Finding fluff on popular women's Web sites is like shooting fish in a barrel; it's so obvious that it's almost embarrassing to point it out. On these pillars of all things womanly, you'll find love compatibility calculators, diet plans, humiliating-moment confessionals, "secrets for sizzling summer sex!" and of course horoscopes, horoscopes, horoscopes. Other than a certain emphasis on resourcefulness, do-it-yourself-ism and pro-female positivity, there isn't much difference between the front page of iVillage and the cover of Family Circle, that of Women.com and Cosmopolitan (whoops, Cosmopolitan is now part of Women.com).

In the early days of the Web, fledgling sites like Women.com (then called Women's Wire), iVillage and Cybergrrl.com promised to provide alternatives to the shallow women's glossies on newsstands. In a medium then heavily dominated by geek testosterone, these women's sites shone as tiny post-feminist havens, modeling themselves after general interest magazines but with a heavy emphasis on community and more politicized content.

Now women make up 50.4 percent of the Web's population, according to a joint report released earlier this month by Jupiter Communications and Media Metrix. Great news for women -- no, Barbie, math isn't hard and computers aren't just for boys. But the news was anticlimactic for some: Five years into the evolution of the "Woman's Web," most of these original sites are suffering. Candice Carpenter, the most visible face of women's online publishing, has departed her seat as CEO of iVillage; Women.com has lost much of its original editorial team and is being kept aloft primarily because of a savvy merger with the Hearst women's magazine empire. A significant number of editors and Web producers of the much-trumpeted Oxygen.com have left, Cybergrrl is mostly forgotten and the young founders of the indie-zine network ChickClick.com have quietly left their own company. In the face of these departures and an increasing emphasis on the bottom line, the content on the sites is consequently becoming more and more mainstream.

Did you expect a feminist revolution online, empowering women to toss aside those astrology readings and turn off "Ally McBeal," in order to run for president on a platform of halting genital mutilation in Africa? Those who thought the Web would be more like Ms. than Mademoiselle -- believing that all women were itching for more intellectualism -- were probably deluded. (As the former editor of a now-defunct woman's zine, I include myself in that number.) As Francine Prose scathingly put it in the New York Times in February, "Only the most starry-eyed difference feminist could seriously have imagined that 'women's culture' would be any more noble, intelligent, high-minded or less blatantly meretricious than the 'male culture' peddled by Maxim magazine and Comedy Central's 'Man Show.'"

Half the Web may now consist of women, but what we are finding at the sites that are built with us in mind is often much of the same pabulum we'd get in People or Seventeen magazines. In fact, according to the most recent studies, women are going online in order to get People and Seventeen and that brand of 'women's culture' that so many feminists abhor. C'est la vie, c'est la révolution. It makes one wonder: Now that women make up the majority online, do we even need "women's" sites?

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