stuffing out of Hollywood and advertising’s tired female clichés. The two solitudes: woman as mom, or woman as whore…and nothing in between.

That cliché is still an advertising trap but it’s in thankful decline. Her show Sex in City was a game-changer. It represented a new, somewhat subversive voice for women. It also redefined HBO, which was largely a male-driven, sports-fueled platform at the time. Sex in the City cultivated a very specific female audience and selectively purchased media to match. It portrayed nuanced, conflicted female characters, who struggled with issues like sexual politics, kids, marriage and infidelity,

Parker cites earlier role models as inspiring ground-breakers, including Mary Tyler Moore, and That Girl’s Marlo Thomas (both characters I loved, full disclosure). But Sex in the City moved the goal posts by tackling modern themes, like remorseful sex, or putting your career on hold to have babies, or not wanting babies — damn the torpedoes.

Today, where do we sit? As Parker’s witty interviewer, Joanna Coles, Editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan Magazine pointed out, today only 23% of the dialogue in Hollywood is spoken by women.

So……….we have ways to go. As advertisers, we often get the opportunity to redefine the cultural landscape. So let’s do it. Stilettos not required. Even though I really, really want them.