who's imitating whom?

we hear so much about how the fashion industry's obsession with thinness is so detrimental to the healthy body image of young girls, and i think that's absolutely true. even my relatively media-free braniac 9-year old who disdains popular girl culture is worried that she's fat.

but it occurs to me that the horror of the size zero obsession is not just that our little girls are too often and at an ever-earlier age trying to imitate super-models; it's that our super-skinny super-models are trying to imitate little girls. heroin chic? how about pedophilia chic? this morning i was watching some of the little girls at micah's pre-school, one four year old in particular, and i thought "wow, she's got a super-model body!" and then i thought, "no, she's got a little girl body, and that's what the size zero super-models are after." i know this is not a new thought, but the whole catering-to-latent-(and no doubt not-so-latent)-pedophile-fantasies just creeped me out in that moment, as i watched these really lovely, totally unselfconscious little girls deciding whether they wanted to be the bell ringer today or the handy helper.