Anna North at Salon has a crushing critique of the proliferation of trend stories about privileged, urban white women and the very serious concerns floating out there that all this liberation is just too much for them to handle:
These stories, in mainstream American media, tend to fall into certain categories. There are the ones about when women should get married. There are the ones about how women balance work and their children, told with no discussion of these women’s race or class, and with a strange disregard for the possibility that said children might also have fathers. And then there are the ones about hookup culture. ...
This is the emotion of the women’s story. It does not move. It does not satiate. It does not provoke tears or laughter, or even good clean fear. Maybe it titillates, but ultimately, it is intended to worry. The women’s story sidles up to you at a party and asks in the honeyed voice of a false friend whether you or other women like you might be doing sex or love or motherhood (the top tasks of the woman) slightly wrong.
These stories keep coming because we read or hate-read them. We share them. And so more get assigned, and they all sort of reinforce one another until the curated world of the trend story overcomes the narrative of real life. This is no more evident than in the way that women's trend stories deal with men, who are but shadows on the wall: the voice at the other end of a booty call in college, the husband who we're assured helps out on the weekends, the cardboard groom that must be inserted into a tuxedo at exactly the right moment in your life when you're old enough to know what you're doing but young enough to get the cardboard groom to want to marry you. No doubt these men are real people who matter to the women in the story, but on the page, they are hardly characters at all—the reader walks away feeling men have little to no real impact on what kind of choices women are facing and making.