I am not a fan of Sex and the City. This may be because I had a bad experience at the New York launch party for the first series in 1998. It was a hot ticket and I decided to take the girl who had recently dumped me, hoping she would be so impressed by the glitz and the glamour she would jump my bones. Unfortunately, she spotted the actor who played Dex Dexter in Dynasty -- a schoolgirl crush of hers -- and I didn’t see her for dust.

Admittedly, that is not a very good reason for disliking it, but consider this. The actor in question was going out with a friend of hers at the time and she did not hesitate to take advantage of her friend’s absence. I lived in New York for five years and in my experience such behaviour was typical. Attractive single girls not only dropped their “dates” at the slightest whiff of a bigger, better deal, they routinely betrayed their girlfriends, too. The sisterhood of Sex and the City -- the notion that girls like Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda will always be there for each other, no matter what the cost -- is a sentimental myth.

Does this matter? After all, Sex and the City does not claim to be a documentary. So what if it’s characters are nicer than their real-life counterparts?

The reason it matters, I think, is that the solidarity among the four main characters is what makes the world they find themselves so attractive. The message of Sex and the City is that the Manhattan marriage market, whereby single women are compelled to spend all their disposable income on designer clothes and every spare moment on personal grooming, is an absolute hoot. Forcing your feet into a pair of six-inch heels as you tramp from one singles bar to the next is not a form of torture that these women are forced to endure in order to attract a husband; rather, it is a post-feminist “choice”.

Once you remove the pixie dust of female camaraderie, contemporary New York emerges as an essentially pre-feminist society in which the courtship rituals are strikingly similar to those depicted in the novels of Jane Austen. Women are second-class citizens who are expected to use their youth and beauty as commodities in order to secure their economic wellbeing. Sex and the City is set in this world, but it conceals its brutality behind a veneer of cocktails and laughter. In reality, female friendship is the first thing to be sacrificed in the cutthroat competition for rich husbands.

No doubt some of my feelings about this are due to sour grapes. If I had been a Mr Big type, I probably would have found New York’s gender inequality more acceptable. But sometimes the worm’s-eye view is more accurate. To my mind, Sex and the City is the equivalent of one of those Soviet propaganda films in which the factory workers are depicted as happy, singing citizens of tomorrow. The truth is that women like Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda are wretched, unhappy and isolated. The key to their survival is not the sisterhood, but a combination of slimming pills and anti-depressants.