About the time Sex And The City was being released in theatres, a popular joke among men was that watching the film with their wives would be the ultimate agnee pariksha (a walk through fire). Survivors of that experience would be nominated for the ‘best husband award’.

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Cinematic therapy works differently on both sexes. Watching Carrie Bradshaw and friends’ desires, sexual fantasies and lives unfold in New York city is one thing. Admiring Robert Patrick strolling coolly through fire, dodging bullets in The Terminator is something else.

The charms of literature work similarly. Chick-lit and dude-lit are probably the most egoistical bedfellows on a bookshelf. Both have their devoted readers. But for some strange reason, men are expected to read only one of them, while it’s considered acceptable for women to read both.

Then there’s the ‘literature infidel’. And ladies and gentlemen, it’s a he. The same man who will make faces at the bookstore billing counter when he spots his wife’s shopping basket overflowing with Mills & Boon, Nicholas Sparks and Helen Fielding. The same man who will check out the back-covers of those books after his wife is asleep. The same man who will resume his disapproval once she wakes up the next morning.

‘Punishment in pink’Mansi Trivedi, 26, an advertising professional who recently moved to India from the US, testifies to this. “There were incidents reported in the US of husbands being found reading the book discreetly at night,” she laughs. “In India, although chick-lit hasn’t become as mainstream as in the US, it soon will. Besides being a genre in itself, the very term ‘chick-lit’ is also a way to market to a female readership.”

Men, when asked about chick-lit will tell you that they are “badly written”, “predictable”, and “a punishment in pink.” Ashwini Mishra, 25, says, “They’re pink, dumb, pointless and frankly, very boring.”

Neelima Dwivedi, 33, an analyst at a research firm, recollects an incident in a B-school where a guy introduced her to Sex And The City, a TV series she immediately fell in love with. Today, years later, the same guy is shy of admitting publicly that he used to watch the series religiously.

Which obviously begs the question, why don’t closet male fans come out with it? There are various theories that attempt to answer this question.

The scientific explanation is, conditioning. Seema Hingorrany, a psychologist, says that boys may be conditioned to follow a certain kind of reading list by parents, teachers and peers. But girls, as they grow up, find chick-lit easy to relate to, unlike boys who follow the herd, reading books about “pragmatic or worldly issues.” Going by Hingorrany, stumbling on to a guy’s bookshelf full of chick-lit is almost akin to finding porn in a girl’s DVD collection. Trivedi opines that there’s also a prestige issue here. “Men do not consider chick-lit as great literature. It’s not something you boast about.”

Where men are villainsRamya, 31, author of the popular blog, The Ideasmithy, believes that it has to do with the structure of a chick-lit novel. A chic-lit novel, she says, is usually about an independent female protagonist, in her 20s or 30s, who is career-driven, stylish, loves her female friends, and has been unlucky in love.

“Most often, men are painted as villains in the story, since the protagonist has fallen out of relationships with them,” she says.

“Naturally, men are not expected to approve a genre where over many pages, they are shown to be playing spoilsport in a woman’s life.”

However, Farhad Karkaria, 25, who works in an online ad agency, is one of those rare men who have no qualms in admitting that he has sampled the genre repeatedly through films and books.

“There’s good chick-lit and there’s bad chick-lit. The reason why men hate chick-lit or chick-flicks is that nowadays authors/film-makers resort to a predictable formula of characters in order to market it as a chick-flick. The assumption is that the girls will not only watch it as a gang, but also take the guys along.”

Trivedi expects more men to eventually come out of the closet and become fans of the genre. “You now have fairness creams for men. They are now becoming more conscious about their grooming, style — things which were previously a ‘women only’ domain. Metrosexuality might end up blurring the divide.”