What I have learned from dozens of chick flicks(1/2)

With the release of the trailer for "Barbie," the expectations of rom-com moviegoers, including myself, have been ignited. From the trailer, it's evident that it's a story about "Barbie coming to the real world." It showcases some details of Barbie's world that may seem unreasonable from an adult's perspective, like Barbie's feet never touching the ground.

As a romantic-comedy movie enthusiast, I learned what a chick flick is after watching dozens of them. At one point, these chick flicks shaped my values and definitions of various aspects of women's lives. I learned about women's love lives, fashion, career perspectives, and outlook on life through these chick flicks. Even though I had never been to the United States, "Mean Girls" told me what high school students in America do. At an age when I was still pondering if premarital sex was acceptable, "Bridget Jones's Diary" showed me that women could have sex with two men simultaneously without being condemned. Before I even started working, "The Devil Wears Prada" taught me that being a magazine editor in a fashion magazine was an aspiration for countless women.

However, when I grew up and started experiencing love and work, I realized that chick flicks were like ice cream. They are lovely and sweet but far from the realities of life. Not every woman's life can be redeemed through a beautiful love story, and working is far from just donning different outfits every day and helping the boss with trivial matters. Therefore, I once thought that chick flicks created a world that deceived me, and the romanticization of love and life in them obscured the difficulties that women faced in real life. However, even after realizing the reality, I still occasionally watch a romantic-comedy movie, such as "Emma" starring Anya Taylor-Joy, and enjoy a couple of hours of leisurely and happy time.

Moreover, I have found that with the changes in feminist discussions over the years, chick flicks and other similar movies have undergone many changes. The female protagonists are no longer all blond beauties, and love is no longer the main theme. Today, I want to discuss the characteristics of chick flicks before and after 2008 and try to provide a sociological analysis and explanation for these changes.

What kind of movies are considered chick flicks?

The meaning of the word "Chick" is worth pondering. Initially, it referred to chicks, birds, and later became a term for children, finally becoming an additional meaning for women. In the evolution of this term, we can see the traditional image of women, which is similar to chicks and children, a creature that needs protection, just like a chick that needs to nestle in a mother hen's bosom, with no resistance to the outside world.

So it's not surprising that the phrase “chick flick” originally meant a sexually explicit movie. The late 1980s brought about the term "chick flick" as we now know it, which became synonymous with romantic comedies in the mid-1990s. The earliest known use of the phrase, from the Bergen County Record in 1988, described movies with heavy erotic elements.

From a feminist perspective, using "Chick" to refer to women is undoubtedly discriminatory. This word dilutes women's self-awareness and defines women as silent, weak, and subject to male-dominated culture. However, from the perspective of the development of commercial films, this word also reflects the response of the commercial film market to the needs of female consumers.

During the early days of the commercial film industry, the primary consumer group consisted mainly of men. The films produced for these audiences featured male protagonists who explored society and the universe, pursued personal or family success, and engaged in fights and competition. Female audiences had unique and different life experiences that prevented them from entirely identifying with the male protagonist's perspective in these types of films. However, due to their social status and purchasing power, women's preferences have not become the main driving force behind the types of commercial films produced. Such situations began to change after the end of World War II.

World War II is often considered a turning point for American women's employment. During this period, a large number of women entered the workforce, gaining some degree of independent consumption decision-making power. Their specific needs for movies gradually formed a force that drove the commercial film market to produce films that met their tastes and demands. As a result, the earliest chick flicks were born in the 1960s, with "Breakfast at Tiffany's" starring Audrey Hepburn in 1961 being the earliest recognized Chick flick.

The movie "Breakfast at Tiffany's" showcases the main characteristics of chick flicks. The female protagonist is typically young, beautiful, and fashionably dressed. She desires a beautiful love story, regardless of wealth or poverty, and struggles to find happiness in the city. Eventually, she experiences twists and turns to obtain a beautiful love story. "Breakfast at Tiffany's" achieved commercial success, earning $14 million on a $2.5 million budget. This success led to romantic comedies becoming an indispensable and lasting force in Hollywood's film industry. In the new century, "Bridget Jones's Diary," adapted from a best-selling novel, had a budget of $26 million and grossed $280 million worldwide, once again demonstrating the powerful vitality of romantic comedies.

