Colleen posted this wonderful article link under my post about Titanic. It starts out with:
To the Young Man on the Plane from Los Angeles to Seattle Who Said of the Movie That Most Passengers -- Male and Female -- Voted to Watch, "I don't watch chick flicks!"
So what exactly is a "chick flick?" I think you and I could probably agree that it has more dialogue than special effects, more relationships than violence, and relies for its suspense on how people live instead of how they die.
I'm not challenging your choice; I'm just questioning the term that encourages it. After all, if you think back to your school days, much of what you were assigned as great literature could have been dismissed as "chick lit." Indeed, the books you read probably only survived because they were written by famous guys.
Think about it: If Anna Karenina had been written by Leah Tolstoy, or The Scarlet Letter by Nancy Hawthorne, or Madame Bovary by Greta Flaubert, or A Doll's House by Henrietta Ibsen, or The Glass Menagerie by (a female) Tennessee Williams, would they have been hailed as universal? Suppose Shakespeare had really been The Dark Lady some people supposed. I bet most of her plays and all of her sonnets would have been dismissed as some Elizabethan version of ye olde "chick lit," only to be resurrected centuries later by stubborn feminist scholars.
Indeed, as long men are taken seriously when they write about the female half of the world -- and women aren't taken seriously when writing about themselves much less about men or male affairs -- the list of Great Authors will be more about power than about talent.
Read the rest of the article HERE
2 comments:
I totally agree. Even now in the twentyfirst century I E-mail a man and he wont bother to reply, but David sends this man the same E-mail and that moron will reply pronto. How infuriating and insulting is that!
There are still a lot of chauvinistic men about. The other day a man was astonished that a woman write scripts!! Hello!!
Monique
I know. It's exasperating. In the early years of my career, psychology was a male dominated profession. I had to do twice the work of a man and do it twice as well. When I won an achievement award at the V.A., bringing with it a hefty raise, I found out that the raise ONLY brought me up to what my male colleagues were already making!
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