Girl Trouble

Illustration by Jillian Tamaki.

Something creepy is happening in the pages of the 2005 book catalogues, those beautifully bound lists of new releases that publishers send to sellers and media at the start of each season. In describing many of its latest books, company after company has chosen to invoke a phrase as chilling as “Wassuuuup” or “talk to the hand”: “Part Sex and the City, part Bridget Jones's Diary.” (Or, sometimes, to mix it up: “Sex and the City meets Bridget Jones's Diary.”) Though Jones and Sex are fictional, these newborn manuscripts are not. Dating, or not dating, is usually the subject, as indicated by the colour pink somewhere on the cover.

Pink is the colour of chick lit, that universe of trade paperbacks covered in cartoon martini glasses and lipstick tubes. Faced with these new self-help books, each a litany of romantic woes and female humiliations not unlike those that befall Shopaholic and co., it seems apt to borrow phrasing from Sex and the City heroine Carrie Bradshaw: Could it be that non-fiction is the new chick lit? (Question mark typed, I butt cigarette, close laptop and head to a fabulous party).

(Okay. I do not smoke. There was no party. I am back.)

The current nonpareil of the Bridget-Sex genre is the mammoth bestseller He’s Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys. Written by an actual former Sex and the City staff writer (Liz Tuccillo) and one of the show’s consultants (Greg Behrendt), it was released last October and is currently number three on the Globe and Mail bestseller list. Canada has its own versions, most recently Amy Cameron’s Playing With Matches: Misadventures in Dating, saddled with the part-Sex-part-Bridget phrase in its Random House promotional copy. Whoever wrote the jacket blurbs for BitterGirl: Getting Over Getting Dumped thought outside the box, slightly: it is christened on its hot pink glossy back cover as “Sex and the City meets Dr. Phil.”

Reading these three books — and there are many others to choose from; press material for America’s Top Model judge Janice Dickinson’s latest autobiography, Check, Please!: Dating, Mating and Extricating tags her as “a real life Samantha Jones,” a nod to Carrie’s highly sexed pal on Sex and the City — is different from reading non-fiction or self-help. The colon-heavy covers follow the catchy headline/explanatory sub-head format of articles found in women’s magazines, and indeed, all three would have been more bearable at 1,500 words than 100-plus pages (which includes a lot of cutesy graphics and lists). The books, like their women’s-mag forerunners, are a string of outrageous confessionals from women in the grips of dating crises. Their choices are so astoundingly stupid – really? A guy who sleeps with his ex-wife isn’t into you? — that the women can only come across as losers. But the confessors, we’re told, are secretly sassy, downtown and fabulous; they simply need a little advice to reclaim their fabulousity.

And yet, after a woozy day reading all three aforementioned tomes back to back, it’s clear that female empowerment is about as meaningful in these books as it is in Jane and Cosmo. The Bridget-Sex genre traffics in fiction while claiming to represent real life, and its greatest invention is that being a woman today is about incompetence and humiliation. Wacky anecdotes about dates with anal-obsessives and men who refuse to touch their lovers are supposed to be funny; beach-bag diversion for the emotionally traumatized. It’s fantasy packaged as self-improvement.

He’s Just Not That Into You begins with an authors’ note to the reader: “The stories you will read in this book are illustrative examples, not based on specific events or people.” The book goes on, from the perspective of the male author, to tell women that the men they are dating are caddish and sex-obsessed and probably lying. Chapter headings offer sensible advice like He’s Just Not That Into You If He’s Not Asking You Out and He’s Just Not That Into You If He Only Wants to See You When He’s Drunk. Women – well, fictional constructs with names lazily chosen from baby books, like Frida and Gloria – write down their terrible personal scenarios (“Dear Greg, A guy who I’m going out with… is totally important and totally busy. Sometimes when he’s working, I don’t hear from him for days…”) only to be told by (married father) Behrendt: You don’t hear from him because… (wait for it)… He’s just not that into you! It’s an I-know-you-are-but-what–am-I philosophy, as effective as a schoolyard taunt, which is to say, very useful in silencing the feeble “But, I…” defenses of the weak and vulnerable. After telling women how wrong they are, Behrendt always adds a go-girl proviso, such as: “You’re way too tasty to be alone for too long.”

