HerStory – what’s happened to the quality chic-flick?

There’s Scarlett Johansson’s character, who takes up with a married man and is then forced to sit in a closet and listen while he has a sexual encounter with his wife. If you had to sum up this film in one word, it would be “humiliation”.

It’s not only women who have noticed the shift in the romantic comedy genre. Peter Travers, a film critic for Rolling Stone magazine, describes He’s Just Not That Into You as “a women-bashing tract disguised as a chick flick”. Diane Purkiss, an Oxford University fellow and feminist historian, feels that we have reached a nadir in the way women are portrayed on screen and says that there’s been “a depressing dumbing-down of the whole genre”.

“That’s not to say that I want all movies to be earnest and morally improving,” she says. “But I think that you can actually have entertainment with sassy, smart heroines rather than dim-witted ones.”

You can, but at the moment, we don’t. In fact, the women portrayed in today’s romantic comedies seem to have three main obsessions. There’s shopping, as seen in Confessions Of A Shopaholic and Sex And The City. There’s babies, as witnessed in Baby Mama, Juno and Knocked Up. And there’s marriage, which was front and centre of the noxious recent release Bride Wars, featuring Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway fighting over their dream wedding. Marriage is also at the centre of Made Of Honour, License to Wed, The Wedding Planner and 27 Dresses. It’s something the teenagers find bemusing. I ask whether they’re obsessed with marriage themselves and they laugh.

“I see marriage as a bit of a negative thing,” says Bronte Norman Terrell, 17. “Very few of our parents are still together, so why would we want to go through all that?”

What’s sad is that over the years the romantic comedy has been a genuinely positive genre for women. It sailed off to a fine start in 1934 with It Happened One Night, featuring Claudette Colbert as a famous heiress on the run from her father, and Clark Gable as a luckless journalist.

The relationship between the two is initially sarcastic – as with the relationships between countless rom-com couples – but most of all it is equal.

This sets the tone for most of the great classics of the genre. So in His Girl Friday, Russell and Grant trade witticisms at terrifying speed, as do Katharine Hepburn and Grant in The Philadelphia Story. This trend continued through classics such as Pillow Talk (1959), in which Doris Day’s clever, capable interior designer could never be bested by Rock Hudson’s rakish composer; and on through When Harry Met Sally, in which the two protagonists are equally intelligent, witty and proud.

The girls are initially unenthusiastic when I give them these classic romantic comedies to watch at home but when we discuss them later, their voices light up. Shanice Calica, 16, says she thought Pillow Talk “was going to be really old-fashioned and lovey-dovey but it was quite modern and funny. The female character wasn’t throwing herself at the man, whereas in the newer films they’re willing to do anything for the guys.”

And Rhiannan Brown, 17, is impressed by Meg Ryan’s character in When Harry Met Sally. “She’s more subtle, more real life than the women in rom-coms today,” she says. “She’s working, she has her own house, she knows what she wants and what she wants is very similar to what the average woman of today wants – even though,” she adds, as only a teenager can, “it was made back in the ’80s.”

Rhiannan’s comments reflect the fact that in the classics of the genre, women are regularly portrayed as high-powered, competent, capable career women.

Dr Tamar Jeffers McDonald, an academic at the University of Kent and an expert on romantic comedies, says she finds it “quite insulting that a career woman now is something that is frowned upon. You see depictions of women who are supposedly at the top of their game, yet they can’t walk down a corridor without pouring coffee on themselves. The films are not very subtly saying, ‘Yes, they may be at the top in their jobs but actually what they really need is a man.”‘

A big part of the problem with romantic comedies, Purkiss says, is that “there aren’t enough women involved with the film industry”. Women made up only 15 per cent of the directors, writers, producers and editors of the top 250 films of 2007. The result is that those making romantic comedies often have no idea of their audience and simply resort to outlandish female stereotypes.

Purkiss points to the fights in Bride Wars: “People sneaking in and poisoning each other’s perms, which wasn’t only improbable but was on an index of probability that could only be set by someone who isn’t a woman.” Compare that with Mamma Mia!, released last year, which had a female writer, director and producer and was warm and respectful towards women, showing no judgment, for instance, about the fact that Meryl Streep’s character had clearly slept with three men in quick succession.

As women make the slow crawl towards equality in the workplace, freedom in our relationships and parity with men, romantic comedies seem determined to remind us of “our place”, to suggest that we’re incapable of further progress and should really give up.

Bronte says she “can’t think of a film where the main female character has been someone successful, someone normal”. “And if they are successful,” Shanice says, “it’s like they have to get married so that they’re not so concentrated on their work.”

The teens write off many of today’s rom-coms as predictable, cliched and exaggerated but they’re not too bothered. They prefer horror films. I ask whether there are any female characters that have captured their imagination and Bronte names Angelina Jolie’s character in Mr & Mrs Smith – an assassin on a mission to kill her own husband. When I relay this to Purkiss, she sounds relieved.

“That just shows that no matter how powerful the cultural forces raining down on you are, you can always find a role model somewhere.”

The Guardian