What are the advantages of chick flicks?

Despite receiving criticism, chick flicks have gradually become a major trend in commercial films due to their ability to create box office miracles with low production costs. As the main audience of chick flicks, I agree with the public's criticism that they can be immature and unrealistic. However, While writing this article, I also realized the positive impact of chick flicks on women's growth. What I personally value the most about chick flicks is that they put women in the center of the movie, giving them subjectivity and emphasizing their self-worth.

Almost all chick flicks follow a similar theme: women face setbacks but ultimately achieve personal goals by transforming themselves. Through this journey, women discover themselves, find love and friendship, and exhibit confidence, courage, and kindness, breaking away from the passive and weak female characters of past films. For instance, Mia in The Princess Diaries demonstrates a strong sense of responsibility for her own destiny, Elle in Legally Blonde showcases her intelligence and bravery in challenging stereotypes, and Viola in She's the Man displays her resilience and vitality. These women are the main protagonists of their own stories, and the male characters in the film complement their narratives rather than overtaking them as the central focus.

Placing women at the forefront of a story is groundbreaking, whether in literary works or commercial films. As Virginia Woolf stated in "A Room of One's Own": "For centuries, the role of women has been a mirror that reflects the figure of man at twice its natural size." Society has established a set of rules that stifle women's creativity and promote the false ideas of their fragility, stupidity, and incompetence.Over time, these stereotypes have become a hard mask embedded in women's life. External reality has challenged women's survival skills, and society's harsh reality has constantly shattered their fantasies of an ideal life. Women have gradually become supporting characters in stories, reduced to mere tools for shaping men's personalities and charm. Their true dilemmas and desires are undervalued and unexpressed, often distorted or concealed by male narrators.

Therefore, chick flicks have a positive role in reshaping and affirming women's desires. Whether it's the desire for love and friendship or the desire for sex and money, these desires are all part of human nature, and women have the right to showcase and satisfy them in their own way.

Movies like Easy A, Mean Girls, and Clueless depict the peer pressure faced by high school girls and show their growth path as they seek to integrate into the collective in order to gain identity recognition. Meanwhile, chick flicks as Pretty Woman, Sex and the City, and even Magic Mike affirm women's attitudes towards sex and money. And movies like Pride and Prejudice, Little Women, and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants make positive depictions of women's friendships and sisiterhood.

For me personally, it is very important to see women's friendships depicted in chick flicks. This is because in the environment where I grew up, traditional concepts have a skeptical and contemptuous attitude towards women's friendships. Unlike male friendships, which have been sanctified since the time of Plato, women's natural tendency towards jealousy in traditional culture has led to competition for men and jealousy towards one another. As a result, women's friendships are often viewed as less noble, sacred, serious, and powerful than male friendships.

Even though the struggles between men are often the most brutal, there is a seriousness in this cruelty that sets them apart from the emotional struggles of women over men and small benefits. Therefore, when we see a group of female friends around the female lead in chick flicks, we subconsciously gain more confidence in women's friendships. In other words, chick flicks play a positive role in constructing a positive concept of sisterhood. This also forms an intertextuality with the current feminist social consciousness trend of "girls help girls."

In summary, putting women at the center, affirming women's subjectivity, affirming women's self-worth and inner desires, and making positive depictions of women's friendship are all advantages of chick flicks as a movie type. But after more than thirty years of repetition, these advantages are not enough to make modern audiences ignore the limitations of chick flicks. Especially when we use queer theory to re-examine all constructed gender and identity concepts, the limitations of chick flicks are particularly evident. The most commonly mentioned question is: why are movies aimed at guys just "movies," and movies aimed at women are "chick flicks?"

Next, let's talk about the limitations of chick flicks and the changes that have occurred in chick flicks since 2008. Click Here to read What I Have Learned from Dozens of Chick Flicks (2/2)