Just last Friday night, I was at a friend’s house, doing what’s normally done at sleepovers: eating a slice (or four) of pizza and getting ready to start a movie. We were scrolling through the usual TV streaming services and being a bit indecisive about what to choose. One of my friends had expressed interest in watching the love story starring Katherine Heigl 27 Dresses, so I had my eyes peeled.

We continued to search a little more and boom: there it was, filed under a category branded “chick flicks.” I looked closer and saw about fifty other movies labeled with this same genre: Miss Congeniality, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Steel Magnolias, you get the idea. It never occurred to me that these movies, movies that I honestly enjoy, were so thoughtlessly grouped together because women have lead roles and they were, sometimes, about love. This is why having a genre of “chick flick” movies is stupidly out of touch, sexist and should be changed. 

For starters, the “chick flick” genre came to be through our male operated society, having men as leads in most movies. Because of this, when women started taking some of this power, their work was sometimes deemed less because of their sex. Obviously, this is flawed because if you’re banking on a film being good because of the actors’ sexes and not the actual subject matter, you’re a lot more superficial than any of these movies could ever be. Also, you can’t look at something and decide because its title sounds dumb, it automatically is. Hello, ever heard the phrase, “Don’t judge a book by its cover?” There should be a phrase “don’t judge a movie just because your predetermined patriarchal thoughts are forcing you to disregard it because it has females” phrase, if you ask me.

Take the movie Mean Girls for example. The name sounds terrible and the poster bares four teenage girls armed head to toe in pink, miniskirts and gossip. On the surface, it seems “girly” and dumb, but the movie covers many issues, such as bullying, self-image and toxic relationships. This happens way too much with films that star women; they cover a wide range of topics, but still cannot escape the gruesome “chick flick” mark.

“Chick flick” is also an extremely unfair title to men too, saying a movie is only for girls excludes them. There are movies out there with pointless plot lines that only deal with “girl issues,” but there are also movies in every other genre that are just as senseless and unimportant and they don’t need women to show it.

So next time, when you catch yourself rolling your eyes and putting that vapid “chick flick” movie on as background sound, stop and take a listen. You may hear something pretty interesting.