Last week, a new TV series, Girls, started to air on HBO in the US. It's a show about four twenty something women living in New York, navigating the bridge between college and real life.

What is interesting about this series is the friendship it portrays. A friend is someone with whom you dare to be yourself. And this is true of the bond between these four girls.

In one of the early scenes of the pilot episode you see two women spooning in bed together. Warmly intertwined, they are awoken by an alarm, having fallen asleep together watching television.

A short while later, these same two girls, Hannah and Marnie, share a bathtub and laugh about the emasculated boyfriend in the next room.

These women are so comfortable together. But when Marnie's boyfriend opens the door, he is laughed out of the room. Men have no place or status within the world of these women.

This particular brand of female friendship seems very modern, and many culture critics have been provoked to hail Girls as revolutionary.

However, Rebecca Traister at Salon.com makes the point that female friendships which are the main source of emotional nourishment only seem new and noteworthy because of relatively recent history. But it's a dynamic that is very old.

"It wasn't until the early 20th century, as marriage came to be treated as a union based on love and sex, that same-sex friendships began to be seen as competitive to the closeness a woman was supposed to feel to her husband," said Traister.

What is great about Girls is that it opens a window through which we can peer at female friendships in the 21st century.

The women characters' closeness is a byproduct of a world where marriage is no longer the highest goal for women.

Without this inherent competitive goal, women can form unbreakable bonds of sisterhood and support. Women have time and resources to be whoever they want to be, and instead of focusing on men they can focus on themselves.

Girls has been compared to another famous television show, Sex and the City. One also set in New York, also revolving around the friendship of four women. But unlike Sex and the City, Girls portrays a very different kind of feminine companionship.

"Carrie and her brightly colored cadre made history in almost cartoonish fashion, in which friendship was a public performance enacted in expansive shiny clubs over jewel-colored cocktails," said Traister.

"Those flamboyantly drawn expressions have given way to Hannah and Marnie, who breakfast in their grim kitchen, Marnie listening with irritation as Hannah slurps her cereal milk and talks with her mouth full, like regular best friends, not fabulously implausible best friends."

This new breed of friendship is more deeply entwined, and the gritty details of each woman's life are laid bare on the dinner table in the crappy apartment they share.

Female friendship is brilliant in its ability to entwine the beautiful, sacred and disgusting facets of the girls that it links.