So did it teach us anything that came in useful along the way?

Female fans of Sex And The City never hesitated when Carrie asked them to choose between man or Manolo. But what did male viewers think of the show's bedroom antics and explicit girl talk?

Jay Rayner, The Observer's restaurant critic

When Sex and the City first aired in 1998 it was customary to praise the frank and detailed way in which the women it featured talked about sex, and the education that dialogue could offer the male audience. Perhaps for others, but not for this male. Then again my mother is agony aunt Claire Rayner and so in my childhood home, getting women to talk in a frank and detailed way about sex wasn't a revelation; it was just mummy's job.

What made Sex and the City work was not the subject matter, but the complete believability of the characters. We'd had comedies about sex and relationships before. Friends was still on the air at the time and it dealt with similar subjects but, with its laughter track and pantomime set ups, it was Dad's Army to Sex and the City's M*A*S*H. Carrie Bradshaw was not simply the kind of heroine we all cheered for. She could be a total heel, a bitch, a desperately unreliable witness to her own life. And yet we still cheered her on.

The show's huge audience appeal worked liked this. Women watched Sex and the City for the machine gun dialogue, the honest depictions of sexually active female lives, for the emotional narrative, the fab dresses and shoes. Men watched it to work out which one they fancied.

It was never Samantha. We weren't put off by her predatory sexual instincts. That was fine. We liked that. The problem was that she, alone among the quartet, was just a little too lightly drawn. What would you talk to Samantha about afterwards? Charlotte, of course, had the uptight quasi-virgin thing going on; a believable enough theme, but it looked a little bit too much like hard work.

That left Carrie, who was kooky and funny, and Miranda, who was whip-smart and smouldering. Obviously, in my case, it was always Miranda. I just have a thing for the brainy girls. Unless it was Carrie. Or Charlotte. Or, when I was a bottle to the bad, Samantha. Though it might have been Carrie. Then again, Charlotte... You get the general idea. Of such things are blockbuster TV shows made.

Toby Young, author of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People

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 its 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 in so attractive. The message of Sex and the City is that the Manhattan marriage market 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 cut-throat competition for rich husbands.

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.

Jeremy Langmead, editor of Esquire

Men were scared of Sex and the City. Not only did credit card debts soar as the show shamelessly plugged Manolos and Jimmy Choos (I think it's more to blame than sub-prime mortgages for the current credit crunch) but our physical and emotional foibles were cruelly exaggerated by an endless roll call of pathetic male characters. And instead of our other halves meeting up with friends to discuss Sontag, Sondheim and the Sudanese crisis, all they apparently talked about was sex and shopping.

We were shocked to discover that we were even more intellectually superior than we already thought: after all, men don't sit around sipping white wine giggling at the fact that their latest date has a strange-shaped nipple, or scream with excitement when a mate says the new DKNY sports pant is simply to die for.

To illustrate this point, I took notes of what my colleagues and I discussed over lunch this Friday at Soho Pizza:

1. Who would win a fight: a horse or an alligator?

2. Will Chelsea or Man U win the Premiership showdown?

3. Why, as you get older, do you always wake up early even at the weekend?

See? Much more challenging, isn't it?

However, the good news for blokes is that as most of the female population disappears in a fortnight to watch the movie, we'll finally be able to reclaim the telly.

Kwame Kwei-Armah, playwright and the first black Briton to have a play staged in the West End

A fever is about to grip the nation and I fear it's something not all the population of Great Britain is aware of. Say the names Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda to the average man in the street and I'll wager at best you'll get a shrug of the shoulders and a blank expression. Try same experiment with 99 percent of females and I believe that quite the reverse will happen. Pupils will widen, teeth will appear and apart from instantly articulating the release dates of the Sex and the City movie in all the major territories of the world, a certain lightness of being will be evident.

To test my hypothesis, I called all of - well, a handful of - my female friends and within moments I was informed how many boxed sets they possessed, how important the series had been to them, and that they and their entire female posse had already booked babysitters for the opening weekend of the movie.

What I found most interesting, however, was that when I asked my girlfriends what factors made the series so great, not one of them mentioned the S-word. 'It's the glamour I love', said one; 'fashion'; 'the friendships'; 'the shoes' - everything except the SEX. This seemed odd to me, because every time I caught glimpse of an episode, people were forever sexing and talking about how good or bad the guys were, and how big or small his member and ability to commit was. Which, I have to say, I thoroughly enjoyed. Any series that breaks taboos in such a stylish way should quite rightly be lauded. And though I have to admit I will not be eagerly queuing on May 28, awaiting the arrival of Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda to the big screen, I know that many of my sisters will - and for the next few days at least the spirit of joyousness will reign supreme. And that can only be all good for me, and all the men I know.

