‘Mirror, mirror on the wall, I don’t see anyone like me at all…” is the message on the cover of the current edition of Stylist, the women’s free weekly magazine, much garlanded with awards.

Editor-in-chief Lisa Smosarski is a feminist who smartly uses the magazine to find imaginative ways to proselytise that, while readers may face private and individual challenges, many more of their difficulties are rooted in the public and systemic – low pay, discrimination and, last week, what she calls “the mental health crisis”, triggered by a ubiquitous and fetishised very white, very thin, very doctored vision of female beauty.

She quotes a recent survey by Dove, the manufacturer of toiletries that boasts it uses “real” women in its ads. Seventy per cent of women said they did not feel represented by media or advertising; in terms of ethnicity, body shape, age, disability, the diversity of womankind is absent.

So Stylist has launched the Love Women initiative, to challenge itself and “all media to think about how women are represented”. It’s collaborating with Dove to support the latter’s #ShowUs campaign. This is a new photo library compiled with Getty Images and Girlgaze and chosen by women and non-binary individuals from 39 countries “to show women as they really are… defining beauty on their own terms”. (Why beauty? Why not character or strength or independence?)

Veronica Yoko, heavily scarred after contracting bacterial meningitis at 15, is a Paralympic triathlete who wants to #ShowUs “there’s strength in our scars”. Leticia is “a lover of life who wants to #ShowUs that beauty doesn’t rest at 67”. And Ya Wen “is an artist who wants to #ShowUs that bathing suits are for all bodies”. It should hearten but, far from normalising diversity, it patronises. Perhaps it’s the #ShowUs tone?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Feminism has a long history of being co-opted... first, it was flogging cigarettes and booze wrapped in the language of liberation.’ Photograph: Apic/Getty Images

As part of Stylist’s Love Women campaign, it has made five pledges. These include inclusivity – to represent all women and have one photoshoot a month using “real”, diverse women (one?). There’s also reality – “we will ensure that we never sell an impossible dream”; accountability and advocacy; calling out and challenging “brands, media and people who refuse to represent women with respect and truth”. And education – teaching everyone what needs to be done to resolve this “self-esteem crisis”.

All of which is commendable (and follows a tradition laid down by Ms magazine and Spare Rib) and may mean that the companies that advertise in Stylist will opt to take their lucrative business elsewhere. Or, in these vegan, anti-plastic times, will they rush to identify with an apparently “ethical” brand?

That may depend on how serious the magazine is in its intent to conquer the very systems of power that shape and define what’s female so that, according to Dove, women have internalised the directive that they are anything but worth it.

Does Stylist’s intent matter? Yes it does. Feminism has a long history of being co-opted, the radical extracted from its message and commodified. First, it was flogging cigarettes and booze wrapped in the language of liberation. Now, there are any number of ways for an “independent” woman to “choose” to freeze her face, bloat her lips and generally hack her body about, driven by the false image of perfection on which capitalism makes its money.

Stylist may yet prove to be David against Goliath, but if it is it needs to look at the women it portrays on its pages – and a great deal else. Poor self-esteem is about more than face value. It is also reflected in what we relentlessly buy and what we wear. As Susan Brownmiller wrote in Femininity: “Who said that clothes never make a statement… Clothes never shut up.” And they cost. The latest issue of Stylist in its regular feature “Thirty Little Pick-Me-Ups” features a dress at £415, “most desired” sandals £340 and black dresses that range from £12 to an eyewatering £610. Newspapers and women’s magazine flog similar high-priced wardrobes to readers, many of whom are on very modest salaries – selling an impossible dream?

More than 30 years ago, Janice Winship investigated women’s magazines for her PhD. She called for a new kind of “mental chocolate” that was not based on insecurities, anxieties and uber-consumption that subliminally send a message of disempowerment, inadequacy and isolation. That’s still a long way off. But one day, in magazines, social media and popular culture, women may yet see more of themselves as they really are, happily resisting what others, in the name of profit, demand that they strive to become. One day.

• Yvonne Roberts is a journalist, writer and broadcaster