By Amelia White ‘Chick flick’ is a facet of our colloquial film dialect that signals a careful belittling of a film, usually a romance, usually starring a young woman, and usually featuring some sort of emotional turmoil. Now, none of these elements in isolation are reductive, and yet in conjunction, their proximity to femininity has rendered the chick flick a low-brow film genre. The rise of the modern chick flick happened just as second-wave feminism began losing steam.