Women's channels.

Women's magazines, women's websites, women's issues. Chick-lit, chick flicks.

God, these kinds of things get me down.

I don't really know why they do - they simply do, and that's all there is to it, hence the vagueness of this rant. But maybe it's because in a lot of cases the thing that is being described - books, movies, TV shows, etcetera - often seems to have been somehow devalued or debased by the addition of the word 'women' to it. The idea of a woman's anything often seems to conjure up images, in my mind, of pastel colors, true love stories, babies, huge bucketfuls of estrogen, micro-celebrities, horoscopes and squealing. Why? I don't think of silver and grey, soccer players and Gillette Razors when I think of 'men's' anything.

And I'm a woman. What mental pictures the mention of 'women's TV' conjures up to the average intelligent male I would hate to imagine.

Why is that the very word 'woman' appears to have become equated with trivia in the eyes of the media? Women's magazines are full of sex scandals, babies, healthcare and cooking. Anything weighty is pushed under the carpet, as if it didn't exist. Or, worse, as if women in general were such fluffy, ditzy, cute little Stepford Wives that they didn't need to worry their head about the bigger picture, because someone else (someone male?) would be thinking about all that for them.

No, they can go back to thinking about lipstick colors, and Autumn hemlines, and how to achieve the perfect orgasm whilst Having It All. The funny thing is that 'Having it all' simply seems to equate to the idea that, shockingly, it is possible to have a career and children.

(Of course, it helps if you have a nanny, and a Fabulous Rich Husband. All too often when I look at examples of Women who Have It All, they have been helped along the way by having a huge amount of money.)

( Is this really what women want? )

And this sickening, frothy concoction is being marketed as 'women's pop culture'. But the idea of marketing to 'women', as a niche market, hasn't really seemed to find a parallel amongst marketing to men. Yes, there are men's magazines, but there aren't magazines targeted at men as a group from the age of eight to the age of eighty-eight, and above - whatever stage of life a woman is in, almost from the moment that she first becomes literate, there will be a 'woman's magazine' targeted at her age group. Women are targeted and marketed to, as an amorphous and undifferentiated group, defined more by age and income than they are by personality and interests, pretty much from the cradle to the grave in a way that men simply aren't.

I stopped reading women's magazines aged fifteen, when I realized they had no relevance to my life, my beliefs, my aspirations or my world view and never would do, and that reading them because I wanted to fit in was just making me feel miserable that I wasn't slim, pretty, popular and fancied (and didn't think the cure to my woes was a new top from Miss Selfridge and a makeover, either). I now read Private Eye, which mentions current events and doesn't constantly insinuate that I'm fat, and am much happier and better-informed for it.

So what's the point of this rant? Well, it's a surprisingly simple one, given the length of it, and it runs thusly.

There is no prescribed way to be female.

The sooner we let go of this conceit, the sooner we stop targeting things at women as an undifferentiated and undemanding niche group with about half a cupful of brain between them simply by virtue of their gender, the happier we'll be for it. Women make up over half the freaking population, for heaven's sake. Who told society that the values, dreams, aspirations and motivations of over half its members could be summed up in a single publication, a single movie, a single show - or rather, in a series of them all of which are fundamentally just the freaking same?

Women are not a minority group, world. Get that into your head, and get over it!