Derek Draper, former new Labour insider and lobbyist, now a psychotherapist

'Which one would you...?', was a universal, and rather crude, question among my single, late-twenties friends back in the late 90s. Now, a decade later, the girls are back, this time on the big screen, and in the meantime my mates and I have all settled down with wives and kids. To echo Carrie's erstwhile show opener, I got to wondering, did Sex and the City teach us anything about women that came in useful along the way? At first glance I'm not so sure. For most of us, the show's central theme - that women had found a way of mixing feminism with femininity - just echoed what we already knew. But the central message of the show was a crucial one - that relationships matter and it takes a lot of sweat and heartache to choose the right one and make it work. What the show's male viewers picked up from all this was that our female counterparts, however exciting their own lives were, hadn't given up on us but that they wouldn't settle for second best.

Witnessing the return of Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte, I have no doubt that men everywhere will be asking each other again the old, crude question but maybe, now we're older, we'll also be asking a more mature question: which one would we most like to be married to? And why?

Lemn Sissay, poet and artist at The South Bank centre

Like everyone else I had to watch the programme - it had the word 'sex' in the title and I am a guy - and to be frank I enjoyed the sex, the women and the city, New York. They're all gorgeous. But if Sex and the City is as honest about women as it is about race then by watching I was entering the sticky realms of fantasy. Let's not pretend it was anything else.

Every black American male or female, knew from the start that like the other international hit, Friends, Sex and the City was just not about them. By exclusion from one of the most cosmopolitan and racially mixed cities of the world, the message was abundantly clear - this one is not for you.

Jeez, you cannot get more cosmopolitan than Manhattan: Hispanic, Asian and black people make up more than 50 per cent of the population of the city. You can't step on a passer-by without having to apologise in four languages.

The truth is, there's nothing wrong with a show about white girls and their inner city lives - black folks have had their inner city lives portrayed throughout TV's short history. If there were too many black people in the show it couldn't be called Sex and the City anyway. It'd have to be called 'Sex in the Inner City' or 'Sex in the Urban Environment' or Sex on the Streets'. Yawn.

Forget shoes and men - this show nailed our friendships

Beyond the Manhattan fantasy, Sex and the City gave a rare depiction of the complexity and value of women's relationships, argues the Guardian's Libby Brooks...

I have never really understood why so many people felt personally affronted by Sex and the City. 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 much anticipated release of the Sex and the City movie later this month prods those discomfits yet again.

At the risk of collapsing one Bradshaw metaphor into another, 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 fuck 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: when is it all right to fake an orgasm? Ought there to be clean-up etiquette for men giving head? How does maternal ambivalence affect a woman who is already pregnant?

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. However the critics receive the new film, they 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 the imported Desperate Housewives and the brilliant British-born 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. Later, women wind up being their own worst enemies, buying into a culture that sets them against one another: the singles versus the marrieds, the stay at homes versus the working mothers. We are told that we can only understand those who mimic our lifestyle choices. It's interesting that when Hite surveyed she found that, of all barriers to friendship, relationship status was the greatest. Single and partnered women were less likely to be close than those of a different class or race.

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.

Can a feminist really love Sex and the City

For some, Sex and the City was a refreshing story of friendship and sexual freedom. For others, it was an orgy of consumerism and triviality. With the film version set to open, Alice Wignall asks if the series was good or bad for women...

If you are even remotely au fait with the motifs of Sex and the City, the scene will be instantly familiar. A female journalist, at work in her city apartment, ponders the blank screen of her laptop. Her fingers hover, the cursor winks invitingly and this week's pressing question is tapped out. But the person at the computer is me rather than Carrie Bradshaw, there is not a strappy shoe in sight and my question would never have appeared on the show, namely: is it really possible to call yourself a feminist and still like Sex and the City?

I only ask because, next month, the series that launched a thousand "Which SATC character are you?" quizzes is back, this time on our cinema screens. And yet I'm still no closer to working out if the SATC gals could do with a few remedial consciousness raising classes, or if they are, in fact, le dernier cri in empowered womanhood.

