Writing on the salon.com website, Janelle Brown argues that online content has dumbed down to the level of newsstand glossies.
'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,' she writes.
She believes women's websites have been forced by economic realities to rethink their intention to offer more intelligent content than the glossies.
When they were launched the sites 'shone as tiny post-feminist havens, modelling themselves after general interest magazines but with a heavy emphasis on community and more politicised content'.
She notes that now some of the most popular sites 'are merely online versions of the old magazine rack standbys.'
Love compatibility calculators, diet plans, humiliating-moment confessionals and horoscopes now dominate their content. she says. 'It seems the most brilliant women in the world love a little fluff.'
'It is, perhaps, not fair to blame women's media for a revolution that didn't happen,' she adds. 'Maybe there weren't more than a handful of women who really wanted it in the first place.'
Janelle Brown herself came under fire when the influential commentator and online editor Amy Grahan joined the debate.
Writing on her E-Media Tidbits weblog, she says that Janelle Brown has 'swallowed' the classic cover-up tale from publishers by saying that fluff is what the readers want.
Advertisers, she writes, have notoriously been scared of content that 'doesn't wholeheartedly reinforce virtual enslavement to consumer culture'. They therefore exert indirect control of content and this problem, she claims, is a taboo in the publishing industry.
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