Chick Lit: You know that section in the bookshop all the men seem to give a wide berth, full of covers sporting bright colors, flowers, high heels, and handbags?
Yeah, that one. The label “Chick Lit” comes with an air of illegitimacy, of low quality, a kindergarten-level eww-girls-have-cooties kind of disgust. If classic literature is a well-balanced meal, chick lit is a slice of chocolate cake: maybe fun while it’s going down, but lacking any substance or real nourishment. Literature is for everyone. Chick lit is only for silly women with bad taste.
But is this a fair assessment or just snobbery? And what exactly does it take to get a book labeled “chick lit?”
A quick browsing of the popular books listed in the category on GoodReads reveals books such as The Devil Wears Prada, My Sister’s Keeper, The Help, and Fifty Shades of Grey, and that’s without leaving the first page. These books are worlds apart in tone as well as subject matter, seemingly connected only by the fact that they all contain female characters doing things and having feelings. For shame!
What warrants that label on these particular books?
Let’s take The Help, for example. The fact that anyone has tagged it as chick lit is, at best, confusing to me. The Help takes place in 1962 and revolves around Skeeter and her journalistic project: getting the stories of black women working as maids to wealthy white families in the rural south. Skeeter wants to help give these largely ignored women a voice. This book has faced plenty of criticism for its treatment of race, and I’m not dismissing that, nor am I really going to address it here. Roxane Gay explores this issue far better than I could in Bad Feminist. But the point here is not whether or not it’s a good book or whether Katheryn Stockett handled racial issues with appropriate sensitivity. The point is that there’s something that feels insidious about a person reading a book about racial relations in the south in 1962 and, because the main characters were female, walking away with the message that this is a book for women.
Let’s move on to My Sister’s Keeper. Again, this book touches on some really heavy issues, including a dying child and how a family grapples with the issue of bodily autonomy of the healthy sister who has continually been pushed into transfusions to help keep her alive. This is a book that demands that we ask difficult ethical questions. Again, why is this designated as only for women?
Chick lit is a category so nebulous as to be almost meaningless, but it seems that often what is meant by the label is something along the lines of: “a book which is lighthearted and perhaps a bit trivial while also committing the mortal sin of being girly; probably contains romance.” This just seems a bit odd to me. Men write fluffy, self-indulgent books with little to no substance all the time (I’m looking at you, Ernest Cline) and we don’t relegate them to their own separate sub-genre for it. And for the record, there’s nothing inherently wrong with fluffy, self-indulgent books. We all read them sometimes, and they’re fun. We can’t spend all of our time reading stuffy literature that grapples with heavy philosophical issues.
But when one actually takes the time to browse which books are being labeled as chick lit, it seems that anything marketed to women is fair game, and there is no truly analogous category when it comes to media that men consume.
What it comes down to is that it’s taken for granted that women will be willing to consume media about men, while the reverse is not true. Men write about their emotional journey and they’ve written about “the human condition.” Women write about their emotional journey and it’s “chick lit.” Men’s work is universal because men are the default. Women’s work is a sub-genre unless those women bend over backwards to be marketable to men.
There are some lovely books that a lot of readers will never touch because the publishers saw a female author writing about a female character, slapped a flowery cover on it, labeled it “chick lit” and called it a day. It’s time to drop our assumptions about a sub-genre when it’s become so broad as to have room for both The Help and Fifty Shades. It’s okay to give chick lit a chance. I promise, the books don’t have cooties.
This post is so true! And the notion that “chick-lit” is inherently bad is just infuriating.
My uni did a module about children’s fiction; what and how kids read and what grabs and keeps children’s attention in books. The same problem surfaced in these lectures; girls read books with male protagonists all the time, but boys very rarely want to read books about girls.. truth be told, it’s sad when grown men won’t read a book simply because it is apparently “chick-lit” and little boys don’t want to read about girl main characters. This only means that they’re missing out on so many wonderful stories! sorry for the long comment, ha ha, your post just got me a bit invested and carried away x
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Yes! The divide on this starts so early. And honestly, a lot of those books would probably be so beneficial to little boys; boys are taught so early to suppress a lot of emotions, and I feel like female-centric stories are a lot more likely to deal with healthy expression of emotion.
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Nice post! I read chick lit from time to time and I don’t think Fifty Shades is chick lit.
I tried to submit a book review to my newspaper and one person editing it had never heard of that term before.
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I agree Fifty Shades doesn’t seem to fit, but people increasingly seem to lump all erotica in with chick lit, and I’ve found Fifty Shades listed as such more than once. When the term was new, it seems like it meant something far more specific, but now it’s like anything remotely “girly” gets that label.
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That’s surprising! I’ve never seen it on a Goodreads list or anything but then again I automatically write it off.
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YESSSS! I agree with you so much! Chick lit should stop getting such bad reputation. Bad books exist in each genre and it’s not a specific genre that’s bad.
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Great post- you’re right about so many books simply being written off as chick lit– Not sure about Fifty Shades but I have read some Kinsella (a fair bit actually) and enjoyed it–good fun. Just because something is light and fun doesn’t necessarily make it worthless–after all then we should be watching more serious drama movies and no comedies or light films/
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I was kind of baffled to see Fifty Shades listed under that category, but I guess it goes to show anything with a predominantly female audience gets labeled as such.
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[…] touched on this in my In Defense of Chick Lit post, but there’ something intensely grating about the fact that all categories of humans are […]
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