THE AMERICAN trend-spotter Faith Popcorn may be wacky and irritating, but her prophecies as a self-styled 'cultural detective' have always been newsworthy. A pioneer in terms of charting the so-called 'Eve-olution' - the shifting of the global perspective from men to women - Popcorn can be credited with turning many millions on to the fact that when it comes to spending money, it's women who are responsible for spending the most.
The more cynical male reader may be thinking, 'I could have told you that years ago'. But the fact is that, when it comes to the big financial decisions - houses, healthcare, holidays, cars and schooling - women are today responsible for a hefty 80 per cent of them.
This in itself is nothing new, of course - canny marketers have been aware of this for a long time now, to the extent that the concept of masculinity has been skewed into metrosexuality. Men are now being bombarded with messages coded to appeal to the female senses. At least that's my excuse for shaving my legs this morning.
The internet has been crucial in making this happen, and so it's no wonder the world of women's websites is, in particular, a battleground. Take ivillage.com for example - a site so determined to dominate that it's bought up every domain name that has the word 'woman' in it, taking all internet searches to the same site.
That's the sort of thing you're up against if you want to start your own site - and according to the editor and webmaster of Hong Kong's first online English-language women's magazine - which is set to go live today, one week before International Women's Day - the emphasis on selling has stripped the internet of its original essence.
'Most websites fail because people think they're marketing tools,' says Jo Dehaney, whose WomensWeb.cc attempts to reverse the trend by being content-heavy. 'I think the true message was lost years ago.'