Dialogue: Women turn to a new passion

I've got some news that scares me as much as it'll scare you. We females are falling seriously in love with Sex and the City.

For those of you who do not know it, Sex and the City is chick-telly.

It's an hour-long, dramatised lech-fest which follows the fortunes (and there are many) of four fantastic-looking, single birds who have slept their collective way (I trust my atlas is correct) three-quarters of the way round New York.

The show is based on the column "Sex and the City" which Candace Bushnell wrote/writes (no one seems to know if she's still there or not) in the New York Observer.

This means, of course, that it is not terribly big on plot.

Basically, each of our heroines gets up in the morning, goes to work, picks up at some point a bloke who looks normal (there's a reasonably generous margin of error here), sleeps with him, remembers herself, then meets the rest of the girls for a rather sheepish analysis of the above series of events.

It isn't exactly high and/or textured art but every woman is raving about it - even those of us who feel (rightly) that both television and sex are beneath us. (They still are, of course.)

Still, perfect strangers charge up in the street to tell you all about the best bits in their favourite episodes.

The whole thing is striking some serious chords.

For instance, about 11 women (five at a cafe, three at a party, two at a dairy and one on a farm) have cornered me so that I might relive with them the episode in which Samantha (she's the witty, 40-ish, gorgeous blonde trollop who is on about her third lap of Manhattan) is forced to end things with her boyfriend.

She loves the guy - hell, you always do. It's just that he's not brilliantly ... ah ... endowed.

Size shouldn't matter, of course, except that it does. Samantha does her best not to care for about a week, but underneath it all, she knows that it is hopeless. Alas, then, it is curtains for Samantha's bloke.

"I have so been there," your friends splutter, absolutely hysterical with laughter as poor old Samantha begins to wake up to the fact that she's going to have to cut her losses.

"That's so how it is. That's so what it's like. That's so what we ..."

Which is not to say, of course, that Samantha and/or her fans are completely impervious to various aspects of the male plight. Far from it.

In a kooky way, she's actually something of a rescuer-personality.

In last week's episode she was sleeping with her friend Charlotte's soon-to-be divorced brother, just to help him unwind.

She also agreed to help out two gay friends on a matter that I can't quite bring myself to discuss (suffice to say that Samantha was a true pal to agree).

Let's not forget, either, that she did her best to stay with the guy with the small penis.

Meanwhile, Charlotte makes really nice scones for people she doesn't/can't fancy.

She also returns a $200 pair of shoes to a salesman who gave them to her free because he had a thing for feet. She likes the shoes, but does not want to take advantage.

Uptown, Carrie tries to think of the best way to let down a guy whom she foolishly got involved with before he completed rehab.

You see what I mean, then. In its shambolic, contemporary way, it's all kind of human.

Of course, it's complete tripe as well. Let's not forget that.

Nobody lives or looks like these birds. I doubt that even the actors who play them do.

Which begs the question - why do us girls love it so much?

Reasonably intelligent women the world over have gone mad for it, and while it's true that women are always going mad for one reason or another (PMT, valium, hysteria and so on, the list goes back about 1000 years), this latest trend strikes me as quite relevant.

Does it prove that females actually quite like the idea of a I-can-take-it-or-leave-it attitude to sex?

Does this mean that we've finally left behind the uptight, humourless Ally McBeal and Bridget Jones - the ones who felt women were nothing without a bloke?

Yay.