Sex and the City crushed my male ego

I watched Sex and the City for the first time 22 years ago “under wincing duress”, says Simon Mills in The Times. I remember “squirming at the sight of thirtysomething women behaving like male predators”, commodifying men in terms of wealth, genital proportion, intellect and sexual technique. The girlfriends dated more than 100 men between them over six seasons, bedding 45 – then chucking them, in “just the same way that we men had objectified women” for decades.

Being a “strutting, cocky, freewheeling” 1980s male, I had never considered that women talked about men in this way before. Thanks to Carrie Bradshaw and co, it was suddenly easy to imagine one’s “every move and performative failure” being judged by your wife or partner’s girl gang, slightly pissed on white wine. It was a real blow to the male ego. And then there were the vibrators. Largely due to Sex and the City – the latest reboot, And Just Like That, begins on Thursday – there are said to be more Ann Summers Rampant Rabbit vibrators in Britain than real rabbits. In the Noughties, a woman asked me if I felt “threatened” by her Rabbit. To be honest, I wasn’t. “I was absolutely terrified of her, though.”