Getty Images Black is slimming, but someone ought to tell Mary-Kate Olsen, Calista Flockhart, Ellen Pompeo and Nicole Richie (from left)that's the last thing they need. Hollywood actresses are slinking right past svelte to skeletal.

Mary-Kate Olsen, treated for anorexia. Lindsay Lohan copped to bulimia. Nicole Richie looks like her head might topple off her frail little shoulders, and you could hammer a nail with Keira Knightley's clavicle. Flockhart's new TV home should be renamed the Anorexia Bulimia Company – the network's leading ladies include “Grey's Anatomy's” Ellen Pompeo, who's built like the skeletons in the medical book that gave her show its name, Desperately Thin Housewife Teri Hatcher, not to mention her castmates, who were all looking starkly angular late last season. (Marcia Cross admitted to a British magazine that staying thin was “a living hell.” She apparently sneaked some carbs here and there, because she's pregnant at 44.)

Even Katie Couric's hips were airbrushed off the page in a network promo shot.

“This extreme, severe, emaciated level of thinness seems to be the new optimal,” said Naomi Wolf, author of the 1991 book, “The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women.” “Human beings aren't made like that. They don't look like that unless there's something terribly wrong.”

No one, except perhaps the stars themselves, knows for sure who is maintaining their skin-and-bones look through actual eating disorders, or other by other means, like the drug-and-alcohol diet, or the cigarettes-and-coffee diet.

No matter the methods, in this celebrity-worshipping, media-saturated age, concentration-camp chic is getting seared into our consciousness like an ahi tuna salad, hold the dressing and the fish.

This might have no effect at all on a self-assured grown-up who thinks size 0 sounds like clothes for someone who'd rather be invisible.

But for many women and girls, being anything other than hyper-thin is grounds for feeling like an ogre.

DAN TREVAN / Union-Tribune Maryanne Murphy, a 21-year-old college student from Fallbrook, battled an eating disorder before coming to appreciate her size 10 figure, curves and all. Trying to stay skinny was "completely exhausting," she said. "I am who I am, and I don't think there's any reason to be ashamed of that."

A 1991 study found 42 percent of first-to third-grade girls wanted to be thinner, while 81 percent of 10-year-olds were afraid of being fat. The data is 15 years old, said Lynn Grefe, executive director of the National Eating Disorders Association, but the aversion to fat has likely only gotten more exaggerated.

“Everybody has been brainwashed. I grew up with my mother talking about Marilyn Monroe, and I thought it was OK to be shapely and curvy,” Grefe said. “Young people now are scared of any fat.”

When Maryanne Murphy was a teenager, she started vomiting after meals to control her weight. “The need to be skinny to fit into society is totally overwhelming,” said Murphy, now a 21-year-old student at Mira Costa College. “Look at magazines, movies, posters. Everywhere you go you see this model of what a woman is supposed to be, and she's size 0.”

Murphy overcame bulimia after her sister, then 8, tearfully pleaded with Murphy to stop making herself sick. Today, at 5 feet 6 inches and 160 pounds, Murphy is comfortable with her curves, though she's going to Weight Watchers to lose 10 pounds.

Associated Press (left), CBS Watch! (right) Katie Couric must have looked too chubby in the photo at left, because someone at CBS felt compelled to shave a few inches off her waistline.

Like Murphy, the majority of women understand, intellectually, that the glamour they see on their TVs and in magazines and on billboards is manufactured – either achieved with personal chefs, trainers, nannies and a genetic tendency toward preferring carrot sticks to Snickers bars, or simply photo-shopped and flat out phony.

Some 81 percent of women in the U.S. strongly agreed that “the media and advertising set an unrealistic standard of beauty that most women can't ever achieve,” and 75 percent would like to see more images of diverse beauty, according to a recent survey commissioned by Dove, the soap company.

Yet, women, and increasingly men, keep trying. One quarter of American men and 45 percent of American women are dieting on any given day. Americans spend a reported $40 billion on dieting and diet-related products a year. When that doesn't work, hundreds of thousands turn to plastic surgery and liposuction.

Manufacturers now vanity-size clothing, believing correctly that women would rather buy a size 8 than a size 12, even if the size 8 is so roomy it looks like a “before” pants held up by the formerly fat guy in the diet ads.

While it's easy to blame the stick-figure trend entirely on the entertainment/fashion/advertising industries, which bombard us with an endless parade of malnourished nymphets, we're the ones buying the products and the magazines.

EVAN AGOSTINI / Getty Images Author Naomi Wolf sees the waif trend as an attempt to make women seem less powerful.

“It's almost like every human being I meet thinks they should be loosing weight and thinner,” said Connie Sobczak, founder of the Body Positive, which offers programs in schools about increasing body satisfaction. “There's an idea that we should always be striving for weight loss, and we should not feel beautiful if we're not thinner.”

This body anxiety is getting passed down to our children, Costin said. “Young girls are trying on their mother's diets like they're trying on their mother's high heels.”

Cassie Hoeprich, 16, knows all about the pressure to be thin. Despite being on the swim team and playing soccer, she started counting calories in the fourth grade. During sleepovers, she and her girlfriends would ask one another what body part they'd most like to change. She'd hear adults talking about diets and figured she ought to be on one, too.

She began to overcome her self-consciousness after joining Body Aloud!, an after-school program at Carmel Valley's Canyon Crest Academy high school, in which students put on presentations for other teens about self-acceptance and body-image pressures. Hoeprich and her classmates are planning a “Love Your Body Day,” during which they'll place bathroom scales around the school, replacing pounds with positive messages.

“Being healthy is not the size your pants are,” Hoeprich said. “It's how you live your life. It's listening to your body. Eating when you're hungry and stopping when you're full; exercising because it makes you feel good.”

To encourage such self-confident attitudes, Wolf, the author and mother of an 11-year-old daughter, recommends women keep a shrine with photos or art of gorgeous women of all shapes, sizes and ages as a reminder that beauty comes in many packages.

“There are some young women who will be enslaved by (unrealistic body images),” said Wolf, who suffered from anorexia as a teen. “But there's another group of young women who will be actively critical of the ideal, actively questioning it and actively rejecting it. It's not like they never have a bad hair day or say, 'I feel fat.' But they see through it.”

Rarely, there are even glimmers that the industries that created the gaunt goddess look are suffering from stick-figure fatigue.

Dove got oodles of press with ads that featured ordinary women, sizes 4 to 12, in their underpants. Earlier this month, Spain's top fashion show rejected one-third of would-be models for being too thin. Even ABC is offering up a new comedy on Thursday (Sept 28) called “Ugly Betty,” starring America Ferrera, the young actress made famous in the 2002 movie “Real Women Have Curves,” in a show that celebrates character over looks.

But faced with the all-consuming starvation aesthetic in today's media, such efforts are mere morsels. As long as the Mischa Bartons, Kate Bosworths and Sienna Millers keep getting the parts, the publicity and the adulation, eating solid food will be off-limits in Hollywood.