Lena Dunham pretty much the quintessential “Marketplace Feminist,” with her lifestyle-marketing “Lenny Letter” which, in July, “talked about the importance of women in science — thanks to a check from General Electric” in a week-long brand placement deal. I’ve brought the term “marketplace feminism” (and its origin) up on my Twitter about a million times (and a few here on Medium), but I am repeating a point from Andi Zeisler’s fantastic criticism of the phenomenon, a book entitled “We Were Feminists Once.”

What Zeisler calls “marketplace feminism,” one could also call “capitalist feminism,” “neoliberal feminism,” or even just “for-profit feminism,” This version of feminism applies a (ridiculous) free market analog to an ideology that is constantly called “cultural Marxism” by its detractors. It’s an extension of neoliberalism, something people constantly mistake as an insult for “being liberal” — which, as a term, “liberal” itself doesn’t really mean what people think it means (hint: “free markets” are not a feature of leftism). Neoliberalism (simplified and summed up) means “applying free market ideology to all situations, economic and social.”

Do you know whom marketplace feminism targets first? Women of color.

Women of color are more adversely affected than white women by every issue feminism takes on. For them, the wage gap is wider, the harassment is more frequent and more fervent, and the erasure is constant. For this reason, they are often the progenitors of much of what eventually gains acceptance as “feminism,” which then gets stripped-bare to contain the most attention-worthy aspects of to create the “marketable” version.

To give an obvious-yet-astounding example: Flavia Dzodan, the woman of color who coined the phrase “my feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit” has seen nothing for it, despite widespread adoption. You’ve seen that co-opted and used on buttons, shirts, websites (big ones) and other for-profit shit. For more info on that, read this piece she wrote. Simplifying it to make it marketable reduces the value of the words, making it impossible to apply in a manner that doesn’t conjure a person or product.

Dunham is valuable economically and spreading the buzzword version of feminism that fits on shirts and coffee mugs (while, clearly, not deeply considering the implications of things she says; racism isn’t compatible with any ideology of equality). As her popularity rises, so does the demand for meaningless products with regurgitated, oversimplified soundbyte versions of concepts that meant something when they were a complex, important observation or demand when they came out of the mouth of someone with considerably less — often a person of color.

It’s just a matter of time until some “feminist” CEO writes the “Come On Guys, No One Is Perfect” op-ed somewhere. Writer and diversity consultant Mikki Kendal (homepage, PayPal) identified a likely (and egregious) angle many will take in Lena Dunham’s defense — possibly subconsciously. She observed, “for sitting next to Dunham at a ball, Beckham is about to be the subject of fifty-eleven thinkpieces on weight and attraction.” This will direct people who bring it up to frame it the same way Dunham has — as if some person of color she doesn’t know not paying attention to her is a real problem.