Read: How Dove ruined its body image

It’s comforting to think that who we are and how we look is some sort of true north, or at least a brandable identity with its own product line. But it also brings up a question. If only some women can be categorized as “real,” what becomes of the women outside those boundaries?

Women can’t be divided neatly into models and “real” women. By “real,” these companies usually mean a person a little bigger or darker-skinned than those in the images they or their competitors traditionally have put forth, but being a model isn’t some divine status bestowed by a higher power. According to the definitions provided by consumer brands, we’re left with two categories of acceptability: those who are young, thin, and symmetrical enough to conform so closely to conventional American beauty ideals that they make a lot of women feel bad, and “real” women who, these ad campaigns suggest, are simply the most conventionally attractive of everyone else.

While brands like Dove market on their inclusivity, they still tend to go with flat stomachs and hourglass figures when choosing their larger or disabled models. The American clothing and lingerie brand Aerie, which celebrated five years of its #AerieREAL campaign in January and has built its public name on body diversity, still doesn’t make a true plus-size line. (A representative for the brand told me that it will soon be expanding its bra line by 50 percent, including larger band and cup sizes.)

Even for the brands that market to “real” women with more sizes, the result is still pretty clear. These ads wrest the mantle of cultural approval from one subset of women and bestow it on another, a transfer of power that will hopefully be met with grateful sales dollars. In doing so, the campaigns validate one set of people as the truest to a nonsensical concept. For “real women” to be a useful idea, people have to grant that it’s possible for a person’s womanhood to be fraudulent. You can remove digital retouching, but there is no objectively correct way to depict a woman in a photo, or for a woman to present herself in real life.

In a time when the idea of gender authenticity is often used as a cudgel against the human rights of queer and trans people, drawing lines of acceptability around any portion of the female population for the purpose of selling soap or loungewear can feel especially uncomfortable. The realities of being a woman in 2019 are just as messy and varied as everything else about trying to find solid footing in this cultural era. A woman in a full face of makeup is no less real than one who never bothers to apply eyeliner, and both of those women are real whether they fall outside a brand’s size range or fall within the traditional ideals of beauty that women have now been asked to reject.