Each little prescriptive narrative in He’s Just Not That Into You – the girl dates the bad guy, the girl gets rid of him and then (the subtext) finds true love when she’s least expecting it – is like a mini-chick-lit novel by Laura Caldwell or Sophie Kinsella. Variations on this formula, the preferred model for romantic escapism, is nothing new. Chick-lit heroines are really just sassier versions of their Harlequin counterparts, with cooler jobs and clothes. (Harlequin Enterprises has its own chick-lit imprint, Red Dress Ink, labeled in a National Post article as “Bridget Jones meets Sex and the City.”) But in 2004, the weekly Waldenbooks list of single-title paperback sellers showed that Harlequin has been losing its grip on the number one slot. According to the New York Times, female readers are now getting their fantasies from chick lit, and non-fiction.

The moniker “chick lit” entered the vernacular around 1998, when Helen Fielding — then a columnist for London’s Independent — adapted her newspaper creation Bridget Jones to book format; the Oxford English Dictionary included the phrase as of 2002. Bridget is a chain-smoking, futilely self-bettering Londoner with a knack for creative semantics (“My flobby body flobbering around…”). Fielding dropped her loveable character into a version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice — appropriately so, since Austen is an early incarnation of chick lit at its best, if chick lit simply means women’s lives in close-up.

But Fielding, as astute an observer of social class as Austen, was actually writing satire. Bridget’s “wobbly bits” and “singleton” obsessions were Sloane Square silliness, gently mocked. Self-loathing and personal failure were never meant to be celebrated or turned into the latest wing of the self-help industry. In an interview with Powells.com when the book was first released in the US, Fielding said friends had warned her that American audiences wouldn’t understand “irony and self-deprecation.” Trust your friends; the chick-lit tone – playful but smart — that made the first Bridget Jones (and Sex and the City) so enjoyable comes off in non-fiction chick lit as a hectoring, materialistic cure-all. These books have nothing new to say about break-ups or dating, but they say nothing with attitude, honey, adopting a party-girl posture that’s embarrassing, and tired. All three books I read constantly mention Manolo Blahniks and martinis — set dressing in Sex and the City — as if spending money is an important element in the healing of real women who are hurting.

Blurring the real and the unreal is a disorienting experience as a reader. The outlandish and ridiculous things that happen to characters in fiction – Bridget showing up for cocktails accidentally dressed as a prostitute; Carrie falling on her face while walking the runway at a fashion show — are packaged in the new non-fiction chick lit as the actual realities of women’s lives. Cameron’s reams of bad date stories were collected from people she knows. While the tales are sometimes funny (like the scuba diving date where, many leagues below the sea, a guy takes off his wetsuit and starts gesturing for a blow-job), they read like fiction rather than truths about dating life. Certainly the stories have been massaged for publication, but even if they are factually accurate — and I have no reason to doubt Cameron’s research methods — the epic scale of these bad dates raises another Bradshaw-ish question: Are women beginning to cast themselves as protagonists in some kind of imaginary farce? I shudder to think that women now talk about themselves like a bunch of junior high self-mutilators. It’s as if we can no longer explore our emotional lives with any seriousness for fear of looking like humourless, retro feminists.

Of course, most of these books lay claim to some kind of pro-feminist mood. Playing With Matches, light and disposable as it is, at least lacks the rah-rah-ladies self-justification of He’s Just Not That Into You and BitterGirl. (It also, thankfully, has no pink on the cover.) The BitterGirl authors — Toronto stage performers Annabel Griffiths, Alison Lawrence and Mary Francis Moore — proudly declare that between them, they’ve been dumped 57 times, so they have a little wisdom to spread around. Consequently, they address their readers as “sweetie” and “baby,” as if we’re all having breakfast together on Sex and the City.

