The Orange Prize - and the Blue?

Like many, I suspect, I find it hard to justify the Orange Prize for women's writing. When two out of every three purchasers of novels are female, when women win literary prize after international award on their own merits, do they need a ghetto of their own? If the Orange Prize were an old tradition, if it were the only prize of its sort, then there might be some inherited kudos and merit there, but there are numerous other equally - or rather unequally restrictive awards too.

We also have Mslexia, a whole magazine dedicated to women having a second bite of the cherry. Ruth Rendell has commented that women need no such restrictive prizes and that the Orange Prize should be opened up or abolished.

As I find I read a lot of books by women, perhaps it's the crap male writers who need sorting out by being given a special prize (the Blue Prize for the best book by a male writer, maybe) and a leg-up magazine, possibly UnderWrite, for the poor little darlings to show off their best efforts (bless 'em).