This Novem­ber, Kate Bolick’s cov­er sto­ry in The Atlantic, ​“All the Sin­gle Ladies,” detailed what she sees as the impend­ing end of het­ero­sex­u­al mar­riage. The arti­cle was blogged, tweet­ed and dis­cussed to the high heav­ens – most­ly by women, often by women I respect immense­ly. Plans are afoot to adapt it into a TV series.

The harm of this genre isn't how it exploits well-off women's insecurities. It's how it dismisses the rest of the female population.

Despite the excite­ment over Bolick’s arti­cle, I felt I’d read it before. And I had.

“All the Sin­gle Ladies” belongs to a pop­u­lar type of female jour­nal­ism: care­ful­ly researched, sophis­ti­cat­ed, sub­tly reac­tionary, each sen­tence so allur­ing­ly pol­ished that you can almost for­get it’s a 10,000-word arti­cle about how tough it is not to have a boyfriend. I’ve come to think of it as the What To Do About The Nan­ny genre.

Straight mar­riage, Bol­ick argues, is on the way out due to the reces­sion, women’s advances in the work­place, the rise of casu­al sex and (that eter­nal cul­prit) fem­i­nism. Giv­en that ​“men have been rapid­ly declin­ing – in income, in edu­ca­tion­al attain­ment, and in future employ­ment prospects – rel­a­tive to women,” het­ero­sex­u­al ladies are left in a dat­ing waste­land, forced to choose between ​“dead­beats or play­ers.” Accord­ing­ly, many women remain unmar­ried – and, Bol­ick opti­misti­cal­ly projects, cre­ate com­mu­ni­ties of their own.

I’m all for sis­ter­hood, but her use of ​“dead­beats” stuck in my craw. Bol­ick seems con­cerned not that straight women will miss out on mar­riage, but that upper-mid­dle-class women will have to ​“mar­ry down.” She equates job attain­ment with desir­abil­i­ty. She tells us what ​“we” could learn from ​“the African-Amer­i­can com­mu­ni­ty” (imply­ing that ​“we,” her read­ers, aren’t part of it). Bol­ick posits that in vit­ro fer­til­iza­tion (which costs between $10,000 and $20,000) is always an option for would-be sin­gle moth­ers, as she explains that she ​“flew around the world to research this arti­cle,” stay­ing in a ​“ram­bling Cape Cod sum­mer house” and a ​“hand­some mid-cen­tu­ry apart­ment in Chelsea,” while her sin­gle female friends trav­eled through Italy or attend­ed med­i­ta­tion retreats.

The What To Do About The Nan­ny genre has rules: It will cite the author’s own life as a cau­tion­ary exam­ple of what fem­i­nism hath wrought. It will touch upon the low­er orders – com­mu­ni­ty col­lege stu­dents, sin­gle black moth­ers, the nan­ny – and explain how they’re rel­e­vant to the upper-mid­dle-class. It will be about ​“gen­der,” but focus on the ladies’-magazine vari­ety of female con­cerns: moth­er­hood, mar­riage, dat­ing. And it will shame upper-mid­dle-class women for their ambi­tion – and simul­ta­ne­ous­ly imply that they, the women who can afford nan­nies and have seen the inside of ram­bling Cape Cod beach hous­es, are the only peo­ple lit­er­ate enough to care about women’s progress.

Anoth­er Atlantic cov­er sto­ry, Caitlin Flanagan’s 2004 ​“How Serf­dom Saved the Women’s Move­ment,” lit­er­al­ly addressed what to do about the nan­ny. Flana­gan feigned con­cern for poor domes­tic work­ers before land­ing on her point: Nan­nies are the accept­able vari­ety of child care (she employed one), but were only nec­es­sary because mod­ern women were self­ish, careerist shrews who wouldn’t stay home with their kids.

Mau­reen Dowd, in The New York Times, pio­neered the fer­tile Too Rich To Find A Boyfriend sub-genre with 2005’s ​“What’s a Mod­ern Girl to Do?” After a man told her she was too ​“intim­i­dat­ing” and suc­cess­ful to date, she wailed that ​“being a maid would have enhanced my chances with men.”

