A trip to the bookstore, in quasi-aesthetic pseudo-prose!
In this bookstore, there is one aisle sacrificed to misguided feminism, spawning a new genre they call Chic Lit. In this forsaken aisle, the pages are skewered with pettiness, in and out of the gleefully female paragraphs, in and out of the sentences screaming mainly of orgasms draped in tepid plots. Pettiness, threading the cringing chapters of feminine whinge and binge; the distant Other Sex lynched against the punctuation in perils of misrepresentation.
"Delight in our womanhood!" the books shout. Paint our covers in estrogen and neon pastels; pink, blue, green and yellow, and ludicrous martini glasses and stilettoes cartooned into ridicule by some overzealous suffragette. Peddle our exultant chromosomes to the masses, greedy for our idiocy. "This is Being A Woman!" they crow, while the real women entomb their shame in the Fiction section.
This is travesty, I fume, while on the mirrored side of the Chic Lit shelves, the Romance novels - accursed predecessors! - mock my indignation. Two shelves of psuedo-haute melodrama stitched to the mindless spines; spines that strut titles like "Fashionably Late", "Six Reasons To Stay Single" and "Girls' Night Out". It is all almost more than I can bear.
I find solace in Poetry, seeking purchase in Ted Hughes like a paraplegic rockclimber. But behind me, shelves of Chic Lit steam into distillate of womanhood, which in my disgusted mind resembles a kind of thick, dense slime, whose reek paralyzes eyes into squints, blinds the mind into torpor and bludgeons the words out of stunned lips: Why have I picked this trash up, and dear lord, why am I actually reading the synopsis?