8 reasons why chick lit authors should be kicked until they're dead

From number one hit song:

• Novels about stupid women are, apparently, just fabulous. To quote Stephanie Lessing on her character, Chloë: “Chloë doesn’t play dumb. She is dumb.” Don’t you love this Paris Hilton approach to life? Being dumb is fun! Yay!

• Chick lit promotes a creepily retro agenda that goes something like this: shopping is divine, a career is cool, but the only life goal of any real importance is finding a man to procreate with, a.k.a. the inevitable conclusion of the story. The apotheosis of this anachronistic belief system: Jennifer Weiner, promoting her new book by posing with husband and spawn in People magazine.

• The covers. Oh God, the covers. If aliens landed and went into a branch of Borders they would think that human beings were a species of infantile pastel-color-obsessed shoe fetishists.

• Two words: Plum Sykes.

• The genre is bestowing the status of author on überbimbos like this woman, who has achieved fame extolling the virtues of lipstick and pentapeptides. She says her novel will be a fun read set in the beauty industry. I think it’s a safe bet that there’ll also be some romantic hassles along the way, but all will be resolved in the final chapter when the narrator realizes what any reader with more brain cells than the author has known since page 2: the man who’s been right under our heroine’s nose all along is THE ONE.

• Some women who write chick lit seem to be laboring under the delusion that their product is equivalent to decent literature and that Sophie Kinsella isn’t excerpted in the New Yorker due to prejudice against non-literary fiction, rather than due to the fact that she writes complete and utter crapola. See, for example, Lauren Baratz-Logsted’s essay. Or Melissa Bank: "I feel like having a happy ending disqualifies you from any kind of serious literary prize." Yes, that’s what kept The Wonder Spot off the Orange Prize short list.

• Jane Austen is perpetually invoked as some kind of defense: “Jane Austen was a chick lit author!” Right – she wrote formulaic, socially conservative stories about the importance of becoming a wife. Her excuse, however, is that it was THE EIGHTEEN-HUNDREDS.

• When people criticize these pollutants to the culture, they’re accused, in the grandest of ironies, of being antifeminist. Well, fuck me gently with a spike-heeled Manolo.