Walking through town at night, the week after International Women’s Day, and the shop windows screamed empowering messages. Mannequins’ T-shirts were lit from behind, a headless army subtitled in Impact font. STRONG WOMAN. FIERCE. HEAR ME ROAR. GIRL CREW. FEARLESS FEMALE. FEMINIST. With every bus stop, I got more irritated.

But first let me stress that the way brands supported International Women’s Day was amazing. Please, never imagine for a second that I would want to undermine the important political work they’re doing with their buy-one-get-one-free yoga classes, and their hand-cream samples, and their phone cases that say “Cheeky Grrrl” in glitter. I’d heard of the myriad promotions businesses were planning – indeed over the past month I’ve kept a special folder in my inbox into which press releases from zoos, beer companies, juice bars and fashion labels celebrating women by selling them hats or salad cream automatically fell – but the scale of support truly overwhelmed me. McDonald’s turned their M over on the internet. So it was a W. Which was really powerful. Though, admittedly, by the time I’d finished the complimentary thimble of prosecco handed to me outside a pilates studio, and considered next door’s International Women’s Day discount on a bikini wax, the sheen had worn off a little. I passed a Tesco Metro, and in my weary wokeness, read it as Tesco #MeToo.

Show me a feisty woman and I’ll show you someone who finds it hard to be alone

Why did all this annoy me so much? It’s not just the branded feminism. It’s a bit that, but not all that. It’s not just the use of feminism as a marketing opportunity, plonking it in the window of H&M scrubbed clean of all guts and pain. It’s not just the commodification of it, the relentless selling of stuff, the viscous flood of “content” that leaves you feeling slightly filthy as, halfway through learning about trafficked women or the rise of backstreet abortions, you find yourself seriously considering the purchase of a new moisturising leg oil that smells of vanilla. It’s not just that. It’s not even simply the fact of the messaging, though “Fearless”, “Fierce”, “Feisty” – it all makes me shrivel. The condescension.

Who decided we couldn’t be scared? Why all this interminable energy? To be female, even to be feminist, does not require full-time perkiness. In fact, in my experience quite a lot of the time to be a woman is also to be a bit cross, with a slight headache, occasionally overwhelmed. But I suppose that’s less snappy on a T-shirt. We don’t all have to be incredible, or inspiring – most of us just want to be accepted as equal. Show me a fearless woman and I’ll show you someone who has pressed their fear into a crack inside them like a prayer in a wall, or who carries it hidden in their palm, a small thorn made of experience. Show me a feisty woman and I’ll show you someone who finds it hard to be alone. These are not essential qualities. They sit alongside the less marketable ones, always.

It’s the same with the messaging that promises women we are all beautiful. Are we? Or are most of us fairly weatherworn and sullen, and thrown by the meaning of the word. If every woman is beautiful, then what is its value? And, spoken in the context of female empowerment, what does the insistence that everyone is beautiful tell us about beauty itself? Perhaps the intention is that we will read it on a magazine advert and then relax totally, all that anxiety about weight and skin and age now dissipated to allow concentration on overthrowing the patriarchy and making our flats smell nice. Instead, its effect is that we learn “beauty” is core to our feminine experience, ingrained and important. If you don’t feel beautiful then it’s nothing to do with the myriad reminders that you need to work harder to pass as female, it’s your own silly-billy fault.

OK, but here is the thing that annoys me the most as I trundle through town with a face on. It’s fairly common practice now that to wear, say, a Ramones T-shirt, you should at the very least own an album and be able to sing along to their hits. If you wear a T-shirt that says PRIYA’S HEN PARTY 2001 then those piqued enough by the penis acronym on the back should expect no less than a good half an hour of anecdotes about what you got up to at Center Parcs that fateful weekend in June.

Similarly, if you wear a T-shirt saying FEMINIST, then the expectation should be that you have performed some action to further women’s rights, that you have marched, voted, campaigned. That the company selling it has invested in women’s projects. That the wearer will at the very least be able to sing along to feminism’s greatest hits – reproductive rights, sexual violence, equal pay. Otherwise, what is it other than political appropriation?

The irony, of course, is that the feminist slogan that really rolls off the tongue and would look fabulous on a T-shirt, is the simplest: “Deeds not words”, babes.

Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.ukor follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman