Recently, Virginia Tech released a study claiming chick lit badly influences body image.
In the study, researchers took passages from two novels, – Emily Giffin’s “Something Borrowed” and Laura Jensen Walker’s “Dreaming in Black and White” and changed the character descriptions to various heights and weights.
The researchers found readers’ self-esteem plummeted when they read the passages with lower body weights and when the characters’ expressed low self-esteem.
Here’s the thing. I’ve read a lot of so-called “chick lit.” Not once have I heard a character mentioned of below average body weight, and rarely have I even heard a character’s size mentioned without immediate commentary on the way society views size.
I am sure books exist which may portray body dysmorphia without critiquing it, but many more exist which simply portray the pressures on women to be thin in an honest and critical manner. This also means the reader who begins a book reading about a character worried about losing weight will often find that same character has addressed that challenge in some way by the end of the book.
Counter to the logistical problems with the conclusion of the study is the question of what in the world “chick lit” is anyway. The term gained popularity in the 90s after Bridget Jones gained immense popularity, and even then was not very well defined.
Now, “chick lit” seems to mean either “stuff that is packaged in pink with trite bylines” or simply “stuff that’s written by women, about women, for women.”
No matter what it’s defined as, the term is rarely used as a compliment, instead becoming a catch-all term used to label certain books as sub-par simply because they portray the experiences of women.
If we need proof that the quality of these stories bear little relation to the “chick lit” marketing publishers are pushing on them, we need look no further than our very own Barnes & Noble. Search any classic novel written by a woman on Google Images, and you will probably find that it has recently been “chick litified,” bearing a pastel cover, maybe with an image of a hot dress on the front.
These novels are not “trash,” but they do have a lot in common with the modern novels which also bear these covers: they were written by, for and about women, often as honest critiques of the challenges the average woman faces.
Likewise, Marvel has recently released a “chick lit” line of comics about She-Hulk and Rogue with bright colors and descriptions like “climbing the corporate ladder by day and battling villains and saving the world by night – all while trying to navigate the dating world to find a Mr. Right who might not mind a sometimes very big and green girlfriend.” My question to the publishers and critics of these comics is what exactly makes this storyline different from every other superhero storyline on the market?
Clark Kent and Spider-man juggle ordinary life with their superhero identities all the time, but we don’t see descriptions like this about them.
All of these things point to the conclusion that the marketing makes a genre but the content.
Creating a category for women’s writing which denigrates it is just a bad idea. Many chick lit novels are not light or frivolous, but tackle real issues in thought-provoking ways. But even if they were all light-hearted, what’s so bad about that anyway? Using contemporary voices and pop culture references do not make a book useless.
Sometimes we just need something relatable to read on the beach. These books don’t need to last 10 years to make a difference. All they need to do is portray our society honestly and give women a space to understand themselves and their generation.
The term “chick lit” probably isn’t going away anytime soon. But in the meantime, we can refuse to judge books by their covers, read broadly and refuse to allow critics make us feel bad for doing it.