An eerie thing has happened since George W. Bush took office in 2000. Women have vanished from the world’s landscape. Newspaper editorial pages have become male wallpaper, we have apparently been Photoshopped out of pictures unless we’re the spokesmodelactresssinger Jessica Simpson, TV news is filled with male faces, and the political stage is bereft of women to interview, should anyone wish to interview them, which they don’t.

The disastrous war in Iraq is particularly striking, a trillion-dollar video game almost entirely devised by men, fought by men and commented on by men. Condoleezza Rice is a token, and not a bright or honest one; that is why Mr. Bush retains her. We see only Iraqi men interviewed in the street, and this is not simply because Iraqi women have the sense to stay home, but because they are increasingly being fired, hounded out of public places and marginalized to such an extent that some Iraqi women tell reporters on the quiet that life was better under Saddam.

King Fahd’s funeral was all-male. I shan’t miss him or the smug mourners or the moment when the obedient Canadian minister for public safety and internment without trial, Anne McLellan, realized she was the only woman in the room. In the United Arab Emirates, women are allowed to speak only to husbands or relatives. Don’t just blame Arab men. A woman in a burqa isn’t going to be interviewed by a Western TV reporter. Who is she? A voiceless clown, maybe. That’s the purpose of the burqa. What a success it is.

The news is a male fantasy played out. The last time I saw an American female politician get big press was Senator Hillary Clinton demanding regulation of video games because one was found to have women raped and beaten as part of the game. It seems odd to pick on video games, when the beating and killing of flesh-and-blood women is commonplace (murder is the leading cause of death for pregnant American women), but mentioning that would make Ms. Clinton sound like some damn feminist.

Women make up 3.2 billion of the 6.4 billion people on this planet. How did we disappear from view? In Canada, the venom directed at women in the public eye, especially truthful, frank MPs like Carolyn Parrish, is part of the reason women are rare in Parliament. I am thrilled by our new governor-general, Michaëlle Jean, but her job is to be tact incarnate. Men run the media, which may explain why women don’t prosper there.

The list mania, the omnipresent Top 10s, are the most noticeable symptom of the Vanishing Female Pandemic. Lists are good fun. But women are almost never on them. Remember the Greatest Canadian (Man) List? That was so disgraceful that I shrug off grotesqueries like Esquire magazine urging readers to guess the identity of the world’s sexiest woman, with a different body part shown each month. She’s not a woman, she’s a collection of chicken parts. This is thigh month, by the way.

What about the Time magazine cover showing three women who aren’t afraid of turning 50? Bring it on! was the headline, a tasteless use of Mr. Bush’s invitation to Iraqis to attack American soldiers, which they did with tragic success. The implication is that middle-aged women are repellent, but, gosh darn it, these gals can make it on their own.

Women are used to every form of humiliation, but it’s an art form in American magazines.

But we are not used to disappearing. It is as if we are protoplasm. Despite our huge economic power that fuels advertising, publishing, manufacturing, on and endlessly on, it seems that more and more, we do not publicly exist. The Guardian is making a conscious effort to publish more women writers. This year, its summer roundup of celebrity book recommendations was mostly female. I noticed and rejoiced and yet knew it was a one-off even for that newspaper. No one else has even thought to do this.

All this is tragic, although the real tragedy is that no one has pointed it out to a preoccupied, lethargic and despairing public.

But the killer was an article on the BBC News website. Japanese scientists have built the first female android. With skin made of silicon instead of latex or even the plastic of the dolls that men inflate like dinghies for home penetration, she looks so real that I assumed she was one of the scientists. Indeed, the caption emphasizes that the young hipster man on the right, Hiroshi Ishiguro, is the scientist, not the replicant.

She has sensors and motors that make her move, turn and react. She is beautiful. Programmed to follow humans with motion sensors, or to move on her own, she flutters her eyelids, breathes, and has hands that move. Her head is tilted slightly downward with her eyes lowered. She is the last word in submissive females.

It gets worse. She is the second such android built. The first was a five-year-old girl.

The BBC was too polite to ask about whether her genitals are state of the art, or indeed why the Japanese government would finance the engineering of a fake woman and child.

Mr. Ishiguro boasts that he can fool people into thinking she’s real for up to 10 minutes. “Consciously, it is easy to see that she is an android, but unconsciously we react to the android as if she were a woman.” Funny. In the workplace, it’s the opposite. Men react to women as if they were androids.

Women don’t register. They might as well be androids. No wonder 3.2 billion people just vanished from sight. Shut up, bitch, as the new cellphone “PimpTones” say. You’re replaceable.