An early section of BitterGirl, meant to make women feel better, lists “things you’ve survived”: “Wearing white pants the first day you got your period… Puking all over yourself at a university frat party… Realizing (at the reception) the dress you’re wearing to your sister’s wedding is see-through.” After this numbingly unfunny list, the authors go on to tell the reader that a bittergirl can get past it: “A bittergirl learns to turn her life around on her own terms and take on the world again with a sense of humour, a sassy attitude, and a team of gals by her side.” I’m sorry, did you say something? I’m still recovering from the bloody white pants and vomit imagery. Wedging this pro-sass message between mortifications seems like the equivalent of hitting someone, then saying “I love you.” What these books trumpet loudest isn’t the pro-girl appendix but the preceding humiliations, and the drummed assumption that the bulk of women’s lives are made up of comic disasters.

Successful chick lit, like most escapist fiction, works because readers identify with the heroines. The protagonists have flaws and problems that are usually outsize and comic, and readers see their own lives on a comparative human scale, and take comfort in that. But in non-fiction chick lit, a weird reverse is taking place: the identification goes backwards. Real women are presented as fictional. In other words: WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE? (Does Carrie Bradshaw abuse upper case? Not with her manicure.) The women in non-fiction chick lit possess all the cartoonish and exaggerated qualities of chick-lit heroines, and none of the complexity of real women.

Like a bar drunk offering unwanted advice, these books trample a complex reading of any situation. In fiction, nutty things happen and chapters end. But in real life, our experiences accumulate slowly, and our responses to pain and love are ever shifting; our advice needs to be as sensitive and intricate as we are. Behrendt tells women never to call a man. But what about desire? What if you want to call a man? Or what if your bad date was going through a rough time when he took off that scuba suit? (Okay, that might be an incident where I’m Just Not That Into You applies.) Or what if, after you get dumped, you don’t feel like hanging out with your friends – those idealized, mythic, fantastic female friends who float through non-fiction chick lit? Even Sex and the City, which did more to venerate female friendship since, well, Bridget Jones, showed that touchstones can be shaky and unreliable. The books claim we’re all pals dispensing common wisdom, but I like authority in non-fiction. I like expertise. I don’t think my friends know it all, and I assume they see my limitations, too.

Chick lit — in its original form and the new version 2.0 — can be liberating. Its success is a response to the smothering, simple-feminist notion that all our representations of women have to be ideal, that romance is a female rocket scientist and her stay-at-home mixed-race partner doing dishes together. But it’s bleak to think that the alternative to political correctness is this false, never-ending depiction of women’s lives as frivolous. Our preoccupations are not just shopping and sex, and our problems aren’t solvable with a wink and giggle and a new pair of shoes. Honey, sweetie, darling, a word of advice: please keep your fiction away from my reality.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

Letters:

Excellent! My girlfriend's friends are all highly involved in the chick-lit culture and identity described by the author, and I have debated it many times with her and them. Ms. Onstad's article was funny, informative and thought-provoking in ways that the genre she critiques could never aspire to. Please pass along my compliments, and keep this fabulous contributor!

Geoff Van Praet
Ottawa

Ah, thank you for the relieving article. I'm a man but I have been bothered by the recent portrayals of women in popular culture (and men for that matter as well). We may be sexually liberated, but there are more important things! Thank you for a great perspective on this chick-lit.

Nathan
Victoria

I have to say that I was truly intrigued by this article. For the last few years now, it seems as thought the depiction of women in movies, on television and in books has been one of bumbling, flighty, but mysteriously wealthy women who go to fabulous parties and date less-than fabulous men. I don't know if we're supposed to pity or envy them. This new girl-power movement towards shoes, smoking, and sex is dangerously powerful as non-fiction starts to portray what was once fictional comedy-drama as the new reality. Does anyone really believe those humiliating stories in Cosmo anyway? I, for one, am tired of feeling guilty for staying home on a Saturday night instead of rushing off with a gaggle of supportive and relatively dichotomous girlfriends (there's always one slut and one cynic — even in the Golden Girls!) for a night out during which we all ditch each other to pursue men. Thanks for pointing that out and for speaking up for all of us women who resent being called "girl" by publishers and marketers guilting us into mass market consumption.

Leslie Forbes
Sarnia, Ontario