IN GAL LAND CRIME IS THE DOMINANT FEATURE OF LIFE. IN GUY LAND THE ONLY CRIME IS STUPIDITY.

Lifetime is big on original movies (it recently started a separate, movies-only channel), but a large proportion of those films work one basic plotline: a woman (sometimes with spouse and/or children) is in danger; is she intrepid enough to save herself? Description of “The Accidental Witness”: “A murderer goes after a female attorney when he thinks that she has witnessed one of his killings.” And “Break-In”: “What begins as a leisurely romantic honeymoon in a tropical paradise quickly turns into a tension-filled crisis as intruders break in during the middle of the night and take the honeymooners hostage.” You get the idea: In Gal Land you are never, ever safe.

You are never, ever safe in Guy Land either, but only because you’re not very bright. We learn this from one of Spike’s original shows, “1,000 Ways to Die,” which was introduced in spring 2008 and is still around. The title says it all: Each episode features dramatizations of real-life fatalities that were odd almost beyond imagining. A man driving drunk leans out the window to vomit just as the car is passing a mailbox; head and mailbox collide; head ends up on the ground. A drunk man in Honolulu tries to join in one of those twirling torch dances staged for tourists; he catches fire and burns to death as people applaud, thinking it’s part of the show.

IN GAL LAND THINGS WEIGH MORE THAN THEY DO IN GUY LAND.

By “things” here we mean, basically, “women.” Spike’s shows are full of women who could easily be in Playboy and probably have been: gorgeous in that hourglass way, hair full and perfect. On Lifetime there is “Sherri,” a sitcom introduced last fall starring Sherri Shepherd, who is what is generally called full-figured. There is also “Drop Dead Diva,” in which a thin model who dies young gets sent back to earth but is placed in the body of a large-ish woman played by Brooke Elliott.

Plump women are almost never seen on Spike, and hotties are almost never seen on Lifetime. It’s a tough call as to which is the more cynical ploy: brazenly playing to a female audience that probably could stand to lose a few pounds or shamelessly playing to a male audience that likes to fantasize about women more gorgeous than actually exist in real life.

But if women weigh more on Lifetime, so do their brains. The title character in “Sherri,” for instance, is smart, and the show is witty enough that it could play in network prime time. The women on Spike are roughly as bright as the ones in “Jersey Shore,” and the shows are often written for men whose sense of humor never made it out of junior high.