Is It Time We Retired the Idea of the Chick Flick?

variety.com:

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic This weekend, the jaw-dropping commercial triumph of “It Ends with Us,” a romantic soap opera with dark undercurrents starring Blake Lively (it’s just about the only hit film this summer that isn’t an escapist fantasy), ought to give the entire movie industry pause.

It should tell the industry that it needs to be making different kinds of movies. These kinds. Yet I’m not sure if Hollywood film culture, as it stands now, can take in that lesson as long as it has a term like “chick flick” on the brain, and as long as it applies that term — lazily and reflexively — to a movie like “It Ends with Us.” For a long time, “chick flick” was a phrase that gave off a knowing retro wink of ironic feminist power.

I never liked the term myself, and refused to use it in my reviews. Yet I saw why it had come into vogue. The word “chick” was a sexist relic of the ’60s, and women using “chick” in a hip way was a bit like the gay reclaiming of “queer.” It turned something patronizing into something liberating.

And joining “chick” with “flick” was, in its cute way, an assertion of cultural identity. It was all part of the new wave of self-aware party-girl feminism that kicked in around the time of “Pretty Woman” and reached full throttle in the age of “Sex and the City.” A chick flick, according to the definition, was a romantic comedy or maybe, at times, a non-comic romantic weeper that women gravitated to out of a kind of primal impulse.