On Tuesday, Crikey offered an account of the way in which prominent tactics of the Yes campaign for same-sex marriage served to undermine their purpose. That same day, news broke — internationally, in fact — of a local performance by a private firm that also appeared to promote that cause while actively trashing it. Pro-marriage equality media outlets, argued our piece on Tuesday, appease some at the risk of alienating those beyond the in-group. The pro-marriage equality bra seller that jiggled through Sydney’s Martin Place this week may have appeased those of us eager to cop an eyeful of cleavage. It did so perhaps at the risk of aligning the Yes case with shitty employment practice.

“Honey Birdette” may suggest the sort of pseudonym we’d see on an adultery app. It is, in fact, the name of a lingerie company that has faced questions about its labour practice for more than a year. When the advocacy group Young Workers Centre received documents in December 2016 for use by store employees, internally referred to as “Honeys”, they made the case that stacking shelves on a ladder while wearing stilettos was neither sexy nor WorkSafe compliant.

Former staffer Chanelle Rogers posted a petition describing her work conditions. Some news outlets emphasised the activist’s more controvertible claims — those of harassment by customers and employee unease with the “sexy” store dress code. But Rogers and her allies at the Young Workers Centre had also sought to bring attention to matters including unpaid overtime, bullying and, of course, those high heels, which the company’s “Little Black Book” of staff guidelines declared should be worn at all times.

[Rundle: if we have to have this plebiscite, we have to win it]

This is not, if you like, only a “feminist” issue, but one that might end up being resolved only by an orthopaedic surgeon. While there were groups, such as Collective Shout — a group whose social justice efforts peaked, in my view, with the invention of the truly awful word “sexification” — that offered workers unity only against sexism, Rogers and others had made it clear that they felt violated by forces other than the patriarchy.

This is the thing about any social matter divisive enough to be broadly debated, though, isn’t it? Just as the indignities that Honey Birdette workers say they faced are compound, so is a matter like homophobia. Loathing or disdain for non-normative sexuality has multiple origins: criminal law, medical science, religious doctrine, labour, family organisation. It is overdetermined. It will not be solved, and will possibly even be worsened, by the emptiness of a debate; again, per Tuesday’s article.

It certainly will not be diminished by the spectacle, however delightful, of ladies in rose-pink suspender belts holding professionally crafted signs that urge us to both “Free the Nipple” and “Make Love Not Plebiscite”. You may say for all that you and your IPO are worth that what you are fighting for is “tolerance”. But here, as elsewhere, the fight is only for the market value of the “protester”.

One could say that this promotional shimmy was harmless, that there are few who would seriously connect it to the claims of poor employment practice or to the more earnest aims of the Yes campaign. It’s just a bit of isolated fun. Even if we accept that this moment was just another meaningless marketing exercise in Sydney, we must also concede that the nature of protest, and even of debate, has itself been irrevocably rebranded.

[Turnbull needs to get marriage equality off the agenda]

I have no moralising objections to ladies in underwear. I am no more appalled by the social conditions that lead to bikini carwashes than those that place squeegees in the hands of homeless people at traffic lights. I will say, though, that I am troubled by a time in which the genuine expression of genuine grievance is almost impossible. Nearly every truly legitimate objection is trivialised, and the trivial ones — was a prominent media host bullied on Twitter because of her stance on Yes? Well, who gives a shit? — are legitimised.

I have lingering self-respect sufficient not to invoke The Matrix, but, gee, it’s difficult to come up with a more convenient way to describe an era of utter spectacle in which most acts of rebellion serve and do not destabilise the master. News organisations and scanties stores paint themselves in rainbow colours, heedless of the negative outcomes by those they claim to represent. Moralising feminists argue to either end “sexification” or to “free the nipple”, but have no true solidarity with the female workers who sell and make the clothes they’d prefer women would dress, or not dress, themselves in. Journalists dominate headlines about their noble fights with other journalists, while the substance of the fight itself is lost to more personal branding.

Rogers wrote of her former employer that it had promised “empowerment” to all workers but delivered a reality in which she was shifting crates of merchandise in five-inch heels. She says that the company “promised a dream. They delivered a nightmare”. Which, come to think of it, sums up the current status quo recycling of “debate” and “protest” just as well as The Matrix.  For as long as rebellion serves only the mainframe, we can all expect bad dreams.