In 2006, a woman is not supposed to take herself too seriously. Being po-faced - tight of jaw and thin of lip - is just about the worst crime she can commit (unless she is overweight). So I feel quite anxious about what I intend to write here. God forbid that anyone should think that I don't have a sense of humour, that I fail to see the irony in certain aspects of camp. But what I'm wondering is: why do so many intelligent women enjoy Desperate Housewives? Doesn't it irk them? Don't they feel it's backward-looking? Has it never occurred to them that if Teri Hatcher, who plays Susan, gets any thinner, the other housewives will be able to use her to floss their teeth?

The days of shared excitement at TV cliff-hangers the night before are meant to be over. The theory is that, with so many channels available, the audience is too fragmented for conversations along the lines of 'who shot JR?' I am not convinced of this. If it is the case, how come I'm always feeling so left out? Desperate Housewives is a case in point. Recently, a friend revealed she was having a 'Bree moment'. It was several minutes before I understood that this had more to do with control freakery than soft cheese. Then my heart really sank.

Everyone I know is crazy about Desperate Housewives, and I just don't get it. It's as if I'm back at school and, while all the other girls are busy lusting over some boy who is obviously a complete bastard, I'm secretly hankering after the dork with an earnest smile and a CND badge on his blazer. I ignored the first series, in so far as I could. The title alone, which sounds vaguely like a specialist porn mag, was enough to set my teeth on edge. And on the few occasions when I did catch a brief blast, I was always bewildered. As another Housewife-aphobe, the TV critic of The New Yorker, Nancy Franklin, wrote 12 months ago, playing around with tone - with soap opera, melodrama, and comedy - proves that the series' creator, Marc Cherry, has talent, but it doesn't prove that he has artistry. Its scripts are pap: slick pap - but pap all the same.

But worse than these faults of drama is the insidious way it plays on sexual stereotypes. Its jokes, which are often funny, and the unbridled sex one of the women has been having with her teenage gardener, and the female characters' sharp tongues all act as a distraction - very handy, this - from the central thesis, which is that women are mad, bad and dangerous to know. Their hormones make Hurricane Katrina look like a blowy weekend in Bexhill.

The second season began on Channel 4 last Wednesday; minutes in, and it had started. Mothers-in-law? Boo! Childless career women? Boo! I am told that Bree, who is like Martha Stewart on Ritalin, is everyone's favourite. Why? Because her rubber gloves are a vampish purple? Because the great, shining dome of her forehead appears to contain so much Botox it looks like an ostrich egg with a torch behind it? I suppose you could say that she stands as a kind of warning - that an unfulfilled life is a shrivelled life. But if so, why does she get such great outfits? Even by the standards of this show, where a woman with a bum or a bust is not really a woman at all, she looks good. And looking good, in Wisteria Lane, is just about the only thing that really counts. Cheekbones are go!

The critics are kind to Housewives. They regard it as a bit of fun. 'Perkily malicious,' says one. 'Preposterous glitz,' says another. But women get told that so many things are fun; we're compelled to smile so often, and so hard, that our faces ache. In the series, only Lynette (Felicity Huffman), a career high-flyer who became a full-time mother but is now going back to work, betrays any sense of this; only in her do the strange, mixed messages women receive, and the internal conflicts these messages ignite, seem to have any life at all. Last week she ended up selling herself to her new boss while changing her baby's nappy - which was, well, a bit better than the robot antics of the other wives, for whom work seems to be about as appealing as flat shoes or pop socks, but still a bit dumb. Even as she 'multi-tasked', she looked disorganised. You see how women cock things up? So, Lynette got the job. The question is: will she be allowed to keep it?

Much of our culture seems to be so retrograde at the moment. It's like living in 1973. Rachel Weisz wins a Golden Globe for a brilliant performance in a politically-engaged film, and all anyone wants to talk about is that she and Kate Winslet - allegedly - are not the best of friends. Well, no wonder - when our favourite TV is dolly birds in suburbia. Do I have a sense of humour? I think so (though you should never trust someone who tells you they possess such a thing). But do I worry? Yes, I do.

When I watch the BBC's wonderful Life on Mars, in which a cop has been transported back to 1973, there are times when the sexism seems outlandishly shocking - and times when it seems just a little bit too familiar for my liking.