I am not a fan of Sex and the City. This may be because I had a bad experience at the New York launch party for the first series in 1998. It was a hot ticket and I decided to take the girl who had recently dumped me, hoping she would be so impressed by the glitz and the glamour she would jump my bones. Unfortunately, she spotted the actor who played Dex Dexter in Dynasty -- a schoolgirl crush of hers -- and I didn’t see her for dust.

Admittedly, that is not a very good reason for disliking it, but consider this. The actor in question was going out with a friend of hers at the time and she did not hesitate to take advantage of her friend’s absence. 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 it’s 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 so attractive. The message of Sex and the City is that the Manhattan marriage market, whereby single women are compelled to spend all their disposable income on designer clothes and every spare moment on personal grooming, 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 cutthroat competition for rich husbands.

No doubt some of my feelings about this are due to sour grapes. If I had been a Mr Big type, I probably would have found New York’s gender inequality more acceptable. But sometimes the worm’s-eye view is more accurate. 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.

Can the decline of the American male be traced in the career of Dennis Quaid? He started out as a strapping, hot-headed youth (The Right Stuff), matured into a bona fide sex symbol (The Big Easy) and then got relegated to playing guilt-ridden fathers (The Day After Tomorrow). In Smart People, which opens next Friday, he is cast as an embittered college professor who somehow manages to combine a stoop and a paunch.

As if to confirm just how un-glamorous the traditional American he-man has become, the European Space Agency announced last week that it was no longer looking for the kind of daredevils that pioneered space exploration in the 1960s and 70s -- the men immortalised in Tom Wolfe’s famous non-fiction book. “We are not interested in the Right Stuff; we want the right staff,” a spokesman for the Agency said.

Remarks like this have triggered a bout of soul-searching among middle-aged males on the other side of the Atlantic. For instance, in The Decline of Men: How the American Male is Tuning Out, Giving Up and Flipping Off His Future, Guy Garcia argues that men have become demoralised by the non-stop assault on traditional masculinity. “Trapped in the Reebok canyon between the Vagina Monologues and Brokeback Mountain, many men are afraid to even stand close to other guys, paranoid of looking gay just when they most need to give each other a helping hand,” he writes.

Or perhaps it’s the fault of Donald Trump. That is the view of Rabbi Shmuley Boteach in The Broken American Male (and How to Fix Him). “His narcissism and boastfulness scrape the skies, just like his buildings,” he writes. “If wisdom’s highest manifestation is the human ability to discern a cause greater than oneself, then Trump is mired in an abyss of self-absorbed darkness so thick that it blights any ray of hope.”

Fortunately, there is a cure. At least, that’s the view of Smart People. Dennis Quaid tries a number of different ways to reclaim his masculinity, including breaking in to a car pound, before finally hitting on the right one: Sarah Jessica Parker. Apparently, sleeping with the star of Sex and the City has a remarkably rejuvenating effect on even the most depleted of males (though it hasn’t worked on her husband, Matthew Broderick, whose career path is remarkably similar to Dennis Quaid’s).

The notion that a “broken” American male can get his mojo back by becoming involved with a sassy career girl is a popular theme of recent Hollywood comedies, from Knocked Up to Superbad. It’s the story of Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, but with the gender roles reversed: Men can only be roused from their emasculated slumber by the kiss of a bold and confident woman. Testosterone is still with us, it seems. It has just migrated from men to women.

I never thought I'd end up doing an impression of Joan Rivers on a red carpet, but here I am at the Spectator's 180th anniversary party.