Three years lat­er, Lori Got­tlieb took that ball and ran with it, with The Atlantic​’s ​“Mar­ry Him!”, about how ​“suc­cess­ful and ambi­tious” women – with their sil­ly quest for ​“edu­ca­tion! career! but also true love!” – had devel­oped dat­ing expec­ta­tions that would leave them lone­ly spin­sters. (Got­tlieb has also pub­lished a more recent Atlantic piece about how mid­dle-class moth­ers are wreck­ing their chil­dren with – sur­prise! – over­ly high expec­ta­tions.) Even the web­site Jezebel joined in, repub­lish­ing an arti­cle by the anony­mous writer ​“Legal Tease” about how men are so ​“intim­i­dat­ed” by law degrees that some will reject a ​“six-fig­ure-siren who has a white shoe pedi­gree” in favor of an ​“unem­ployed hook-up bud­dy in Astoria.”

Bol­ick her­self cites Han­na Rosin’s Atlantic piece ​“The End of Men,” in which Rosin con­flates the idea of a ​“man-ces­sion,” some anec­dotes about men strug­gling in col­lege and (for some rea­son) Lady Gaga’s ​“Tele­phone” video, to con­clude that male priv­i­lege has end­ed. This arti­cle spends time with work­ing-class men. It talks about com­mu­ni­ty col­leges. Its gen­der-bait­ing seems refresh­ing­ly lack­ing in class bias. But if you thought it wouldn’t come back to upward­ly mobile women and their mar­riage prospects, think again: Rosin quotes a female stu­dent, who tells her, ​“In 2012, I will be Dr. Bur­ress. Will I have to deal with guys who don’t even have a bachelor’s degree? I would like to date, but I’m putting myself in a real­ly small pool.”

No one wants to hear that they’re going to die alone, endan­ger their chil­dren or end an entire gen­der just because they work too hard. But the harm of this genre isn’t how it exploits well-off women’s inse­cu­ri­ties. It’s how it dis­miss­es the rest of the female population.

Con­sid­er the Jezebel piece about the plague of Asto­ri­an girl­friends. The tar­get is nei­ther ​“intim­i­dat­ed” men, nor ​“suc­cess­ful” women. It’s Legal Tease’s imag­ined rival: This ​“28-year-old recep­tion­ist” liv­ing in ​“some out­er bor­ough” with room­mates; this ​“crack­whore” with­out health insur­ance; this unpedi­greed work­ing-class woman who has the nerve to date the men Tease wants. This woman is also the maid Mau­reen Dowd wish­es she were, Rosin’s man-end­ing work­ing-class ​“matri­arch,” the sin­gle black moth­er cit­ed as a cau­tion­ary tale by Bol­ick and the nan­ny whose plight Flana­gan deplores, while insist­ing that said nan­ny is every work­ing mother’s must-have accessory.

This woman can’t be shamed into stay­ing home with her kids – she must work so that they can eat. She can’t reject men for not being well-off and still end up in a beach house. In Amer­i­ca, 80 per­cent of women liv­ing below the pover­ty line are unmar­ried, and this woman’s among them. She’s less wor­ried about Rosin’s idea that ​“female” man­age­ment styles are more suit­ed to white-col­lar jobs than she is about being shuf­fled into pink-col­lar ​“female” jobs that are con­sis­tent­ly low­er-pay­ing than male-dom­i­nat­ed ones.

She is, in oth­er words, the woman fem­i­nism is for. ​“Ambi­tion” isn’t a lux­u­ry she can renounce if it inter­feres with dat­ing; it’s sur­vival. And she’s the woman who is ignored or patron­ized – if not flat-out blamed – by the What To Do About The Nan­ny genre.

I don’t believe Bol­ick intend­ed to attack these women. Her vision of sin­gle women form­ing com­mu­ni­ties to share emo­tion­al sup­port and par­ent­ing is love­ly. But I won­der: Which women will be left out? Does the sis­ter­hood have a plan for them? And, what are they going to do about the nannies?