The original show, which ran for 94 half-hour episodes between 1998 and 2004, is unashamedly - and, yes, unusually - a show about women, for women (though, significantly, not completely by women. It was adapted from a newspaper column and book of the same name by Candace Bushnell, but the producer and a good chunk of the writers and directors were men). The four main characters even represent a slightly self-conscious stab at representing four different archetypes of womanhood. Charlotte, the conservative, romantic, naive upper-east-side princess with sights firmly set (at least at the start of the show's run) on the right marriage to the right man. Samantha, the successful, hardworking, inviolably independent PR executive who is a believer in sex rather than love and just as tirelessly devoted to that last cause as Charlotte is to hers. Miranda, the smart, corporate, high-flying lawyer. And, at the centre of it all, attempting to navigate a path between the options offered by her unlikely group of girlfriends, is Carrie: in her own way just as idealistic as Charlotte, as glamorous as Samantha and as dry as Miranda. The themes and plot of each episode are framed by the questions Carrie asks in her weekly columns for the fictional New York Star newspaper (a reflection of Bushnell's own writing for the real life New York Observer) and include everything from experimental lesbianism to breast cancer and the challenges of combining career and motherhood.

And yet, despite the awards and enviable viewing figures, and despite the fact that SATC really did bring something new to mainstream television when it started, it was not immediately embraced by the sisterhood as must-see feminist TV. That is partly because, for a show about women, it displays a singular obsession with men. As Miranda, the character most likely to consider herself a feminist, points out in one episode: "How does it happen that four such smart women have nothing to talk about but boyfriends?"

Since the primary purpose of SATC is to explore what it was like for thirty-something heterosexual single women negotiating sex and love in a late 20th-century urban setting, it would be hard to do that without mentioning men. But that makes it, at its heart, a protracted romantic comedy, and SATC suffers from being bound by the still-pretty-conventional constraints of the genre.

Janet McCabe, research fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University and co-editor, with her colleague Kim Akass, of Reading Sex and the City, a collection of essays about the programme, says, "The women are still caught in fairytale narratives. The 'right' couple were signalled in the first episode [in which Carrie first meets her on-off lover known only as Mr Big] and in some ways the entire show has just been about them getting together - which, of course, has to be endlessly delayed or you don't have the driving force behind the story." But this central relationship is clearly problematic. Mr Big is arrogant, egocentric and apparently unable to see a good thing when she is standing in front of him in four-inch heels. Carrie's own inability to wake up and realise what a terrible cliche she is dating renders her, at best, pretty dumb and, at worst, passive and weak. (At the conclusion of the TV series, she is rescued from Paris - and another unsatisfactory relationship with another alpha male - by Mr Big, her knight on a Boeing 777.)

"It does make for quite uncomfortable viewing," says Professor Imelda Whelehan of De Montfort University, author of The Feminist Bestseller: 'From Sex and the Single Girl to Sex and the City'. "How do we respect her? And Mr Big is such an interesting element. Even his name is masculine. He is like this phallus at the centre of it all."

The most significant story arcs are about the characters' search for relationships. And at the conclusion of the television show, all four characters - even Samantha, whose avowed aim for most of the series was emotion-free sex - are happily paired up. "It does seem that, in the end, it had to come back to a traditional view," says Whelehan. "That the future for most women means marriage and children."

And despite the shared understanding between the show's creators and its fans and analysts that every woman is one of the SATC ladies, it has always been crushingly obvious that hardly any of us actually is. The characters are, to a woman, white, rich, straight and apparently unencumbered by any strong emotional or practical ties to anyone or anything beyond their friendship group and, of course, the men they engage with. On one level, this is simply a piece of scene setting - it is a show about wealthy New Yorkers, not about all women everywhere. Akass points out that because there are so few television programmes purely about women, "Sex and the City bears the burden of representation. No one expects The Sopranos to encompass the experience of all middle-aged Italian-American men." The lack of drama in any other aspect of the women's lives except their relationships - the fact that they don't generally have to deal with issues arising from, for example, financial burdens or family ties - clears the field for their sex lives to become their first priority. "They do exist in this kind of vacuum," says Whelehan. "The chaotic element in their lives is their partners. Everything else is ultimately fine, mainly because they have the money to fix most problems." Which also explains why SATC is often dismissed as being simply a show about shoes. With no real battles to fight, excessive screen time can be devoted to tales of trivial consumption.

