COSTA MESA UNPLUGGED:

My hunch is this column’s going to bring me some trouble. But the subject is just too fascinating to let pass.

I witnessed a phenomenon last week on my way back to the home fort following another grinding day in the coal mine. Columns of women — a collective demographic of metropolitan hotties in their late 20s to refined and tailored business women just older than 40, it seemed — were surging in unison toward the cinema on Newport Center’s outer ring.

Some strode confidently in strappy heels and in dresses with elevated hemlines and necklines finishing up somewhere near the equator.

Others sported handsome business suits and shoes less torturous on the feet.

A few — and only a few — had dudes in hand. Those guys didn’t look happy.

My eyeballs tracked to the cinema marquee. “Sex and the City,” it read. And then I understood.

Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha were back. Those celebrated, angst-ridden metro-femmes whose sexcapades, careening romances and imperfect marriages explored the conflicts and tensions between pre-feminist traditions and post-feminist autonomy on the long-running HBO series of the same name.

Now, I haven’t seen the movie. And I don’t plan on it. I figure the flick is just one last raid on the pocketbooks of women needing another fix of this quartet and their unquenchable longings, intractable anxieties and aimless quests for contentment.

Plus, I never got the show. Women in search of themselves through sexual adventurism, couture binges, catty gossip and self-centered digs for meaningful relationships with men can’t top a good Turner classic movie or a thrilling NBA-on-TNT affair.

But I still wondered. Who are these women? And what were they going to see? Themselves? Their fantasy lives? Are they hoping to come away with answers?

My brain then swerved to the once-formidable but now fading presidential campaign of Sen. Hillary Clinton.

Here is a smart, ambitious woman who came tantalizingly close to being the first of her gender to win the nomination of either political party for the presidency.

And she nearly reached that political summit on the shoulders of a huge mobilization of women 35 and older who, by my calculus, seem angry and somehow unfulfilled.

Curiously, Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha occupy that demographic.

The “Sex and the City” movie phenomenon is drawing women — nearly exclusively — like moths to a flame. Clinton’s campaign has done the same. It’s as if a new gender conversation has begun, only this time it’s among women who — after having dined on the fruits of feminism and achieved remarkable things — are taking stock of their compass position in America’s post-feminist culture.

Does marriage really have to be boring and autonomy robbing? Maybe the thrill of sexual conquests can’t hold a candle to the stability of a committed relationship? Is motherhood really slavery? Is a closet full of Dolce & Gabbana dresses and Sergio Rossi heels all that I am? Am I living to work or working to live?

It seems to me women in post-feminist America are searching anew for contentment. They were thinking Hillary may have the answer. And if not her, maybe Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte or Samantha.

Nevertheless, they’re still searching. Which isn’t to say the contemporary male is not.

Perhaps they can find it together.

BYRON DE ARAKAL is a former Costa Mesa parks and recreation commissioner. Readers can reach him at [email protected].