There’s a disturbing trend happening in cable specialty channels: they’re being rebranded to appeal to adult women:

• TLC, the U.S. network formerly known as The Learning Channel, gave up all pretense of educating people and is now a female-centric lifestyle channel running Jon & Kate Plus Eight
• Scream, the horror movie channel, was rebranded by Corus as Dusk. It includes more “paranormal” content to broaden its appeal and get more women watching.
• CLT, Canadian Learning Television, was shelved by Corus in favour of VIVA, the network for “boomer women”.

The latest blow came this week as Corus (notice a pattern here?) let it be known that it is rebranding almost-porn network SexTV as “W movies”, starting Nov. 1.

I realize video pornography is easy to acquire these days, but Corus seems to think it needs to change all its specialty channels into women’s channels to appeal to the advertiser-rich demographic. Meanwhile, those of us (male or female) who don’t fit into that stereotype get left behind.

We’ve lost education, horror and sex. What’s next? Will they replace MANswers with Womanswers? Start up the Discovery Emotions channel? Have OUTtv broadcast nothing but Queer Eye for the Straight Guy?

Something must be done to halt the assault on our television.