"flippant counterpart" to the term "lad lit". The parallel term used for movies, chick flick, enjoyed slightly earlier uptake (chick flick is said to have been coined after the 1993 film Sleepless in Seattle in which a male character discusses "chicks' movie[s]"). In what was probably one of its first major outings, the term chick lit was deployed ironically: a 1995 anthology edited by Cris Mazza and Jeffrey DeShell entitled Chick Lit: Postfeminist Fiction contained 22 short fiction pieces in response to Mazza and DeShell's call for "postfeminist writing". Early use of the term was heavily associated with journalism (both Bridget Jones Diary and Sex in the City began as newspaper columns) and James Wolcott's 1996 article in The New Yorker, "Hear Me Purr," co-opted the term chick lit to proscribe what he called the trend of "girlishness" evident in the writing of female newspaper columnists at that time. In the early years, there was some variation on the exact term used: in 2000, the Sydney Morning Herald reported the birth of a "publishing phenomenon" that can be called "chick fiction." At the peak of the term's popularity, a slew of related sub-genres were proposed with similar names: sistah lit (targeted at Black readers), chick lit jr (for young readers), mommy lit, and chick lit in corsets (historical fiction, and a term only found in one academic paper). The relationship with the term lad lit is more complicated; lad lit arose before or in parallel with chick lit. Of these parallel terms, mommy lit, and lad lit are the only terms to have enjoyed any significant uptake - and that a tiny fraction of the use of the primary term chick lit. Writers and critics Controversy over chick lit focused at first on the literary value of books identified or promoted as part of the genre. Over time, controversy has focused more on the term itself, and whether the concept of a chick lit genre is inherently sexist. In 1998, reviewer Alex Kuczynski, writing for The New York Times, condemned Fielding's novel in particular, writing: "Bridget is such a sorry spectacle, wallowing in her man-crazed helplessness, that her foolishness cannot be excused." In 2001, writer Doris Lessing deemed the genre "instantly forgettable" while Beryl Bainbridge called the genre "a froth sort of thing". Author Jenny Colgan immediately fired back at Lessing and Bainbridge, explaining why, for a new generation of