Tell me, young women of the world: why would you want to become a pop star in 2008? Be a musician, by all means, but a big, sparkling pop commodity, shifting units for your label while the world and its auntie tears you to pieces? As a music writer and card-carrying feminist who’s seen how this world works from the inside, I say this with a heavy heart: I wouldn’t fancy it.

Why not? Well, imagine you’re Lily Allen. On Tuesday a 1,800-word article about you ran in the Daily Mail. In it, Alison Boshoff talked about you at the Cannes Film Festival, “courting publicity and disaster with equal ardour: stripping off, getting drunk and falling over”. You were swimming topless, taking advantage of free booze at a party and leaning your smiling head on a table, but no matter.

Boshoff’s worries continued. She outlined how “morbidly sensitive” you were about your appearance after your miscarriage, before a Mail sub added some accompanying pictures, captioned with the words “Lily’s showing a bit of tum”. Boshoff fretted about your “platonic friends”, your love of biscuits and how you won’t “admit” that you care. Then, with all the sweetness of a venomous snake, she said: “It’s impossible not to feel concerned.”

Why do our successful, feisty, funny female musicians warrant this unwelcome attention – especially when it veers dizzyingly between concern and criticism? For in the five years since I started writing about pop, this two-faced trend for celebrity concern has expanded and hardened – and it’s the main reason why I set up a website to counter it.

I think back to when I met Lily Allen in May 2006, two months before the release of her debut album, Alright, Still. I was knocked sideways by the freshness and candour of this talented youngster. She was desperate to inspire teenage women to make music, not care about their cellulite and speak up for themselves. Her songs did this, too, exposing terrible boyfriends, laying bare the dull everyday misery of heartbreak. They said such simple, brilliant things as “I want to be able to eat spaghetti bolognese/ And not worry about it for days and days”.

Not long afterwards, I spoke to Amy Winehouse, who’s also been in the papers this week for the YouTube video she made with Pete Doherty. Her second album, Back to Black, had just been released, and she was in the back of a cab talking about “horrible yummy mummies” looking down on the achievements of young girls, and how proud she was about making an album “that said real things about what it was like to be young in 2006”.

That album, inspired by a break-up with an old boyfriend, was refreshingly candid, with its breakthrough single, You Know I’m No Good, detailing a life stained by Tanqueray, tears, chips and pitta. It’s a shame that the boyfriend it referred to – one Blake Fielder-Civil – became the husband who assisted her messy decline.

Both women’s music was revolutionary because it was so candid, real and British, and the media has turned on that for its own ends.

Still, I know what the counter-argument is to all this. These women are in the public eye, after all. In some ways, critics say, they ask for the attention – turning their cash into booze, fags and drugs, which they pour all too eagerly down their young throats. And yes, these women may not be wholly innocent, but they are young, maladjusted and subject to levels of devastating scrutiny that their actions don’t deserve.

Why are they ripped apart with so much more venom than men? Doherty, for instance, is abhorred, but not dissected in such detail. His every facial expression is not picked apart by reporters, and his heartbreak over Kate Moss is a footnote, not an article frontrunner.

My fear is that the treatment of Allen and Winehouse is much more about the media wanting to reduce successful female musicians to their traditional roles. Take a look at the cover of Now magazine this week, its bright neon headlines screaming at us that Lily, Britney and Posh are “desperate for a baby!” These artists aren’t successful people: they’re rubbish wives, gadabout girlfriends, crap mums and failed baby-makers.

It’s all gut-wrenchingly depressing, an object lesson in the way the media undermines the power that these fabulous females have created for themselves.

Yet this is an amazing time for British women in music. In January, Adele and Duffy’s debut albums of soft, polished soul were released, and they have dominated the charts ever since. In March, Estelle defied being dumped by her old record label by bagging a UK chart-topper off her own bat, while the X Factor winner Leona Lewis topped the US charts. Kate Nash’s eccentric pop success in 2007 is encouraging hordes of young women to make fan videos on YouTube, and the inventive folk-lover Laura Marling is being talked about as the big singer-songwriter talent of 2008.

The only boys to do well are derivative gangs of Arctic Monkey wannabes such as Scouting for Girls. Women have become the lifeblood of the music industry.

It’s time for a revolution, I’m saying. First, let’s focus on these musicians’ artistic endeavours and achievements, rather than trot out yet another piece on Amy’s latest chat with Pete or Lily’s most recent beery belch. Second, newspapers and magazines should stop making lazy comparisons between such different female artists all carving their own prestigious paths. And finally, let’s force the Press Complaints Commission to do its job, to enforce its rules on harrassment and to be tougher on character assassinations.

If all this doesn’t happen, we will destroy the feisty female ambassadors that make British pop music great. And that, young women of the world, will be the greatest crime of all.

*Jude Rogers is editor of www.thelipster.com

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