TRENDS! They affect us all. Like: Remember slap bracelets? I sure as shit do. One’s LIFE was determined, in large part and in second grade, by the number and quality of one’s slap bracelets. Or: Leggings for pants! There was a time when people — and not always laughable people — engaged in such a method of butt-covering! Or: Blogging! Ha ha ha, BLOGGING. Yeah, that was a good idea! Keep on going, Internet nerds! And yet: There is a specific variety of important writing dedicated to covering the trends of the day, so that you can catch on to them fifteen minutes too late after even your mom knows about them and, thus, be totally uncool. This is the “trend piece!” And when it comes to ladies, it is… disturbingly predictable, actually?

Because: Are you rich? Are you married? Are you pregnant? Are you fancily clad? Well, whichever of these four important Lady Success Sectors you’re lacking in, better GET TO IT. Because the New York Times is about to publish an exposé on what a loser you are. You know, again. Oh, also: Do you have a chicken farm and a fixed-gear? Or any artisanal cheeses? Do you brew your own beer and knit sweaters out of your hair and make recyclable menstrual pads out of old New York Times Magazine issues? Are you sleeping with Das Racist? ALL of Das Racist? Including Dap? Yeah, get on all of that, too. In between bearing gorgeous tow-headed babies to your legally contracted husband and posing on your immaculate — yet tousled! Trend piece people, they’re just like us! — white linens with your lifemate and/or spawn.

Here, Amanda Hess of TBD and I discuss the many ways in which your uterus has fallen out of fashion!

SADY: Amanda! I have an exciting trend amongst the ladies, which you may wish to report upon!

AMANDA: A startling number of us are expressing our femininity through motocross.

SADY: Motocross. GChatting. In a few exciting and specific incidences, drinking Coke Zero while GChatting about trend pieces, is a trend, amongst the ladies! Ladies, in growing numbers, wish they could smoke inside! Ladies, oftentimes, are very happy with the sweaters they’re wearing right now! Truly, the possibilities for respectable and absorbing journalism regarding the genders, THEY ARE ENDLESS.

AMANDA: They are. The truth is that I often enjoy pieces about weird stuff that is suddenly going on among a select group of people.

SADY: Oh, sure! The Observer’s reportage on the “urban tomboy” validated my entire existence! You can’t take that away from me.

AMANDA: I just wish they wouldn’t extend that select group of people to entire genders, so much!

SADY: Right. Because, oft-times, they just end up re-iterating the same thing. Which is that feminism ends with women unwed, cradling sacks of potatoes with pacifiers stuck in them due to their childlessness, and men are just unhappy and broke and unable to find a lady they want to do it with. Which is really hetero, but also: Insulting! Even to the heteros!

AMANDA: Yes. I mean, and I recognize that many of these writers are likely aware of how ridiculous these arguments are. I do have a soft spot for absurd arguments. Like the writer arguing that a new skirt-fluttering, blackberry-clutching, bike-riding mass of women is taking over the streets of New York City. That’s obviously just a flight of fancy bolstered by some pretty photographs. I just wish the Times would also make some space for thoroughly anecdotal pieces about how feminism is not in fact destroying anything.

SADY: Yeah. And you can’t blame the paper behind the “hipster beer belly” for sometimes just wanting to take a bunch of pictures and be like, “trend! ‘The’ ‘hipsters’ are slightly older now than they used to be, also drink beer, probs have more sedentary jobs now! STYLE.”

AMANDA: I welcome any excuse to take some photographs of aging hipsters and then crop them at the neck to emphasize their shame. There just has to be a point where the Times, AT THE VERY LEAST, recognizes that “small but growing” is code for “three people I found on the corner two hours before deadline,” and that people really aren’t buying it anymore. Thanks in large part to Jack Shafer. Thank you Jack Shafer.

SADY: Haha. Yeah. But why does tying things to feminism at random keep working? Like, here is a sentence from an article e-mailed to me by a reader: “Could this be part of the reason why one in eight Australian men experiences severe depression in their lifetime?” Ten guesses what “this” is, Amanda. TEN GUESSES!

AMANDA: Um … genetics. Weather patterns. Water source poisoning. Australia more boring than portrayed in films. Depression just more common than reported.

SADY: I would also have accepted “appearing in an Australian trend piece entitled ‘The Bloody Hipsters Have Beer Bellies Now, Mate'”

AMANDA: Haha. OK, so it’s feminism?

SADY: YES IT IS. But, you know. Article written by a lady. True by default!

AMANDA: Right. That’s not sexism. Women’s liberation, as we all know, has also been blamed for the decreased happiness of women. Although I am officially tying women’s unhappiness to the increase in trend pieces analyzing why women are not happy.

SADY: As the saying goes, “behind every great social bummer, lies a great woman, weeping for her never-to-be-born children and thumbing her well-worn copy of Lori Gottlieb’s book on settling.” I really like Vanessa Grigoriadis’s writing, and bet she’s a great lady, but I’m still kind of baffled by that piece on the Pill, the thesis of which seems to be, “if you wait until 40 to have children, you will have the difficulties associated with getting pregnant at 40, also the Pill somehow something something.” “Woman Uses Condom, Reports Not Getting Pregnant, Weeps.” I’m just unsure what the solution or point was, other than the time-honored YOU ARE A LOSER moment delivered by all trend pieces on women, which in my case came right here: “Even most die-hard feminists were still married at 25 and pregnant by 28.” WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT. THEY WEEEEERRRRRRRE. I’M FUCCCCCCCCKED OH MY GOD I FAIL I FAIL IT ALL EVERYTHING oh, no, wait, that’s like factually wrong.

