I do wish Rebecca Traister would stop trying to speak for all women in her articles. She's a great writer, entertaining and intelligent, but doesn't seem to get out much beyond what I imagine to be (and I'd like to be wrong) an incredibly limited social circle. Article after article I find myself wanting to relate to or agree with her about something, but my life experience is just vastly, wildly different than hers.

Chick lit does not record my history, or the history of any of my female friends, or the history of anyone but a small segment of the population. Working in close proximity to an overflowing slush pile, I've learned by picking up book after book that chick lit is exactly what its detractors say it is: formulaic, escapist fluff. Not a bad thing, necessarily, just not representational of reality. Take away its froth, as Rebecca asks us to, and maybe it could stand as a record of somebody's personal emotional history, but if you have to subtract its minutia to make it relevant it can't possibly have any value as a historical record.

I know there are a lot of women out there that enjoy it, and I don't mean to denegrate that at all. Escapism is nothing to be ashamed of, and I've definitely got my own wonderfully trashy methods. To imply that decrying chick lit stems from shame of one's own femininity, however, is to have only the smallest possible view of what femininity encompasses. It would serve Salon well to balance out Rebecca's sweeping generalizations about womankind with someone-- well, different.

People who complain that chick lit bores them and note that they don't read chick lit undermine their own criticism and must immediately be ignored. What defines chick lit anyway? Written by a woman? Starring a woman? Incidentally, I find female characters written by women more likeable and relatable than man-made female protagonists. That's based on a narrow sampling comparing Jane Austen, Helen Fielding and Sparkle Hayter to Tom Robbins, D.H. Lawrence and other men I've forgotten.

The main problem I see with "Chick Lit" is that now any book by a woman about a woman can be considered genre fiction and simply dismissed.

What kind of pressure does it put on serious aspiring writers who happen to be women writing about women? Why are we less imporatant than Michael Cunningham, whos awful books are the worst kind of sentimental, unbelievable crap?

Why is the literary pursuit of a husband deemed pathetic, but the pursuit of a lover by a gay black man considered profound? Why are friendships between women deemed boring, while friendships between men considered to be of the utmost literary importance?

We're all writing about the same thing. But "women writers"--a term that confuses its nouns and adjectives--get stuck with high heels and short skirts on their covers, even when the image bears no realation to the plot.

For the record: I do not live in NY. I do not not own a pair of high heels. I wear Levis, not Prada (I don't actually know what Prada is--a designer?) I do, however, like a good Cosmopolitan now and then. (The drink, not the magazine.)

I write stories. I'm not a bird. Please don't hyphenate me.

I like this piece. Traister's placement of this current popular genre within the tradition of women's writing represents the sort of provocative, well-researched and well-articulated argument I was hoping for on this topic.

In my estimation, however, the conclusion falls somewhat sort of the overall argument. What I'd like to have seen is Traister's moving from her well-founded historical placement of "chick lit" within a long tradition of 'women's literature' to an analysis of what the emergence of such a genre tells us about women at this moment in history.

Rather, her discussion sidetracked into a less interesting, and less well-founded defense of the genre's legitimacy. It's one thing to suggest that recoiling from "chick lit" is based on the rejection of that which culture perceives as "feminine," quite another to conclude that this is definitively the case, as Traister does in stating that "the urge to condemn chick lit is also born of a shame about our own femininity, a desire to distance ourselves not just from bad writing, but from retailed versions of womanhood that might affect the way we are perceived by men and by each other."

My own disdain is based on the fact that such literature codes 'femininity' in such narrow terms. I don't believe that to be feminine is to be insecure, self-absorbed, obsessed with footwear, preoccupied with my relationship status and fundamentally neurotic. Neither do I believe that such coding is any solution to traditional definitions of femininity as self-sacrificing adjuncts to husband and family. The truth is more complex, and it is the job of literature--real literature, to explore those more complex, more uncomfortable dimension of human experience, not just to glibly reassert comfortable truisms.

I'm not sure those complex realms of female experience have ever been adequately explored without lapsing into stereotype, myth or polemic. The fact that this topic is both so very charged and so very unsettled strongly indicates that this exploration is well-worth pursuing. I hope the dialog continues.

For Ransom -

Thank you, thank you, thank you, for using the phrase that I had in the back of my head, but didn't use. I'm so glad somebody said it.

And, on your analysis of dismissed genres - pretty much. It wasn't *that* long ago that Jane Austen wasn't taken particularly seriously beyond being a "woman writer" in academic circles, and "legitimate" science fiction is only just starting to sneak its way in with younger faculty.

Why does bad "chick lit" get so much more attention than bad novels by male writers (I have to believe they have their share)?

They do. It's easiest to find them in the fantasy/sci-fi genre, but they're everywhere. Every genre has crappy writers. Moreover, most of what is published in every genre is crap.

So why is chick lit getting the (negative) attention right now? Well, most of the other genres have been sorted out already. Who doesn't know that fantasy/sci-fi is full of lurid, pulpy novels written by hacks? (Of course, the fact that there are some very incisive, even brilliant, novels in the genre is completely overlooked.) Why discuss something that everyone knows? It's so much easier to just ignore the entire field rather than search for the true gems.

Eventually, chick lit will join the ranks of pre-sorted genres, and no one not already devoted to the genre will ever read those works. That's the way modern capitalism works: it's all about demographics, market segments, and target markets.