There are so many dead wives and girlfriends that the Writers Guild would make a serial killer envious. From "The Godfather" to "The Crow" the roads of Hollywoods are lined with the gravestones of Wives. If it's to inspire laughter, such as "Jack and Sarah", or madness, such as "Leathal Weapon", there's a simple rule in Hollywood; "if you're stuck, knock her off".

Was it always this way? It seems that, before the Kill-The-Girl method of writing came into vogue, the Greeks and Romans preferred knocking off the father figure as the centre of a good story line. The Greek tradition of God after God cutting off Dad's balls and burying them in the backyard had a perfectly good track record. But somewhere along the lines it grew boring and the poet's pen turned to the weaker sex for their plot-inspiring victims.

Slowly the theme crept from books to cinema and finally to the Web. Yes! A simple Google search will reveal over 1,000,000 hits on a search for "Dead Wife". There's gloriously insipid fiction, "latest fad" poetry, "Is your wife dead or not?" and of course dead wife jokes. And this doesn't include a search on dead girlfriends and de factos.

Where are we heading in all this? Luckily the first truly expansive and interactive Web game was based on the death of a man, Evic Chan. But how quickly will this turn so that we're presented with a hundred different sites all asking the same question: "Who killed Evan Chan's Wife"?

It's for that reason and that reason alone I make the plea... Stop the killing! Stop this senseless waste of fictional female characters. Give the

women some room to breathe, some room to grow, to develop into a full blooded character instead of a plot device. Liberate your female characters from the body bag and put them back in the limelight so they can marry their sons just like in the good old days.

It's time to stop treating women like corpses and return them to the role of sexual object where they belong. Then maybe we'll finally be able to see a bit of action on screen, instead of bloke after bloke running around in a sexually frustrated lust for revenge upon the person who took away their old ball'n'chain.

After years of taking women away from you male characters, it's time to give them back. On their back, preferably.