Do Chick Flicks Hate Women?

We stumbled across this hilarious article on Cracked.com entitled “7 Popular ‘Chick Flicks’ That Secretly Hate Women”—and what a loaded title that is!

The writer takes a long, hard look at 7 very popular romantic comedies and why they have underlying themes of misogyny towards the very gender they’re supposed to attract.

The entire list is hysterical but our fave is the brutal recap of the Kate Hudson flick How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days:

By presenting us with a heroine who has the emotional empathy of Josef Mengele, that’s how. This is a character who tortures her fake lover with the subtlety of a sadistic Freddy Krueger/Leatherface/Edward Cullen hybrid; only instead of finger-knifing him in his dreams, chainsawing his face off or psychologically torturing him with her dazzlety, this playa full-on acts like a girl for ten whole days. And in this movie, here’s how a girl acts: she talks during a movie, leaves tampons in his apartment, sings Carly Simon songs, spontaneously becomes a vegetarian, makes her man miss the big game and publicly accuses him of being the source of her eating disorder. Hudson has to learn and fake all of this normal female behavior, since she’s much more special and deeper than the average woman. And we know this because she cares about politics and basketball, not like most women who only care about boys and shoes.

Burn! Oh and fear not—Twilight made the list too, of course!

It’s interesting reading this perspective on a group of “chick flicks” all at the same time. It’s not that these ideas have never crossed our own minds while indulging in the romantic comedy of the moment, but we suppose most people just gloss over it in the assumption that it’s not supposed to be a movie you take seriously anyway.

One has to wonder of course, how many of these movies (and others in the romantic comedy genre) had any women writers at all working on them. Our recent look into the sad lack of female writers in late night TV and a new report stating the same thing about all TV in general make us tend to think no.

Maybe if you’re trying to write movie or television FOR women, it would help to have some more females on board? Or maybe the problem really lies in the attempt to segregate certain movies for women at all. We’re well aware of demographics and why they’re need for marketing issues, but we can’t help but be a tiny bit insulted when you break down the elements of what Hollywood really believes appeals to all women—and the female stereotypes that are presented in most of these movies for us innocent women folk.

But then again, Hollywood also seems to believe men are only interested in dumb, mind-numbing violence and action and talking robots. Maybe we’re all just walking dollar signs to them, men and women alike. Yay equality!