Do you ever feel like you just don't fit in? Of course you do, we all do. But it's never more obvious to me then when I sit down to watch a so-called chick flick. Whether it was the 'woman's picture' from the Golden Age of Hollywood, or He's Just Not That Into You's new message of faux-empowerment, it has been a long time since a movie has more to offer my gender than shopping montages and romantic self-pity. Just to keep it all straight in our minds, what exactly makes a chick flick a chick flick? According to popular definition, a chick flick is "a film, usually about relationships, which is popular with females and comparatively unpopular with males". In other words, anything you have to drag your boyfriend to.

It's time for us gals to unite and start demanding a little more from our entertainment. With plenty of room for stories of love, loss, and marriage, Labels or Love cannot be the sum total of the 'female experience'. So, here's my call to arms with a list of the worst crimes perpetrated by 'chick flicks'. You can't change what you don't acknowledge, so let's begin.

1. Two Kinds of Stories -- married or dead?
According to conventional Hollywood wisdom, women are only interested in trying to get married, getting married, getting divorced and then eventually dying of a horrible disease. It doesn't exactly take a Women's Studies degree to see the pattern in most feature films marketed to women -- they are centered solely on personal relationships. I'm not saying that these stories don't have value, but it can't be the only game in town, and I refuse to believe my entire life revolves around making a family, losing a family, and then keeling over after coming to terms with something.

See: Terms of Endearment
Stepmom
One True Thing
...and just about any film starring a woman that has been released in the last 100 years.

Film critics are often criticized themselves for being the wrong audience for a movie they've panned. Whether it's old white guys who aren't the right audience for a Tyler Perry movie or old white guys who can't appreciate a "chick flick," the subjectivity of certain reviewers is sometimes even called out for being too racist, sexist or otherwise prejudiced. We saw a high level of apparent chauvinism going on recently with the release of Sex and the City, and now it's happening again with Mamma Mia! Last Friday, in her his review, New York Sun critic Grady Hendrix* noted that Mamma, "has been getting generally good reviews, but it's also been getting trashed by some critics who all have one thing in common: They're men." And the claim has now been escalated by Liz Smith, who quotes Hendrix in the Page Six section of today's New York Post.

Despite my half-belief that Hendrix has a point about some male critics, I didn't want her his claim to go unchecked. Especially because her his review went out on the same day that most newspaper reviews went out. Meaning, how could she have known the true demographics of all negative and positive reactions? Going through all the Mamma Mia! reviews sampled on Rotten Tomatoes, here is what I discovered:

Even before Sex and the City proved a hit of modest blockbuster proportions, women, such as our own Kim Voynar, were asking whether the film's popularity could lead to more female-targeted fare from Hollywood. Not necessarily "chick flicks," which we already see every now and then in the form of stale romantic comedies (like Made of Honor) and other small movies involving a female protagonist -- but big, smart, well-funded movies that appeal primarily to the ladies. You know, as in the female equivalent to comic book and action movies like Iron Man and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (yes, I know many women were fans of both these "guy" flicks). Well, according to a piece in Variety asking the same question, women can at least look forward to Sex and the City 2. That's good enough, right?

Apparently New Line is already at work on the Sex sequel, but studio execs are predictably responding to the success of Carrie and Co. as a fluke. Warner Bros. head Alan Horn, who jokingly told Variety that the sequel will be titled Sex in the Suburbs, said last weekend's Sex opening was "unusually big" and claims similar projects wouldn't do as well. In a way, he's right, pointing to the fact that Sex had a built-in audience, being based on a hit TV series. Meanwhile, Universal's Donna Langley, also acknowledging that Sex is "outside the norm," at least says it's something to aspire to. Her studio also has a female-targeted movie coming out this summer: Mamma Mia!. But again, that, as well as this summer's The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2, has a built-in audience.