The Media Equation - Slumber Parties Go Digital - NYTimes.com In the gender wars, men generally win the race to the bottom. This past week though, women were the ones who seemed completely preoccupied by the reproductive act: a cultish cable series that gave birth to a movie. All week long, women had "Sex" on the brain. The wait for some women - and a few men stapled to them - ended last Tuesday night at Radio City Music Hall, where thousands of acolytes gathered to see the New York premiere of "Sex and the City." The movie, a big-screen take on the long-running HBO series, left critics scrambling for synonyms for the word "vapid" and true believers in a state of bliss. "I'm coming back like, oh, about 30 times," said one young woman, tottering out of the premiere on the kind of shoe-like contraptions that suggested she had internalized one of the franchise's core messages. In the run-up, consummation and aftermath to the series, women who wanted to gather around a campfire of obsession could always tune in to "Entertainment Tonight" or pick up a copy of People magazine. But lately, more often than not, women use the Web to meet their informational needs, including early intelligence about the garments and footwear of Carrie and her cohort. There has long been a conceit that held that the Web was a men's locker room, full of pornography, sports and gadgets, but the same demographic group that controls 83 percent of the spending in America is increasing its time spent on the Web. So in the last 18 months, venture capitalists and media companies have been cranking out the digital estrogen. IVillage, (ivillage.com), the mother of all mothers" sites, continues to rumble along, with Glam (glam.com), a federation of gossipy blog sites in hot pursuit. SheZoom (shezoom.com) began offering a video portal this year, Slate has a subsite called The XX Factor (slate.com/blogs/blogs/xxfactor), Yahoo grabbed magazine veteran Brandon Holley (Elle Girl, Jane) to produce Shine (shine.yahoo.com), Nick Denton's Jezebel (jezebel.com) found immediate traction, PopSugar (popsugar.com) took the celebrity route to a girl's heart. Even print icons like Liz Smith ("I'd still be using a quill if they'd let me") have joined in with Wowowow (wowowow.com), a site put together by book publishing veteran Joni Evans that includes the electronic jottings of Peggy Noonan and Lesley Stahl. And The Wall Street Journal has started Journal Women (online.wsj.com/public/page/2_1357.html). "Women have the been the majority of Internet users for three or four years now," said Lisa Stone, co-founder of BlogHer, a site for women who read and write blogs. You are seeing the confluence of the world's most powerful consumer, the American woman, and a user who finally has the tools she needs to express herself. This past week, BlogHer and Compass Partners released a study of Internet use, which suggested that television, newspapers and magazines are all losing female mindshare to the Web. "Fortune 500 companies who are seeking a new kind of relationship with those women consumers have noticed the same thing," Ms. Stone said. Mr. Denton said that after a single year of existence, Jezebel has about the same traffic as Gawker and carries more annotation from the commentariat than any other site the company owns. "Four or five years ago, no one was thinking about women," he said. The ravings of the usual Internet gurus about how the Web was all about little niches turned out not to be true. By launching Jezebel, we came to the conclusion that women's market is reasonably coherent and very profitable. We were late to the party, but I think we have something readers seem interested in. And what are readers interested in? This week, it was wedding trains big enough to require their own ZIP codes, shoes that cost as much as cars and loving loutish men who do a poor job of loving them back. Jezebel live-blogged the public premiere of "Sex and the City," (in flip-flops no less, how very 2.0), Journal Women looked at the implications of combining cleavage and pinstripes, Glam went wall-to-wall with "Shoes and the City," Shine had video interviews with the franchise's four principals. SheZoom had a five-part deconstruction teasing apart the ethos of the show. Some sites sat out the hype, with The XX Factor preferring to focus on the tidy pleasures of a "Daily Show" spoof of the show and Divine Caroline, a West Coast site, focused on issues closer to home and office, such as, "Why do guys think it's appropriate to adjust themselves in public?" Yes, countless women's sites, including the ones mentioned, expend a lot of serious effort on serious matters, including lunch-bucket issues like finding a way to put food on the table and be around to cook it as well. And mommy sites like UrbanBaby (urbanbaby.com) and a forum that grew out of it, YouBeMom (youbemom.com/forum), have become a vital part of the culture, a place where mothers in search of solace, tips and community can spend some quality screen time with other mothers. Women's sites, in the aggregate, certainly have more ambition than the empty-headed ethos of male sites like Heavy (heavy.com) and Maxim (maxim.com/index.aspx). Besides, I realize we are all, like it or not, having a moment with "Sex and the City," no more or less frivolous than the Super Bowl. It's just odd that while there has been a significant advance in sites by and for women, much of what is being produced replicates, rather than revolutionizes, the template set down by women's magazines for decades. "The lack of evolution is disappointing to me," said Caterina Fake, one of the founders of Flickr.com. Back in 1996, it was going to be this brave new world where women were finally going to take control of their stories, and to me, it is often more a crushing sameness. Even so, she is unsurprised that in an era built on communities of interest, women are on the rise. It is a rule of Web development that if you want a vital community, it has to start with women. It is just a higher level of discourse and behavior. If a site starts male, it stays male. After so many years of being on the wrong end of what (male) media executives choose to dish up, women have taken matters into their own able hands. So far, it's a shallow revolution, but one that carries deep implications.