Let’s be honest: rock’n’roll is like the fire brigade, still a male preserve. What women have instead is hormone rock — one clever girl, an acoustic guitar and not too much banging and crashing. Soothing, like a pasta bake or a Radox bath, or emotional, like the end of your favourite feelgood TV series, this is girlfriend music (and it comes as no surprise that many hormone rockers made their names with standout tracks at the end of glossy television series such as The OC).

Over the past few years, the grizzly A&R men have unleashed a wave of hormone rockers upon us, and now, the charts are awash with them, ranging from the essential to the instantly forgettable. If there were a hormone-rock pyramid, then Beth Orton and Martha Wainwright would be at the top: clever, uncompromising, subversive poets who are essentially punk in ways that Vicious and Rotten were never clever enough to articulate. It goes on down, through Fiona Apple, Amy Winehouse, KT Tunstall, Corinne Bailey Rae, Natasha Bedingfield (hormone rock with pop marketing), Jewel and, of course, Dido, who, with her 22m album sales, can justly claim to be the mother of them all. Following behind are her many gentle-breathed friends: Rachael Yamagata, Imogen Heap, Julie Feeney, Gemma Hayes, Sophie Solomon, Katie Melua, Jem (another Jemma, at least this time trying to punk up her home counties moniker), all names that sound more suited to prefects or captains of the lax team. But you can be as rude as you like about them and their wholemeal tales of everyday feminine angst, because these ladies ain’t going away.

Rock’n’roll is the musical embodiment of maleness. It’s one of the reasons women get penis envy — it looks a lot of fun. It’s about vanity, anger and nihilism (unless you’re Bono); it’s ugly things like a gas-guzzling car, a pub fight, a one-track mind. Women who play rock’n’roll are often sexy and aggressive, but, ultimately, are not representative of their sex in general. Is Courtney Love like your sister? Is Patti Smith like your mum?

Hormone rock is rock with the cock taken out, and it’s what a lot of women want to listen to right now. Women left alone with their more tormenting attributes don’t start wars. They moan, cry, bitch, go shopping; they’re anxious, neurotic, put-upon, argumentative, manipulative, analytical and brooding. These are all aspects to femaleness that none of us feels enamoured of, but they are unquestionably an essential aspect of ourselves. Rachael Yamagata’s Worn Me Down inspires thoughts of yellow rubber gloves and tired women with hollow eyes, let down again by a feckless man, on their knees scrubbing the kitchen floor of their minds. Beth Orton sings, “I’ve been reeling home, A broken shopping trolley” and Amy Winehouse, on What Is It About Men, casts herself as the passive victim: “I’m nurturing, I just wanna do my thing and I’ll take the wrong man as naturally as I sing.”

Hormone rock is nice tunes, gentle feelings, making love, no sex, please. And the rockers themselves are not exactly high-octane personality fests — they’re even a bit boring. Natasha Bedingfield has sold three times the number of albums Charlotte Church has, but nobody wants to know what drinks she’s slamming before she collapses onto the floor of a nightclub. A recent review of a Jem gig wound up with the words: “A more fundamental drawback was her humility, and general, well, niceness.”

Unlike the words of the Dido song, the hormone rocker’s life is not for rent. A quick ring-round of the mostly female press officers, trying to get these women a profile, elicits a uniform fondness and respect for the artists mentioned here. One press officer described the average night with her male guitar bands as effing and blinding and boredom, while dinner with her female singer-songwriters is interesting and intelligent. But when it comes to getting publicity: “She’s a nightmare to sell. The female singer-songwriter is doomed to be seen as a lesbian or just boring.” Getting people interested is “a challenge” or “depressing”.

The nature of celebrity is such that we only want people we can look up to and/or look down on, and the hormone rocker is not that different from us, coming across as a bit nutty, swotty, nerdy and riddled with faults — the polar opposite of the breasty, f***wit pop puppet. If it came out that, like Stevie Nicks, Corinne Bailey Rae was not a happily married, nice person, but a wild she-wolf who liked nothing better than having cocaine blown where the sun don’t shine, would we think her hormone rock was more credible? Probably not.

Maybe “not sensational” is what women want. Interviews with hormone rockers are not about sex, drugs and fighting, but embarrassment, heartbreak and neurosis. I can read that in my own diary. They don’t tell you to go out there and party, they tell you to turn the tap off while cleaning your teeth for the sake of the planet, or that they love hiking holidays in the Outer Hebrides. Hormone rockers are sold as one up from Friends’ Phoebe with her guitar, singing Smelly Cat. In a postfeminist world, where the Pussycat Dolls, Jenna Jameson and Dita Von Teese are considered ersatz campaigners for the rights of women, the hormone rockers are veritable Wollstonecrafts.

The prevalence of hormone rock right now means record labels are signing artists with a stronger female voice. If only all the ladies could “disregard their limits”, as KT Tunstall decreed when she picked up her Brit award, our time in the rock spotlight could become credible. Martha Wainwright’s Bloody Motherf***ing Arsehole is a good starting point for a new school of female rock. All we have to do now is buy into it.

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