I've tried ignoring them or just being slightly bemused by their ubiquitousness, but I've finally realised that I'm sick of cupcakes. They're everywhere, with their candy colours, inch-thick icing and red-velvet sponge.

Any time a colleague has a birthday or leaves for a new job, we have cupcakes in the office. My daily commute takes me past a bakery better known as New York's prime purveyor of cupcakes. A house guest just left us with a large box of bonbon-sized cupcakes that say they were baked by someone called Melissa. (I think it's more likely Melissa is now living a life of luxury in a Miami Beach condo on the proceeds of her cupcake empire, rather than licking actual cake-mix off her elegant fingers.) Even my daughter likes to bake cupcakes, which is worst of all, because then I have to really like them.

So, what's my problem, you ask: what's not to like about cupcakes? After all, they're pretty, sweet and delicious – a charming indulgence.

Well, I'm not so charmed. I get that they're supposed to be beautiful, artful amuse-gueles. But really, they're only artistic if your idea of aesthetic achievement stretches to artisanal M&Ms. They're not pretty so much as prettified.

But I also get that I'm not their target market. Cupcakes seem designed to appeal, in the main, to young women. They are glossy lifestyle accessories for the post-Sex and the City generation. And with prices to match: in some of the fancier establishments, they're $3-4 (approximately £2.50) for a single cake, or $1 a pop for a bite-size mini.

Cupcakes look absolutely fabulous, of course … in photographs, on e-commerce sites, in shop windows and in expensively beribboned boxes. But have you ever managed to eat one without either getting frosting on your nose or ending up with sticky slime between your fingers? They're the edible equivalent of ultra-fashiony high heels: great to look at, ridiculously impractical.

And like heels, borderline masochistic. Why? Because cupcakes are very obviously a terrible food choice.

Now, anyone who knows me and my industrial-scale chocolate habit will be ready to yell "hypocrite" here. But I'm not preaching abstinence from treats. What irks me about cupcakes is that, for their implied young female, figure-conscious, on-off dieting customers, they set up this horrible dynamic of enabling indulgence in a forbidden object.

You know what cupcakes really are? – butter-iced snares of self-loathing that sell precisely because they exploit young women's insecurity about their looks and identity, and offer a completely false and self-defeating solace of temporary gratification, almost certainly followed by remorse and disgust.

They're just cakes, you say. Ah, but they're not just cakes: like any cultural artefact, they have implicit values baked in. And the values I see in cupcakes are of a demeaning, self-trivialising sort of hyper-femininity. This is where I start to sound like the worst kind of moralising Puritan killjoy, but it's just really hard for me to believe that serious, self-respecting adult women would be at all susceptible to this gooey, sickly-sweet embodiment of female wish-fulfilment.

I don't want to ban cupcakes; cupcakes have their place. I just wish they weren't so in my face.