Yesterday I wasted some energy being mad about Brawny. Yes, that Brawny: the paper towel brand. They’ve exchanged their extra-manly man mascot for a plaid-clad woman as part of a new campaign called #strengthhasnogender. (It’s very important to include the hashtag.) This, I guess, is an effort to convince consumers that their company was spontaneously inspired to Do The Right Thing and Celebrate Women during Women’s History Month.

THE RULES DO NOT APPLY: A MEMOIR by Ariel Levy Random House, 224 pp., $27.00

This type of cynical marketing is far from innovative, which is part of why it’s so exhausting. Companies have a long, shameless history of pulling a John McCain: deploying one woman or several women as bait for the allegiance of us all. Another self-consciously “powerful” gimmick recently deployed was the placement of a statue of a girl standing with hands on hips and legs akimbo, facing the Wall Street bull. The work, titled “Fearless Girl” in case you couldn’t figure it out from her body language, was installed by the branch of a financial services corporation that, several years ago, paid over $64 million to resolve charges that they’d defrauded customers. Vote for me, buy our napkins, empower women by working for our rapacious investment firm—it’s all pandering, and transparently so. The nakedness is part of the insult; it presumes women are so stupid and vain we won’t notice what we’re actually being sold. It reduces social justice to a performance, and an unconvincing one at that.

Token women in these scenarios (Sarah Palin, the Brawny babe, the Child Who Would Be Hedge Fund Queen) are often white, which further speaks to the gestures’ superficiality. A company’s or candidate’s instinct to put a white girl on it, then sit back and reap the rewards, is not an impulse that could arise among those committed to the feminism of Audre Lorde or Winona LaDuke or Emma Goldman. But it’s very much an idea that would occur among people willing to exploit the flavor of feminism that already leaves most women behind, one that begins and ends with middle to upper class careerists like Hillary Clinton, Sheryl Sandberg, and Anne-Marie Slaughter. Within that blinkered worldview, feminism is synonymous with enhanced elevation of mostly white women, meaning greater visibility, higher compensation, and increasingly prestigious jobs for those already positioned for such success.

I suspect—I hope—you are a little bored by this summation, because I suspect (and hope) it’s familiar to you. By now, even the original offenders have learned better, or at least pay lip service to the possibility that they might; Sheryl Sandberg eventually tempered aspects of the (much criticized) Lean In, just as Anne-Marie Slaughter, years later, disavowed the framing of her infamous 2012 article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” The vast majority of the women in my life—who range in age from early twenties to early forties—know that mainstream culture’s obsession with empowerment and “having it all” is hopelessly corrupted and lobotomized, antithetical to a truly progressive vision of the future. Of course we can’t have it all. Most of us can barely “have” a living wage; to simply obtain decent health insurance is a coup.

Which is why I’m so baffled by the premise of Ariel Levy’s The Rules Do Not Apply, a memoir devoted to affirming the familiar truth that a person doesn’t always get everything they want—namely: a happy, lasting marriage, a nice house, and a baby at any age. Levy is an intelligent, well-traveled woman, a staff writer for The New Yorker who made a name for herself with 2005’s Female Chauvinist Pigs, a critique of women’s willing participation in ostensibly sexist and demeaning cultural rituals. Feminism is not unfamiliar to her, nor is human pain. (At the beginning of The Rules, she travels to South Africa in pursuit of Caster Semenya, the young Olympian runner subjected to constant, degrading speculation about her gender.)