need, it is soft-core emotional porn for the frustrated housewife" (155). Like Haskell, Mary Ann Doane argued that the only pleasures offered by the woman's film were Index a Cunt osearchh Index s List a Cunt c Index i Cunt o List n+porn+histort+1850-1980+picsi Cunt tr Class +search8 Index 0 Bodysensualchicks 1 Cunt 8+ Bodysensualchicks i List sLsearchsporn+histort+1850-1980+pics mas·och·ism  
n.
1. The deriving of sexual gratification, or the tendency to derive sexual gratification, from being physically or emotionally abused.

2. . She claimed that the films presented the female protagonist as an object of male desire, promoting the female audience's identification with her as passive object, rather than active agent, of desire. Jeanine Basinger countered that the woman's film operated out of a paradox: "It both held women in social bondage and released them into a dream of potency and freedom. It drew women in with images of what was lacking in their own lives and sent them home reassured that their own lives were the right thing after all" (6).

More recent writing about the woman's film and its female audience has challenged such views. Pare Cook notes that such arguments "imply that the category of the woman's picture exists in order to dupe female spectators into believing that they are important, while subtly marginalizing and disempowering them" (229). Instead, she and others have suggested that cinema offers women (and men) more complex possibilities for identification. Judith Mayne, for example, has rejected the idea that spectators are seeking to identify with those most like them. Instead, "spectators may experience the thrill of reinventing themselves rather than simply having their social identities or positions bolstered" (Cook 234). It is unlikely, then, that chick-flick viewers presume they are or can become Julia Roberts or Renee Zellweger. In part, they take pleasure in the obvious difference between themselves and the women on the screen, just as women of earlier eras gravitated toward the glamour of Hollywood stars, who served as unreal, transcendent figures of desirability and femininity. In her study of British women's reactions to Hollywood films of the 1940s and '50s, Jackie Stacey found that "the cinema [...] was remembered as offering spectators the chance to be part of another world and participate in its glamour in contrast to their own lives" (116).

Several recent chick flicks even take an ironic stance on overly simple theories of identification. Down with Love (2003), for example, a tongue-incheek homage to the films of Doris Day and Rock Hudson, consciously distanced itself from contemporary fashion with its retro '60s art design, and even from contemporary sexual politics, with its campy send-up of a world of "playboys" and sexy stewardesses. Instead, viewers were invited to revel in the distance, credited perhaps with additional knowledge of Hudson's homosexuality which made any pretense to real romance between the film couple a joked. (22)

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The pleasure women take in chick flicks is not, it should also be noted, a purely self-centered or solitary one. Like shopping, going to the movies is often an experience women share, rather than pursue individually. The chick flick Sleepless in Seattle (1993) emphasizes this collective nature of the chick-flick cinematic experience. The film self-reflexively stages a typical chick-flick viewing: Meg Ryan and Rosie O'Donnell cry together over All Affair to Remember (1957) while sitting next to each other on a sofa eating popcorn in their pajamas pajamas
Noun, pl

US pyjamas

pajamas npl (US) → pijama msg; piyama msg (LAM . (In a companion scene, Rita Wilson tells the plot to her male dining companions, who dismiss it as a "chick movie" and mock her own weepy response by claiming to have cried at the end of The Dirty Dozen.) The shared experience of chick flicks is surely a major contributor to their appeal.

The principle of pleasure clearly complicates some of the more censorious cen·so·ri·ous  
adj.
1. Tending to censure; highly critical.

2. Expressing censure.


[Latin c  views of chick flicks. Reactions are polarized and reflect more general and entrenched divisions in response to popular culture. On one side are Marxists including members of the Frankfurt School, such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who criticized the "culture industry" for cranking out products for profit and inspiring passivity rather than resistance to capitalism. On the other are those such as John Fiske who stress the power of the audience to interpret media texts and create alternative or resistant readings. We would argue that positions in between such readings are not only possible but preferable given the increased complexity of contemporary culture in a late capitalist society. If chick flicks are influencing female viewers to accept rather than resist the societal conventions that restrict them, then surely such films are open to censure. But given the complexities of spectatorship and psychology found in response to the woman's film, it is just as likely that chick flicks allow women to enjoy imaginative possibilities or to indulge in vicarious experience that assists them in returning to the challenges that face them. In fact, it's only fair to note that in this heyday of postfeminist chick flicks, the number and percentage of women attending college, graduate schools, and professional schools continues to climb. (23)

Women's complex negotiation with film may explain, in part, the range of films commonly designated as chick flicks. Some, such as Bridget Jones's Diary, stress the audience's identification with an ordinary working girl, seeking love and companionship in contemporary London while sidestepping the intrusions of her family and relying instead on her friends for support. Others, such as Gone with the Wind (1939), present female characters far removed from the daily grind, offering escapist fantasies of fulfillment.

Considering chick flicks as a group emphasizes the fluidity of generic classification. Chick flicks do not clearly align themselves with any particular genre. Certainly some contemporary chick flicks can be traced back to 1930s and '40s woman's films. Although these films cannot be tied to a single genre themselves, those most often cited as "classic" woman's films--films such as Dark Victory (1939), Rebecca, Now, Voyager (1942), and Mildred Pierce (1945)--are all melodramas. The origins, then, of at least one type of chick flick may be found here: the melodramatic woman's film may well be the source of chick-flick "weepies" such as Terms of Endearment en·dear·ment  
n.
1. The act of endearing.

2. An expression of affection, such as a caress.

endearment
Noun

an affectionate word or phrase

Noun 1.  (1983), Beaches (1988), The Hours (2002), and The Notebook (2004).

The woman's film cannot, on the other hand, be considered the source of chickflick romantic comedies, such as Four Weddings and a Funeral or French Kiss (1995). Seeking the roots of these films, we need to look to another early film genre, the screwball screw·ball  
n.
1. Baseball A pitched ball that curves in the direction opposite to that of a normal curve ball.

2. Slang An eccentric, impulsively whimsical, or irrational person.

adj.  comedy. Early romantic comedies such as It Happened One Night and Bringing Up Baby Bringing Up Baby, starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, is a 1938 screwball comedy telling the story of a scientist winding up in various predicaments involving a woman with a unique sense of logic and a leopard named Baby.