Remember the old pop feminist complaint about the lack of "strong female characters" in movies, television and novels? Now that TV offers us Buffy, Xena, Agent Scully and dozens of competent and committed policewomen, doctors and spaceship captains, Toni Morrison climbs the bestseller list and even the latest James Bond movie features (in Michelle Yeoh) an action heroine who can hold her own alongside 007, maybe it's time to retire that particular beef. But wait -- although insecure, needy, man-obsessed women characters who brood incessantly about their appearance may be getting rare in entertainment directed at co-ed or male audiences, you can still find plenty of them -- just look for them where the girls are.

From the comic strip "Cathy" to TV's "Ally McBeal," from chick flicks like "Walking and Talking" and the forthcoming "I Love You, Don't Touch Me" to popcorn novels like Laura Zigman's much-hyped "Animal Husbandry" and the British bestseller "Bridget Jones' Diary," female basket cases abound. No one seems to be griping about them, though, and that's probably because their existence can't really be blamed on men. Women, for the most part, create these characters, and it's female audiences who gobble them up with so much enthusiasm.

Granted, no one really wants to see the kind of character that some feminists once called for: brilliant, accomplished, sleekly independent, politically unimpeachable -- in short, a tedious paragon. It's understandable that women might turn with relief to stories about mere mortals, someone they can identify with rather than feel inferior to, particularly when they need a few laughs. Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones begins her diary with an impossible to-do list of self improvements, including "develop inner poise and authority and sense of self as woman of substance, complete without boyfriend, as best way to obtain boyfriend," demonstrating how easily a principle intended to unleash women can be twisted (by women themselves) into yet another task to fail at. In the end, feminist nostroms about what women could be swiftly mutated into a new, but still unfulfillable, list of things they should be.

So when Zigman's depressed protagonist wallows in a slough of worthlessness after being dumped by her patently duplicitous boyfriend and lies awake at night moaning, "Why me?" (when the more obvious question is: Why him?), we're meant to chuckle with rueful recognition. Isn't that just like life? And, of course, life -- or, more precisely, love, because these stories are always ultimately about the travails of romance -- sometimes is like that. On the other hand, life is like a whole lot of other things as well, things like adventure, inspiration, faith, vocation, idealism -- none of which ever seem to surface when our perpetually crestfallen heroines occupy center stage. It can be refreshing to see the mucky, inglorious aspects of contemporary women's lives reflected in books, TV and movies for a change, but a little bit of this stuff goes a long way. And there's a whole lot of it going around.

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After repeated exposures, the lonely gal heroine -- whose love life never works out, who pines for the wrong guys and who's having a really good day when she can scrape together enough shreds of self-respect to tell one of them off -- starts to feel just as suffocatingly limited as Martha Stewart. It's as if the icons of femininity that women create for themselves must be either flawless, like Martha, or a total mess. "I feel ashamed and repulsive" scribbles Bridget Jones after a Cathy-esque junk food binge, "I can actually feel the fat splurging out from my body" -- this despite the fact that she weighs a perfectly normal 130 pounds. She can't allow for, or live with, any middle ground between fashion-model slender and "flabby body flobbering around."

For Bridget, feminist ideals likewise mean either emulating an impossibly detached "inner poise" or indulging in sodden they're-all-bastards raging at the local pub with her pal Sharon. This impasse is partly the heritage of the ham-fisted cultural analysis of feminism's second wave, which devolved into op-ed page homilies about "good role models" and "strong women" without ever getting at the root of the problem. Surprisingly, sometimes tackling the problem can be as easy as learning from the other side. For example, pop culture is just as full of idealized images of masculinity -- take James Bond, again, who looks, dresses, fights, loves, shoots and drives better than any real guy ever could. But men don't seem to have the same love/hate relationship with Bond that women have with supermodels. They can walk out of the latest 007 (or Bruce Willis, or Arnold Schwarzenegger) movie, well-entertained and with a bounce in their step -- not muttering bitterly about "unrealistic standards." While masculinity's more excessive demands can lead to chronic social woes ranging from war to domestic violence, the average guy is happy just to win every once in a while, while the average woman wants to be perfect.

To maintain the appearance of thinglike perfection presented by someone like Stewart or Kate Moss requires constant vigilance and unending effort. That's a lot of time to spend working on yourself, but Martha's not the only one logging in lots of time with her own navel. In one episode of "Ally McBeal" the Zeitgeist's darling collars a co-worker in the powder room and launches into a litany of disappointment. She expected, by age 28, to be married, pregnant with her first child and on track to make partner at her law firm, she wails. "Ally," the other woman replies, "can you tell me what it is that makes your problems so much bigger than everybody else's?" Ally takes a deep breath, squares her plucky little shoulders and says, "They're mine." In fact, in "Ally McBeal," everybody else's problems are always Ally's problems. Every case her firm tries is just another opportunity for her to reflect on Issues Important to Ally, whether it's monogamy, romance or her own biological clock. Whenever she blunders into someone else's personal dilemma, the conflict turns out to be little more than a Lesson for Ally to Learn.

For it turns out that daunting perfection and chronic self-loathing have something in common (beside their complete alienation from reality): They both require precisely the same massive amount of self-absorption. Fielding's "Bridget Jones' Diary" riffs on Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" to the extent that the good egg Bridget finally winds up with is named Mark Darcy. But, although Bridget lives a much less constrained life than Elizabeth Bennet, reading about her feels much more claustrophobic because Bridget's mind and self are so much smaller. By the end of Fielding's book, it's not plausible that a brilliant "human rights attorney" like Mark Darcy would really fall for Bridget; she's certainly no Elizabeth Bennet. Of course, Mark's own work only interests Bridget to the extent that it labels him a stellar catch, bearing the imprimatur of liberal do-goodism in addition to having all that money.

Bridget begins each diary entry with meticulous accounts of her weight and the calories, "alcohol units" and cigarettes she consumes. Like Ally McBeal's washroom confession, bringing this kind of secret, compulsive self-monitoring into the open air wins an immediate, knowing laugh, but the revelation quickly begins to curdle once exposed. At some point, you start to wonder whether this kind of humor isn't just a way of getting comfortable with the neurotic legacy and restricted worldview of conventional femininity, when just 20 years ago women dreamed of kicking off those traces. That wry, isn't-that-just-like-life grin segues so easily into a shrug; how could life, then, be any other way?