Late last week, I was driving my daughter to her play-based, shoe-optional, sugar-free preschool — a magical Arcadia where an actual chicken is free to roam and grow fat off Pirate’s Booty, and where the major areas of academic focus revolve around turn-taking, problem-solving and the life story of Rosa Parks — when I experienced a moment of self-doubt so paralyzing I almost had to pull over. The radio in my car was tuned to an NPR show, on which callers were debating the decision by the C.E.O. of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer, to ban employees from working from home. I’d been thinking about Mayer since early that morning, having fallen down an Internet rabbit hole that plunged me deep into her art collection, her exclusive wardrobe and her estimated $300 million net worth. Specifically, I was thinking about the rather highhanded, Marie Antoinette-ish way in which she dismissed the need for extended maternity leave, as if it hadn’t occurred to her that building an en suite nursery for her newborn next to her office basically elided the need for it, since the baby could remain within a few feet of her all day long.

En route to the preschool, I was suddenly visited by an apocalyptic vision of the future: I saw my daughter as a frustrated former liberal-arts major stuck in a midlevel job at a company where, despite the easy availability of 3-D holographic telepresence software allowing people all over the globe to interface with one another from the comfort of their own brain implants, employees were now required to “live from work” and occasionally beam themselves home for some cursory family face time. Moreover, I saw that I alone was to blame for this dismal state of affairs, because I am a deluded throwback to carefree days, and in my attempt to raise a conscious, creative and socially and environmentally responsible child while lacking the means to also finance her conscious, creative and environmentally and socially responsible lifestyle forever, I’d accidentally gone and raised a hothouse serf. Oops.

As Facebook’s C.O.O., Sheryl Sandberg, writes in her new book, “Lean In,” a guide for helping women claw their way to the top of the corporate heap, “the media will report endlessly about women attacking other women, which distracts from the real issues.” And it’s true; there’s something about the is-she-or-isn’t-she-a-feminist way the Mayer debate has been framed (and even about the way Mayer herself has participated in it) that feels almost deliberately obtuse. Not that it’s surprising — pretty much every issue that concerns a woman is framed as a woman’s issue. But while Mayer is, in fact, a woman, her circumstances are so rarefied that she might as well be a unicorn. So it’s interesting that the discussions about whether she is a feminist, or whether she displays sufficient empathy for her fellow working mothers, persist even after she has made it amply clear that she never intended to become a standard-bearer for the plight of working women. Furthermore, as she told PBS, she does not consider herself a feminist because she lacks “the militant drive” and “the chip on the shoulder that sometimes comes with that.” (Take that, ladies!)

As Lisa Miller wrote in her 2012 New York magazine profile of Mayer: “Since her earliest days at Google, and despite a canny performance of her own ‘girliness,’ Mayer has refused to make the Woman Question part of her public persona. She doesn’t want to talk at all about how being a woman — in tech, or at Google, or in upper management — makes her different from the guys in the room or deserving of any kind of special consideration. ‘I’m a geek,’ is what she always says.”