If you subscribed to or even occasionally read Sassy, the teen-girl magazine that existed from 1989 to 1996, then that makes you, approximately, a pro-choice registered Democrat who came of age listening to alternative rock. You grew up on R.E.M., the Smiths, the Cure, Throwing Muses, Sonic Youth, Liz Phair, Hole, Bikini Kill, PJ Harvey, My So-Called Life, and John Hughes. Your romantic ideals were forged by repeated viewings of Dead Poets Society, Say Anything, and Morrissey riding around on a tractor in the middle of winter for the "Suedehead" video. You published a zine or bought zines, issued seven-inch singles or bought seven-inch singles. You were probably a high-achieving malcontent, a wearer of black in high school who became a thrift-store-haunting feminist theorist in college. If you were going to get married at all, you were going to marry an enlightened, sensitive man who washed dishes, and you'd do it for enlightened, egalitarian love—not money! Or else you were going to, or did, come out proudly as a lesbian, or you took up with members of both sexes and didn't feel guilty. You were under the impression that the girls who came after you would never have to shave their legs. Read More

Maureen Dowd. Are Men Necessary? When Sexes Collide. Putnam. November 2005.

Caitlin Flanagan. To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife. Little, Brown & Company. April 2006.

Linda R. Hirshman. Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World. Viking. June 2006.

Laura Kipnis. Against Love: A Polemic. Pantheon. August 2003. 

Cathleen Schine, the author of seven novels, has quite fairly gotten pegged as a writer of highbrow chick lit. Her heroines are smarter and also older than is typical of the genre. They write biographies, own bookstores, and go on Darwin-themed cruises to the Galapagos to celebrate their divorces. But, more crucially, they suffer from the standard chick-lit problem (all alone) and receive the universal chick-lit cure: marriage or reconciliation or at least sex with a charmingly cardboard male lead. Read More