AMANDA: Simply consult the intensive reproductive studies completed exclusively among women identifying as die-hard

feminists.

SADY: Like, somehow — hold on a moment while I blow your mind — trend pieces on women always seem to boil down to (a) women generally are sad losers, or (b) these specific women lead lives of sparkling organic vegan locally-sourced Brooklyny riding-a-fixed-gear-in-a-fluttery-skirt-with-an-iPhone-to-text-their-boyfriends-at-their-indie-band’s-rehearsal perfection, and therefore YOU SPECIFICALLY are a sad loser. And should be pregnant by now. With your husband’s baby. Whom you have already married. And who lives in your brownstone, that has two stories, and a refrigerator stocked entirely by the local Farmer’s Market. I CAN’T DO IT NEW YORK TIMES! I CAN’T DO IT ALL! IF I COULD TIME TRAVEL BACK TEN YEARS AND IMPREGNATE MYSELF WITH DAS RACIST’S BABY I WOULD! PROBABLY VICTOR VASQUEZ SPECIFICALLY! BUT HEEMS IS ALSO OKAY!

AMANDA: In other words, AN INCREASING NUMBER of feminists are voicing their regret about not sleeping with a small but growing number of Das Racist members.

SADY: Women, increasingly, wish aloud for time travel devices to aid them in this quest.

AMANDA: But the pill story is also a very complicated way of saying, “women do not know what is good for them.” Which, I mean, I understand that sometimes women don’t always plan for fertility problems, but what is the potential solution? Having babies when you don’t want to have babies yet, if ever?

SADY: Right. It’s the idea of the Pill as “tricking” women into having less awareness of the fact that they might be infertile later on that stands out. Women didn’t want to have babies; they took a medication so as not to have babies; later, they wanted to have babies, and it was hard. I don’t see a trick here. I see something that’s like a lot of other life decisions. If only I’d studied harder in school, I could have gotten into grad school. Now, that still might be a possibility, but it will be harder. If I’d pitched that magazine, I could have written for them. Now, I still could, but it’s going to be hard. Sometimes people make the decision that’s right at the time, then face difficulties later on. It’s not the Pill’s fault. It’s not the fault of women for not taking up some random dude on the street and forcing him to marry them on the eve of their 25th birthday so they can get pregnant. It’s life. You can’t always get what you want, when you want it. The end.

AMANDA: Right. I mean, I am hoping that the reason these stories gain traction and end up in major publications with impressive bylines is because the other story, “woman has baby and ends up finding it more difficult to do some other shit she wanted to do,” is so common it is boring?

SADY: Yeah. But it’s also pretty flagrantly a class thing. I mean, we have “16 and Pregnant” and “Teen Mom” and stuff occupying just as much space in the culture. But the message is: Stupid poor people! Always getting pregnant instead of grabbing their bootstraps! If something makes it into NYM, it’s a different story. Sad rich people! Always wanting to get pregnant and finding it difficult!

AMANDA: Haha. God. Yeah. I believe “housewife dismayed that she cannot embody both a feminist and maternal ideal turns to chicken farming” also falls into this category

SADY: Yeah. “Hip young men overthrow patriarchy with giant beards, tea parties,” is another one of those things. Like, I’m so glad your antiquing is working out for you, Daddy Parentsbucks! Meanwhile, folks is getting beaten up for being perceived as too feminine. But whatever. TURN UP THE FLEET FOXES AND POUR THE TEA! THE MISSUS IS MAKING ARTISANAL CHEESES OUT BACK!

AMANDA: Right? That’s why I was pleased to see Peggy Orenstein, in that femivore piece, aaaaalmost straight up say, “this may only actually be a trend among people who are besties with fancy New York Times reporters.”

SADY: Yes. And yet, if I see one more softly lit photo of young-ish, handsome, white people from Brooklyn posing with their angelically tousle-headed blonde twin boys like they’re auditioning for Taylor Swift’s “Mine” video, I’m giving up. On life. If I ever have a child, you will know that child, for it will have peanut butter all over its face and will be setting the cat on fire. Such are my realities.

AMANDA: Yeah, I mean, that’s the danger of building a prestigious newspaper, then downsizing it. You get a lot of great writers who, whether before or after they are deemed accomplished enough to work for the NYT, are quite fancy. And then perhaps they don’t always have the time to use their skills to report on topics further afield, and they end up writing about their friends, and the zany new trends in which they are engaging. The bigger problem, then, is the assumption that people outside that sphere of influence actually engage in that behavior.

SADY: Right. It ends up being really hegemonic and classed and often racialized. And then you have someone go into a K-Mart and act like it’s some Hell Dimension, with no acknowledgement of the reality of the folks who are reading it. It’s really super-easy for me, and for anyone else who covers a certain subject, to get tunnel vision and be blind to the realities of folks who don’t spend as much time with that subject. But when you’re trying to cover How People Live, the silliness engendered by that tunnel vision just becomes hugely apparent.

AMANDA: Absolutely. I mean, if you must publish frothy trend pieces, at least diversify your reporter pool.

SADY: Yeah. Although “Increasing Number of People Heard To Yell “FUCKING G TRAIN” At Four In The Morning While Debating Whether Taking A Cab Would Literally Bankrupt Them” isn’t quite so fluttery-skirt fantastic.