Chick Lit – A contemporary literary gift for today's young woman?

Are you looking for a literary gift? If this literary gift is for a woman , you will undoubtedly encounter the "chick lit" genre when making your selection

Read more about this term and why these books might not be a good choice as a gift for every woman.

Chick lit – also known as girly or bimbo literature – is the type of literature that purports to describe the everyday lives of young women today, their worries and their typical behaviors

This area of ​​fiction mostly deals with the living environment of attractive modern women who actually have everything in their (well-to-do) lives and yet are frustrated.

They don't quite meet the requirements of the prevailing beauty ideal, constantly notice further flaws in themselves, and by the Methuselah-like age of 30 have still not managed to find the man of their dreams.

Aside from these pitiable women and their equally needy friends, it's pretty much all about consumption. Anyone who doesn't own the latest trendy shoes simply stands out from the social circle (how these trendy brands are incorporated into the mystery thrillers and vampire novels of chick lit would be worth investigating further).

This is also the kind of literature in which women without men are unhappy, constantly get into trouble, and are essentially unable to cope with life.

The name doesn't try to disguise this in the slightest; the term "chick lit" comes from "lit" for literature and the American word "chick," which in turn is derived from the Spanish "chica," meaning "girl." This is a fairly common colloquial term in the US, used for young women, and it expresses the feeling that they are neither valued nor taken seriously.

And just as this term suggests, that's how the women in chick lit are treated: They are the helpless, driven victims of their beauty, their ignorance, or their desires, constantly stressed or in danger throughout the novel, until they are rescued either by "real men" or by romantic and not really dangerous vampires.

Funny! Many modern women say this, thereby presenting themselves as decidedly thoughtful and explicitly cool. Accordingly, Chick Lit is described on Wikipedia as fiction aimed at hip young women and girls. "Hip" in the sense of trendy, chic, fashionable, contemporary.

Contemporary?

“Are you beyond saving?” ask progressive and intelligent women (and equally intelligent men) who catch their supposedly intelligent daughters reading these books. “We’ve had centuries of emancipation, until the realization slowly took hold in our society that women truly have exactly the same value as men, and you’re voluntarily reading books that describe how women can’t cope with life?”

Nevertheless, Chick Lit sells splendidly, and new TV channels for women also believe they are doing well by addressing their future female customers with chickens.

There's nothing wrong with chickens, is there? Chickens are really funny animals, social, hardworking, cuddly, and sometimes extremely resourceful!

Yes, sure, but it's also the proverbial "dumb" hens that flock together around a (sometimes very questionable) rooster. And it's the hens that get eaten by foxes if there's no fence protecting them, the ones that don't start a revolution in factory farming, but simply die..

Is chick-lit really that bad?

“It’s not so tragic!”say many women today who not only have fulfilling jobs but also husbands who show them affection and respect. And for these women, money isn’t so important that they let the persistent gender pay gap worry them. These women don’t get too worked up about chick-lit either.

But they certainly won't read chick lit either. Not only because the content of these books sometimes seems truly "far removed from home" to them, but also because of the often poor literary quality of these works.

This isn't to say that there aren't some wonderfully ironic books among those marketed as chick-lit. Books that don't aspire to change the world through literature, but are genuinely enjoyable as holiday reading.

You just need to be a little careful when buying: If your girlfriend has just successfully struggled through a challenging complete edition that wasn't exactly easy to understand, the drop in quality shouldn't be too high, otherwise it won't bring relaxation, but disappointment.