Chick flicks exist in a complicated place today, as the classic ones tend to run rampant with sexism. Still, there’s a sense of nostalgia for the seemingly unpolitical romantic world, as modern movies focus on genuine inequality and hardship more explicitly. In this sense, the chick flick could only exist in a limited space and time — one where sexism was treated lightly and almost ignored — as though it was an issue of the past. That was the era of neoliberalism, where capitalist sensibilities invaded progressive ideas and informed the mainstream that systematic issues were long gone and that the problems rested on the shoulders of individuals.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the second-wave feminist movement pushed for legalizing abortion, expanding birth control, and passing the Equal Pay Act to ensure women were paid equally for the same work as men. In addition, Title IX prohibited federal funds from going to places that discriminated against gender, but as the 1980s came, so did Ronald Reagan. The Republican president pushed against welfare and emphasized the need for individualism. He isolated the Black community with the war on drugs and the LGBTQ community by avoiding confronting the AIDS crisis. With Reagan came an onslaught of televangelists and a push rightward that emphasized the nuclear family. While it didn’t completely destroy the work of feminism, mainstream feminism became focused on what had seemingly been already achieved: financial independence and sexual freedom.
To even be able to put a candidate against the world Reagan created, the democratic party had to drastically shift its values to become far more centrist and procapitalist, taking on the stance against welfare. The first post-Reagan Democratic president, Bill Clinton, added policies like Personal Responsibility and the Work Opportunity Act that expanded on policies created by Reagan. This attitude undermined the anti-capitalist thinkers of the feminist movement, such as Andrea Dworkin and Angela Davis, By disarticulating the movements, pushing racism and sexism as different issues, and hindering the progress made.
“Chick Flick” may feel like a useful umbrella term often used to cover comedy films aimed at women. Still, there’s no denying that their heyday seemed confined to the 80s through the 2000s before many of the films aimed at women took on a different definition. Films predating the chick flick were deemed the “woman’s film” by Molly Haskell in her book From Reverence to Rape. These films often focused on women challenging their status as housewives and mothers, with the ultimate lesson of putting them back in the house or condemning them for being bad caregivers. Haskell points out that any film focused on men’s relationships would fall under varying definitions, comedy or psychological thriller, but never “man’s film.” The woman’s films included movies such as The Old Maid, Mildred Pierce, and Stella Dallas.
A vital differentiation came with films aimed at women taking a different turn. In the aftermath of postfeminism came the era of neoliberal feminism. Although they are often confused with each other, neoliberal feminism had a far more explicit capitalist attitude. Often the narratives sideline a love story to encourage explicit participation in capitalism instead.
As outlined by Rosalind Gill, “The term postfeminism came to prominence in the 1990s in the English-speaking world as a way of making sense of the paradoxes and contradictions in the representation of women.” Gill has extensively written on the term alongside scholar Angela McRobbie, whose book The Aftermath of Feminism defines postfeminism as an attitude in media where feminism is taken into account and repudiated simultaneously, with societal assets worked in by feminists. For example, participating in the workforce and having freedom of sexuality.
Frequently, the attitudes of postfeminism ignore that the resentment women have isn’t a consequence of the feminist movement but of capitalism. Women are dissatisfied with the draining capitalistic culture, feeling pressured to keep up with a structure that isn’t humane but a belief that the movement to blame is feminism. The view that women should blame feminism comes from adopting feminism into the mainstream with the dissolution of essential points.
As a facet of media aimed at women, chick flicks are heavily relied on to socialize gender. One of the many examples is these films upholding attitudes toward beauty standards. Typically, the protagonists are portrayed by slender women who enjoy eating what they want, often seeming as though they don’t care how they look and are rather humble, despite being considered gorgeous women. These are characters like Gracie (Sandra Bullock) in Miss Congeniality. Each is slim and pretty without knowing it. All three films feature thin women who openly look down on diet culture and choose to eat as they like while perpetuating that all women on diets aim to conform to a socially accepted body type.
This culture remains pervasive today as people continue to accept that cosmetically improving yourself is a sign of improvement overall. The ideas center around improvement in the eyes of men. Society enforces this by ensuring that these women are desirable characters and are the most dynamic, usually witty or funny. They have to be beautiful but unaware of their beauty and never try to be beautiful. If they’re trying, they break the illusion of the woman who isn’t vapid. These trapping dichotomies are also significant players in the characters’ trajectories throughout the films. Beyond that, the makeover scene in Miss Congeniality relies on the idea that the woman in the makeover chair is ugly and needs transformation. This focus on consumerism as a solution occurs alongside personality modification.
Kathleen Hill Jamison established the gendered double bind in her book Beyond the Double Bind, where she writes about women in politics and the double binds they face. In her essay “Postfeminist Double Binds,” Samantha Senda-Cook frames this in the context of chick flicks utilizing the double binds of “womb/brain” and “femininity/competence.”
These binds divide women’s futures into two mutually exclusive possibilities: family life versus work life and choosing to participate in feminine culture or being intelligent members of society. All enforce the paradoxical nature of chick flicks. Women can choose to be feminine or clever, but if they’re smart, they give up femininity and vice versa. In Miss Congeniality, Gracie begins as a tough and deliberately unfeminine character who undergoes an extreme transformation to compete in a pageant. Once that happens, she also gains a love interest and newfound respect for “womanhood,” but one defined by consumer culture.
