"His" and "Hers" DVDs

Since I didn't get to see a movie today, I thought I'd have a whinge instead.  I have a real problem with those "For Him" and "For Her" pages in the DVD catalogues.  You know the ones.  They tend to come out most often at Christmas, Mother's Day, Father's Day etc.  Some genius in the advertising department decides to break up the pages of the movie catalogue according to demographics rather than the typical 'price' or 'newness' (or sometimes 'random collection of junk everyone already owns or would never buy'). This results in in the "For Her" page being limited to rom-coms and weepie dramas, and the "For Him" page being limited to action films and thrillers. Amazing.  It is brilliant that you can tell so much about a person's taste purely from their gender. If only this could be applied to other areas of life so we could neatly box people up based on gender.  Food - women would eat only chocolate and men would only eat steak. Books - Eat Pray Love for the girls and John Grisham for the guys. Drinks - Wine coolers for the girls, beer for the guys.

Okay, I know that there is a higher proportion of women than men that enjoy romantic comedies, and some girls don't like really stupid action movies or gory horror films.  But I know for a fact that I'm not the only girl who enjoys watching a range of film genres, including horror, sci-fi, action and Adam Sandler flicks. All the girls in my circle of friends are up for a good horror flick and don't need to hide behind their husband or boyfriend during the scary bits.  A movie I really enjoyed was "Shoot em Up" - a movie-length gunfight with absolutelly no plot whatsoever.  Please confirm for me that there are even more girls out there that do not limit themselves to rom-coms.

So this raises the question, why do the retailers and marketing hotshots persist with these sexist catalogues?  Do men really need a Big W catalogue to print a "For Her" page to decide they will buy their wife "The Notebook" or "My Sister's Keeper" for Mother's Day?  I'm sure some of those women are really pleased with that gift, but probably not all.  Some might have preferred Transformers 2, or maybe even another gift that you thought of all by yourself that she actually wanted.  It has crossed my mind to write to Target, Big W et al and complain about these catalogues but would this achieve anything?  Maybe I should do it and post what I'm sure will be a polite response....The only time I've been more outraged was when emap (publishers of Empire movie mag who I've been subscribing to for several years) wrote me a letter offering me a special rate on subscriptions to FHM Magazine (lad's mag) since I was such a loyal subscriber to Empire.  The implication being that if you like movies and read Empire you must be a guy!!!!  I never wrote that letter either, I definitely should have...

Of course, the final question this issue raises is exactly which gender is left to enjoy sci-fi films if it's not 'him' or 'her'......