Leafing through these magazines the first thing you will notice is the X-Rated content. Every second article concerns G-Spots, oral this and multiple that. Nothing wrong with this of course, except for the irresponsible attitude it encourages - a woman who is not having great sex is not a complete woman is the message. Furthermore, they rarely mention institutions such as marriage - in women's magazine world, everything is without consequences and everything takes place in a moral vacuum. The primary motivation, they say, is 'lifestyle'. Everything is subordinate to having a complete, fashionable lifestyle.

And what is this lifestyle? Irresponsible sex and endless consumerism. In so far as (dare I say it) spiritual matters are mentioned at all, even then it is just a cypher for self absorption.

And this is the nub: women's magazines encourage total self immersion. They rarely mention anything external to the mind of the reader, it is all internal concerns, total introspection. If one looks at men's magazines for comparison, one will see that they are concerned with the outside world. The magazines men tend to read are focused on hobbies and interests - the entire gamut from computing magazines to Fly Fishing to Railway Modeling Monthly. Even the so called 'men's magazine' market, which caters exclusively to men, tends to examine the outside world more than the internal. An example might be loaded magazine, which has plenty about football, holidays and so on. It isn't just an exercise in mental masturbation, as women's magazines are.

So what effect are these publications having on women? Well, by encouraging irresponsible sex, they lower the value of women to men. Many men are primarily interested in women in a sexual manner, and the point of marriage is to provide a social contract - the woman gets social security and a commitment, the man gets sex and also a commitment from the woman. Thus we can see that male-female relations are all about bargaining.

When feminism arrived in force in the 1960's, it was declared that marriage was slavery for women, and that women should love freely. The effects of this have been disastrous - by giving away their most valuable asset cheaply and unthinkingly, women have cheapened their sex and put men in the driving seat once again. The publications I rail against encourage this on a huge scale - scarcely a women alive in the western world is not tainted by the rubbish put out by cosmopolitan, Elle, Women's Own, etc etc.

Now, after 30 years or more of this, we see the emergence of the 'singleton', the 30-something female who just can't get married. All her male peers are chasing after younger women, and successfully at that. Feminism has shot itself in the foot by making the slightly older single woman very unhappy indeed, as she is out-competed by the young and flighty.

If Bridget Jones is the end result of feminism and women's magazines, then really these things have done much harm in this area. The question is, what can be done about it?

There are better magazines out there for women with a more interesting and less self absorbed content. A good example might be Bitch, which has good, modern feminist writings, or Vogue, a magazine concerned with style and fashion, yes, but not lifestyle fashion.

I think women need to be freed from the endless introspection and lifestyle thinking encouraged by the present media. A woman's magazine will not tell you how to be happy, and it won't 'improve your lifestyle'. Women need magazines interested in the world outside their heads and with interesting, unpredictable content. Not something with an endless factory production of 'How to find your G-Spot', 'How to have multiple orgasms' and 'What do you do if you fancy your boss?' articles.