Bones are not lovely

Teen Times: She's far too thin. Everybody agrees on that. In those shrunken hotpants and skinny vest she looks positively ill, like an urchin from Oliver Twist, albeit one with this season's Prada handbag and Posh bob.

But just how skinny is Victoria Beckham? How would it feel if she sat on your lap? Would she be heavier than a kitten? If you hugged her, would she break? We do know that she wears jeans with a 23-inch waist - the size, apparently, of a seven-year-old child. It also happens to be the circumference of my head.

But Victoria Beckham is not alone, she is merely leading the group of a frightening "New Look", which has come to dominate our lives. Other exemplars are Lindsay Lohan, Nicole Richie, Mischa Barton and Keira Knightley - women who do not have an ounce of fat to share between them. You might not give a tossed salad how much these bony birds weigh, you might not even think it's our business. But it is. It matters because hyper-thin has somehow become today's celebrity standard and thus the goalposts have moved for us all.

Images of Lohan's chest-bones reaching out to greet strangers, or Knightley's xylophone of vertebrae, countable at 30 paces, have burned themselves into our consciousness so that über-thin no longer looks odd. It no longer shocks. But is does make you look at your own teenage, warm, soft body in a hard new light.

I have seen this kind of thin before - in anorexic girls in hospital, from eating too little. I never imagined those poor girls with whom you avoid making eye contact were to become celebrated, a glory to which women of all ages might aspire.

And we do. After all, the mantra is that thin gets you noticed. And these girls that grace our magazine covers are definitely noticed. They are associated with glamour and success and I have met a girl as young as 10 who is unhappy with her figure. Size 00 - a logical impossibility when you pause to consider it - is now Hollywood's dress size of choice. Icons of the past such as Marilyn Monroe would never get the job today. We only have to realise that to know something's up.

The bottom line is that clothes look better on people who are thinner. It's nothing to do with men (as they all prefer curvy girls) and everything to do with competition between females. Four in 10 of us are on a permanent diet. Ninety-eight per cent of us hate our figures. We know exactly how much we ate for lunch and therefore how much we can eat for dinner. We're living under a siege of our own making, bedevilled by a sickening guilt as we lick the last chocolate smear from a Magnum.

But perhaps we should look harder. At Victoria's sick little body, at her desperate little jeans. Perhaps we should train ourselves to see the permanent hunger of the hyper-thin. Strip away the gloss, starve their "lovely bones" of the oxygen of publicity. In the final analysis, doesn't the responsibility lie not with them, but with us?

Sophie Haslett (17) is a fifth-form student at Saint Columba's College, Dublin.

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