Does This Coffin Make Me Look Thin?

I just finished reading an article on Reuters.com about a beauty contestant in Australia being criticized by the media and the general public for being too thin in a pageant promoting "healthy, proportioned bodies". Now, I understand that there are people out there who are naturally thin, I actually know a few of them (granted, the majority of the ones I'm acquainted with are men, but, I digress) and they truly can't do much of anything about their weight. But the young woman in question, a model, is 5'11" and 108lbs.!! Her body mass index is 15.1. 18 is considered malnutrition. The pageant director said that the contestant's corpse-like, I mean, svelte body, is due to her Macedonian heritage.

"They have long, lithe bodies and small bones. It is their body type, just like Asian girls tend to be small," [Pageant director Deborah]Miller said.

Wow. Is this person serious? Three points below what's considered malnutrition and it's her ancestry that's to blame? Come on. The thin people I know look thin, not like they're going to collapse at any given moment! Even models from Ethiopia, who are notorious for their lean bodies, still manage to look like they aren't going to break if you breathe on them. This woman looks like there is an effort being made to be that thin and I would want to see medical documentation that she is healthy before I would even consider that it's just genetics to blame.

The first thing I thought when I read this article and saw the accompanying picture, was, Holy Cow! That girl is a skeleton with the skin still on! I must have actually said something to this effect out loud, because my seven year old daughter said, "What? I wanna see!" Which then led me to my second thought, which was, Do I really want to let my impressionable child see this? It took me a minute before I decided to show her, and then proceeded to explain that the young lady in the picture was in a beauty contest, but people were concerned for her because she looked way too thin. The people in that country were trying to decide if they should make a rule that contestants had to be at least a certain BMI (yes, I had to explain that too) in order to participate in the contest from now on. My daughter looked at the picture again and said "She's too skinny. Why do people like that?" to which I answered that some people think that THAT is what's pretty. "Her face is pretty, but her body looks scary." was her retort, and then she went off to find something else to do. From the mouths of babes...

I know that the world of modeling had a very similar debate when a model ended up dead from complications of her eating disorder. Many European runways have a BMI cutoff to hopefully curb the onslaught of emaciated models. They don't want to have that kind of stigma hanging over them.

When will we decide that beauty isn't worth anything if you're dead or in a hospital. As far as I know, there isn't a competition for prettiest cadaver. The only thing I feel I can do about it is to keep voicing my opinion that this "dying to be prettiest" mindset is wrong and to keep telling my kids to find their own definitions of what beauty really is.