But that can also be easily rebutted. You may not applaud the way that the show tackles more serious issues, sandwiched, as they are, between dates and dinners, sex and shopping, but SATC is never just froth and froth alone. Illness, infertility, bereavement, ageing, single motherhood, sexual discrimination and divorce all play their part in the show's storylines. Glossily packaged and swiftly dispatched they may be, but you can confidently say that there is more to the programme than footwear.

And is the endless head-scratching over men really a betrayal of women? Or could it actually be an acknowledgement of the problems that plenty of women still experience in reconciling the protection and preservation of their own identities while engaging with men at work, at play, and in bed? As Akass asks, "Is it the case that a strong women can't desire a husband?" The success of SATC showed that, at the very least, there's still plenty of mileage in the tension between independence and the desire for sex, love and partnership; and especially for all those things with men.

These questions are not dealt with in an unintelligent way; the chorus of different female voices is a useful device for discussing them; that it fails to offer any novel answers is a function of the fact that it is, after all, just a TV fairy story. It also seems churlish to be bitter about the fact that Carrie et al do not offer a fail-safe model for emancipated womanhood when nor, frankly, has real-life feminism.

And to dismiss the programme entirely on the basis of its shortcomings as a feminist text would also be to lose out on what it does deliver. Just to take the most headline-grabbing example, that includes some pretty frank discussion of sex, in which female sexual pleasure and agency is obviously considered a fundamental right, rather than a privilege. McCabe says, "The way they spoke, and the things they talked about, were revolutionary. And it was also a great study of female friendship.

Ultimately, you just feel that it started with the four of them and they will always be together." Not only is it a programme about women, but one about women who like each other. They identify as each other's soul mates and provide emotional, practical and moral support. They don't compete with each other for male attention. They make each other laugh. It is probably the best depiction of the genuine nature and importance of female friendship ever to win an Emmy.

And so while it is probably about as much use as the Beano as a manual for life, you can be a feminist and like Sex and the City. Not least because if you're about to start letting political doctrine arbitrarily dictate which bits of the culture you respond to you may as well give up now and submit to the patriarchy. But mainly because the programme is funny and clever and it thinks women are important

For £12,000, take the Sex and the City tour

In the 10 years since its debut, Sex and the City has spawned countless girls-night-out discussions about how to capture the glamorous lifestyle of Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda. In New York it has even spawned an industry of tie-in tourist activities – but nothing like this. With the movie version of the show just weeks away, and shaping up to be the most successfully hyped release of the summer, one luxury travel firm believes women will pay £3,000 a day to follow the Manhattan footsteps of their idols.

Destination on Location, which is selling a four-day break in the city for $24,000, promises breakfast in Cafeteria, where the foursome brunched, gossiped and ruminated on the dating life, clothes shopping at Carrie's favourite stores and clubbing at the hottest New York nightspots, such as Bungalow 8. And as if to prove the accuracy of "The Rules", which argue that being hard to get can increase the ardour of an admirer, the first person to sign up to the trip was a woman from Singapore, where the show is banned.

Destination on Location offers "set-jetting", a range of package tours tied to famous films and television series. Future tours include one to New Zealand to visit places featured in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Joanne Konstantinakos, a former magazine publisher who founded the firm, said: "Sex and the City is a perfect opportunity because it's a global phenomenon; you don't have to be a New Yorker to follow it."

All the guests will be allocated a stylist to travel with them on their trip round New York's swankiest boutiques, salons and even to designers' studios. Then aspiring Carries can peel off to go trapezing at Chelsea Piers; Mirandas can go jogging in Central Park; and Samanthas get to attend a "How to Please Your Man" workshop.

The end of the television series in 2004 failed to dampen the tourist industry surrounding Sex and the City, and tour buses and specially chartered limos still regularly pull up on the block where Carrie lived, or by the bakery where Miranda stuffed her face with cupcakes, or outside the shop where Charlotte bought her rabbit. Now the movie, which premieres in London and New York next month, is generating a whole new flurry of speculation about what has happened to the characters during their hiatus, complete with internet teasers, red herring rumours and acres of coverage in magazines.

But Ms Konstantinakos is keen to stress that the trip is not just for women. "If you are Stanford or if you are the elusive Mr Big and want to join us for certain parts of the weekend ... we can custom-design your weekend with activities such as suit fittings, golfing or a helicopter ride over the city."