So who’s your favourite?

Is it the pretty yet neurotic one, the level headed responsible kind or maybe the successful and insatiable sort?

How about the self absorbed type who’ll analyse every intimate detail of her life in a very public column?

Whoever your preferred Sex and the City flavour may be, you’re sure to be satisfied this month as Manhattans’ most famous daughters take over our cinemas once again with the second instalment of their silver screen adventures.

And I’m afraid, very afraid.

It had started out oh so differently.

I first became acquainted with Sex and the City’s feminine wiles in times of yore, also known as my university days.

Back then the show was a staple choice of entertainment for my y chromosome challenged housemates.

Having heard the hype, seen the adverts and read plenty of one eyed daily mail columns on the girls’ empowered escapades, I felt like I knew enough about the show to resist popping my Sex and the City cherry.

Until I realised if I formed my opinions on other people’s experiences instead of my own, I’d be no different to the aforementioned columnists I so despise.

As hypocrisy is one of my least favourite bed fellows, I decided to invite myself along to my housemates next girly night in so I could try out the Sex and the City experience first hand.

After the facemasks, plucking and laughter – mostly theirs – had abated, we got down to serious business by watching the show.

And all it took was one episode to get me hooked.

The writing was witty and engaging, mixing lurid fun with keenly perceived observations on city life, whilst the main protagonists had surprising depth to their personalities.

Despite embodying identikit profiles of female stereotypes, the honest representation of these central characters flaws, along with the gleeful depiction of their confidence and strengths, made it easy to identify with these women.

Although, being a man in possession of some newly shaped eyebrows made this process somewhat easier.

These elements of Sex and the City had largely been ignored in the hype of the right wing press, as newspapers focused on sensationalising the liberal sexual content of the show told from the point of view of four empowered women.

But it was this strong female voice that I loved most about Sex and the City.

And I would later realise how significant this is to the show’s relevance in our society.

As I’ve become more aware of the world we live in, it’s hard to escape the sheer dearth of female voices in our media

The male point of view dominates most every creative medium in our society; be it music, tv or writing.

This is starkly evident in our film industry, where the primary purpose of many female characters appears only to further the story arc of the male protagonist.

Laura Mulvey called this phenomenon the “male gaze”, and deconstructs this theory far better than I ever could.

The more I experience in life, the more I notice this “male gaze” in the media products we consume and the more frustrated and resentful I become over this marginalisation of the female voice.

For no other reason than I find the male perspective to be, well, a tad boring.

As a guy, I think have a pretty good handle on what makes men tick.

The inner workings of a women’s mind, on the other hand, now there’s a challenge.

This is purely subjective and most likely a reflection on how I find those things in life which I don’t understand to be infinitely more intriguing than what I do.

Perhaps I’d be less enamoured with female viewpoints in our media if their voice was dominant and we had a society in thrall to a “female gaze”.

Of course, this isn’t the case.

So, through scarcity of this female voice alone, I feel media products that offer a genuine insight into how woman think to be intrinsically more valuable than anything offered up by their male counterparts.

Which is why I loved Sex and the City so.

Definitely not the four hot actresses talking about sex and getting laid.

(ok, three)

But the success of the show, unquestionably deserved, eventually served as the death knell for the integrity and quality of later series.

The show transmogrified – yes, it’s a word – from a sharply observed insight of the lives of four successful women into a bunch of rich writers and actors going through the motions of incorporating most every soap opera cliché imaginable to carry on churning out a product they could “sell” to their audience.

This process was crowned with the truly wretched first Sex and the City film a couple of years ago.

The script was leaden and predictable, the “second act” drama forced and contrived while I believe the pace the plot provided a major breakthrough for insomnia sufferers everywhere.

Everything that made Sex and the City so great in the first place was conspicuous by its absence.

Thankfully, my friend’s knock off copy of the film conked out half way through and I was spared wasting another hour of my life on this turgid mess.

Yet the film still turned out to be a huge commercial success.

Now the PR machine for the second instalment, when the girl’s take over morocco or something, is already in full swing.

The trailers already look a hell of a lot more fun then the entire first film, so I’ll be checking out the girl’s new adventures with an open mind.

But if the script turns out to be as tortured and formulaic as in their first outing, I’ll have left long before the end.

Without leaving so much as a post it note behind.