The issue with this explicit double bind is that Gracie initially criticizes pageant culture, describing it as anti-feminist. Still, instead of going into the pageant world and gaining a nuanced perspective on why it’s misogynistic, she conflates it to femininity. In the last act, Gracie is asked what she thinks of people who criticize pageants as outdated and anti-feminist, to which she responds:
“Well, I would have to say — I used to be one of them. And then I came here and realized that these women are smart, terrific people who are just trying to make a difference in the world. And we’ve become really good friends. I mean, I know we all secretly hope the other one will trip and fall on her face, and — wait a minute, I’ve already done that! And for me, this experience has been one of the most rewarding and liberating experiences of my life.”
There could be some strength to her pitch on womanhood and friendship if the women around her weren’t incredibly one-dimensional stereotypes. However, they were catty and disliked each other. The Black women were deliberately sassy, while the one Asian character was uptight and cold. They were set dressings instead of people.
Gracie was ultimately a more palatable person for her love interest in her final form. She fulfills a more appealing role by embracing the feminine or engaging in the makeover. Showing the mental transformation enmeshed in the physical transformation helps to avoid the idea that the character’s growth is shallow. She wins a boyfriend and respect in a field where she’s continuously sexually harassed. Gracie’s position in the FBI leaves her frequently targeted for sexual harassment. Rather than ever confronting it, in the singular action of becoming visually appealing and winning respect, she no longer deserves constant harassment.
The “womb/brain” divides the idea of a working woman and a family woman, allowing women to live either a reality where they exist in a maternal role or a career-driven one.
These narratives take many routes. A prominent one is a woman who’s in the workforce but feels isolated or empty as a working woman. She doesn’t realize that she feels unfulfilled by her work until a male love interest enters the picture, in which she sacrifices her career love, or at the very least puts her career on hold.
On the other end, a woman is empowered by joining the workforce. Still, in opposition to the “feminist” in the workforce archetype, she succeeds by being capable of navigating capitalism — which is often tied to consumerism that’s equated to femininity, as represented in films like Legally Blonde and Confessions of a Shopaholic. Reducing the importance of women’s jobs maintains a gender hierarchy perpetuating it as an individual choice. Gill argues that postfeminism narratives use this structure to show gender equality is achieved and that any existing inequalities are viewed as women’s choices or biological differences — ignoring how gender is a concept created from socialization based on sex.
In Baby Boom, there’s an argument for natural desires in the characters. The film follows JC Wyatt (Diane Keaton), an uptight investment banker who notably does not want children. However, she inherits a baby from an estranged cousin and has to take on the responsibilities of a single mother. While she initially struggles to adapt, she starts to bond with the baby and decides to center her life around the child. She gives up her job and pursues living in a country home where she sells homemade applesauce.
Her desire to be a mother is depicted as natural in a way that negates the idea that some women don’t want children. It’s unsurprising to learn that the film came out in the 1980s when the push against feminism sought the return of the nuclear family, but the trend persisted. The central narrative of films that portray women higher in the workplace as undesirable seemingly blames the independence that the feminist movement provided, reaffirming the view that women in the workplace weren’t natural.
Enforcing this narrative supplies work-based narratives with villainous work-driven women such as Miranda in The Devil Wears Prada. The work-driven woman is typically high-powered and portrayed as less desirable due to her status as above or equal to men. These films create villains who are seen as self-centered, missing out on the fulfillment of motherhood or relationships. The broader message blames feminism, asserting that working women negate their proper place in the domestic sphere or a heterosexual relationship.
In her essay, Sende-Cook writes, “By presenting conventional double binds in comical situations and through a postfeminist lens, the films not need even articulate that the women’s careers do not matter; they simply allow audiences to fill that part in.” Characters feel exhausted by their jobs, and their return home isn’t a result of feminine desire but of capitalist exhaustion, but feminism is easy to blame. Feminists are conflated as people wanting women to take on men’s roles, ignoring the nature of the anti-capitalist beliefs of the second-wave feminist movement.
In her establishment of Postfeminism, McRobbie utilizes the famous rom-com Bridget Jones’s Diary to illustrate the nature of postfeminism on screen, pointing out that Bridget isn’t career-minded but knows she should be, and she desires romance. Bridget Jones’s (Renée Zellweger) attitude that feminism was dead created workplace equality and sexual freedom. Still, from there, it was man-hating feminists who shamed desires for family or beauty.
The disarticulation propagated through chick flicks largely relies on the idea that dating and the workplace are an even playing field with zero political connotation. The notion puts a more central agency on women and empowers the idea that a woman’s sexuality can be weaponized. In How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Ben’s (Matthew McConaughey) foes are two women who weaponize their sexuality to win over their boss. Women can weaponize sex to gain what they want and be just as manipulative as men. Workplaces have touches of sexism, but never something that a woman can single-handedly overcome. Women sleeping with their boss to get ahead is a norm, and sexual harassment is a punchline that only operates under the assumption of equal power.
The nature of chick flicks is something we’re now incapable of recreating without backlash. They rely on sexism and characters that simply don’t pass today. It’s hard to watch women-centric comedies in a similar vein, such as Booksmart (2019), that don’t explicitly understand that feminism is not a relic of the past. Despite the often pro-capitalist nature of neoliberal films of the 2010s, they’re usually diverse, and the diversity adds another level of nuanced conversations that chick flicks can’t achieve.
The development of more dynamic, diverse, and queer female characters leaves the world that created and loved the chick flick firmly behind us. Even romantic comedies have petered out as the stories centered on women have expanded, leaving those female characters elsewhere — usually to explore the fallout of the postfeminist era.
