What did Sex and the City do for women around the world?

Maria Lobanova is editor of one of the more popular magazines in Russia. “It is for career girls in their thirties looking for fun, sex and fashion, but also about politics, money and ideas. We write about everything with humour and irony. It’s for a new Russian demographic – women trying to break away from old Asian ideas about the man being the main provider . . . struggling with the problems equality and freedom can bring.” Deciding to call the magazine Sex and the City was a no-brainer, she says. “It meant there was no need to explain our agenda.”

For countless women, from Taipei to Toronto, those 94 episodes of pure single-girl fantasy proved a seductive template for a postfeminist lifestyle, and put their once maligned solo status firmly into a glamorous frame. Carrie is no feminist icon – she rambles on like a dime-store Woody Allen and obsesses over a man who frequently makes her miserable – but the series raised more issues than just sex, men and shoes. When Miranda says that she uses her oven for extra storage, for instance; or when Big’s new wife is exposed, with unsisterly, bitchy glee, as being a bad speller who used to be fat. Samantha’s ecstasy comedown, Trey’s failure to get a hard-on for his wife – the plot lines represented a ramped-up version of what many women were being confronted with in their daily lives.

Paula Froelich, of the New York Post, says that the series instantly caught on in New York. “You’d constantly overhear women at parties saying, ‘I’m Charlotte’, ‘I’m Miranda’ or ‘I am so the real-life Carrie’. You can understand – it was the first time you heard women speak freely about sex, heard them cursing and saw them not having perfect lives. I mean, Carrie’s smoking – when was the last time you saw someone suck on a Marlboro like that on television?”

What Sex and the City proved was that women are clearly desperate for aspirational but flawed role models. The show’s extraordinary success, and the eagerness for the new film’s release, is testament to its universal appeal. Post ladettes, post Bridget Jones’s bumbling, chardonnay-soaked naivety and misery, post the Spice Girls’s pop-tart cartoons, the SATC characters offered upbeat, upscale glamour and work- and friendship-oriented emancipation in the form of a fat slice of popular and accessible culture.

FRIENDSHIP

The essential analysis, over mineral water and salad or an egg-white omelette, or the cocktails that rarely seemed to get the girls drunk, celebrated the power and comfort of female relationships. The phone calls and emergency pavement summits with takeaway coffees, about everything from breast cancer to small penises, encouraged women to turn to women – at a time when many of feminism’s gains had inadvertently set women against each other, in the cruel ways we judge each others’ bodies, say, or fight for our positions at work.

The novelist Erica Jong, who “loved” the show, says that for her, “it focused on the importance of female friendships”. Pity, then, that there was so much gossip about the real-life actresses falling out, as they jockeyed for position on the show. The feminist Suzanne Moore says: “I never believed those women would be friends. Why would Charlotte be friends with Miranda or Samantha?” But Tara Smith, who managed the hair department on the LA set of the movie, says: “Forget the gossip. There was an unusual amount of respect between those women.” Which is a much nicer story.

My peers who mourned the show’s passing are the sort who treasure female friendships. It tapped into a universal truth for all women, whether they can rock a giant corsage or not, something Carrie voices thus: “No matter who breaks your heart, and how long it takes to get over it, you’ll never get through it without your friends.”

SINGLEDOM

“Nobody actually makes those relationship things work, do they?” Samantha says. A lot of us were relieved to hear her voice such a potentially gloomy fact in such a perky way. A lot of 21-century working women now view men as fun emotional rollercoasters, as a hobby rather than a vocation. To have singleness represented in such a glamorous way was a relief – in more traditional accounts, a single woman of that age is officially on the shelf.

Charlotte’s oft-cited dream for a fairy-tale ending is stymied again and again, suggesting the fairy tale is bust. The seventysomething novelist Fay Weldon, who found the series “impossible not to enjoy”, is reluctant to lend messages to the show, but suggests that one might be: “Find ways to enjoy yourself, but give up the hunt for men. It’s just debasing.” One of the most inspirational aspects of the show was that, whether the men were happily coming or miserably going, the four still lived it up – in gay clubs, at art galleries, over cake or gazing out of the window smoking a cigarette while on a deadline. Yet, as Froelich points out: “It is telling that the ratings spiked when the girls were in relationships – which says most single women want hope, most women still want to think, ‘It can happen to me.’ ”

SEX