Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
Beyond the Manhattan fantasy, Sex and the City gave a rare depiction of the complexity and value of women's relationships I have never really understood why so many people felt personally affronted by it.
The 90s TV hit that charted sex columnist Carrie Bradshaw's navigation of life, love and the latest shoe styles in New York never claimed to be a documentary about contemporary women's lives. Inevitably though, the fictional portrayal of four unfathomably glamorous, sexually experimental and effortlessly successful Manhattan females rendered the series hugely influential, mainly because it was unlike anything else.
But just because women are seldom seen on the small screen being hopeful, hilarious and horny all at once is not a good reason to levy the weight of feminist expectation against a single franchise. Still, the release of the Sex and the City movie prods those discomfits yet again.
I always found the series charming, funny, good-looking and intelligent, rather like the perfect first date. I enjoyed following Carrie and her achingly archetypical friends - Charlotte (Upper East Side princess forced to redefine her sense of perfect when marriage and fertility go wrong); Miranda (fiercely independent lawyer not softened by motherhood); and Samantha (unrepentant love machine, latterly breast cancer survivor).
I'm almost afraid to admit it lest it show me up as shallow, but the show did make me ask pertinent questions about my own life and those of my friends - and not solely because we were swithering over Manolo Blahnik designs.
Sex and the City was always two parts fantasy shaken with one part delicately skewered reality. So - no - hot, smart women do not only talk about men and shoes, Manhattan isn't always sunny, and newspaper columns aren't generally written, unresearched, in slinky vest tops (though actually, reader, you should see me now).
But this fantastical element was tolerated in exchange for the unprecedented honesty about other areas of women's experience that Sex and the City hauled into the mainstream. Most prominently, the series discussed the micro and macro of sexual relationships as they had never been before.
Those gasp-out-loud episodes were embraced by women not only because they'd been there privately, but thanks to the context in which they were discussed. For my money, the enduring appeal of Sex and the City has nothing to do with guys or footwear. It's about the uncomfortably accurate presentation of women's relationships with each other.
The critics ought to bear in mind that, for all the brunch chatter, this show has never been a story about men. Sex and the City was always, baseline, about us girls; about how women's friendships can be complicated and bitchy, but also meaningful, supportive and lasting.
I'm a firm believer that all our subsequent interactions are dictated by original familial connections, so it has always fascinated me that Freud didn't bother to create an Oedipus-style template for women's relationships. It's an absence that Shere Hite notes in her latest report on women loving women, alongside the dearth of media representations of what are often the most important relationships in women's lives. Aside from Desperate Housewives and Pulling, it's hard to think of popular art that takes women's friendships seriously.
Perhaps that's because we don't take them seriously ourselves. On the one hand we lionise relationships with other women - it's a given to crow about the super-fantasticness of one's friendships, and we're happy to admit how essential those relationships are in the scheme of our lives. Yet, day to day, we give those connections far less traction than they deserve.
When was the last time you sat down with a female friend and asked: "Where is this relationship going?" Women analyse their interactions with men to the nth degree, while their profound connections with others of their gender go unexamined.
I'm sure it's partly to do with the way women's relationships are set up publicly. From an early age, girls are taught that they are in sexual competition with their peers. Nobody wants to be the loser in the race to couple up and nobody wants to be deemed a lesbian.
Sex and the City was seminal because it showed women's friendships according to a panoply of responses: anger, doubt, judgment and envy, as well as love. And it proposed basic needs - flu, a cricked neck, the plus one - as fulfilled by other women.
It's not anti-men to acknowledge how females can sustain each other. But it is pro-women to suggest that we cease angsting at each other, especially about shoes.
