Lesbians do it better. It's official. I've had a great time with the straight women and the gay men, but now the gay girls have entered the fray, there's no contest. They're just streets ahead in every department.

I'm talking about TV, of course! What did you think I meant? I loved Sex and the City. I loved that it portrayed female friendships as so important to women's lives, at least as important as their affairs with men, and often more so. I loved that they started off trying to portray the women as having serious working lives -- they all had proper jobs at the beginning of the show. I loved the frank, dirty sex talk -- anal sex! Dildos! Golden showers! BDSM! (Actually, there was a disappointing lack of that one.) But it was a huge advance to be talking about that kind of rude sex stuff in the context of women's desire, rather than sex being characterized as nasty things that men do and women have to be paid to endure. Sex and the City was genuinely revolutionary in so many aspects.

But, even at the time, choices the writers made did annoy me. Charlotte gave up work even before she got married -- I think well before, but Charlotte's job stopped being mentioned a long time before she met Trey. And Carrie gave up her job to move to Paris with Alex, who said he'd pay for her place in New York -- Carrie, our icon, the one we were supposed to identify with, the witty writer looking for love, chucked in her career for a man and turned herself into a kept woman, one step up from a prostitute! She only went back to New York because Big came to get her, and we never hear, in the final episode, that she's planning to look for work again; for all we know, she's going to live off Big as she lived off Alex. Thank God for Miranda, who did tell Carrie what a bad choice she was making when she gave up her column. But Carrie did it anyway, and poor Miranda got stuck with Steve's Alzheimer's-suffering mum, who was a nightmare even before she got Alzheimer's. No prizes for guessing whose shoes the writers assume we'd rather be walking in.

It may be an accurate portrayal of New York women to have two out of four of them quitting their jobs as soon as they snag a rich man. Well, to be honest, it is a pretty accurate portrayal -- but you know what? Sex and the City was always fantasy. Blissfully so. The writers really didn't have to give us such a retrogressive portrait of women willfully giving up the jobs that they were shown as enjoying, rewarding jobs that helped to define their identities, their senses of self, their independent personalities. It was a huge disappointment to me.

So imagine my delight in finding The L Word. Finally, a TV show that focuses around a group of women which doesn't show them sacrificing their working lives to have relationships, which explores the deep roots of women's friendships in a way that makes Sex and the City look frivolous and shallow, which does all that and miraculously also manages to give us the escapism of beautiful, gorgeously dressed people falling in and out of love and lust with each other. And doesn't feel pressurized to make the characters and their relationships represent some kind of lesbian ideal.

I don't like all of the characters, but that's precisely the point. And even the ones I do like do things which I don't agree with, or positively disapprove of, which is even more the point -- that women don't have to be perfect, or loveable, or anything but human. I've never seen a show that showed such a wide variety of women characters before, that had so many echoes and resonances in my own life -- friends I've loved, friends I've fought with, stupid mistakes I've made.

So The L Word, and Ilene Chaiken, its creator, are officially inducted into the Tart Hall of Fame. I love that Chaiken's previous credits include writing the script for Barb Wire, the Casablanca update starring Pamela Anderson's breasts, which has always been a guilty pleasure of mine; breasts aside, it's a sneaky, before-its-time attempt to write a feminist movie under the guise of a sexploitation flick. And I love that Chaiken is on record as saying that the L in The L Word stands for 'love', just as much as 'lesbian'. Because that's what The L Word is about for me: how women love. How to find love, how to keep it alive, what to do when it dies.

Oh yes, and you know what I also love? That every woman on the show has a job, earns her own living, and takes it for granted that of course that's the way things are. Even Helena the heiress works, though admittedly under deeply privileged circumstances… and, not to give anything away, but for those people who haven't seen the whole of Series 3, there are a lot of changes coming in that department. I can't wait for Season 4…