“Marry the One Who Gets There First” depicts sex (including casual sex), infidelity in a committed relationship, sexual betrayal, lust, voyeurism, and sexual deviance. The sexual elements are presented explicitly, as in Violet's thoughts about the sex she engages in with Louis. In this uninhibited approach to her themes, Julavits was reflecting American popular culture of the late-1990s, in which such issues were presented in the media with an explicitness that would have been unthinkable to earlier generations, even during the period of sexual freedom in the 1960s. A typical example was Sex and the City, a cable television program which originally began broadcasting on the HBO network in 1998 and quickly attracted a large audience. Based on the 1997 book of the same title by the journalist Candace Bushnell, the show ran for six successful seasons until 2004. It focused on the sex lives...