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c0lo [soylentnews.org] writes:

Several sites report on the France's lower house considering passing a law to ban super-skinny models. My pick [www.cbc.ca] (CBC Canada):

The link between high fashion, body image and eating disorders on French catwalks may lead to a ban on super-skinny models.

Style-conscious France, with its fashion and luxury industries worth tens of billions of dollars, would join Italy, Spain and Israel, which all adopted laws against too-thin models on catwalks or in advertising campaigns in early 2013.​

Under the proposed legislation, any model who wants to work has to have a body mass index (a type of height to weight ratio) of at least 18 and would be subject to regular weight checks.

The law would enforce fines of up to $79,000 US for any breaches, with up to six months in jail for any staff involved, French Socialist Party legislator Olivier Veran, who wrote the amendments, told newspaper Le Parisien.

The bill’s amendments also propose penalties for anything made public that could be seen as encouraging extreme thinness, notably pro-anorexia websites that glorify unhealthy lifestyles and forums that encourage eating disorders.

Random thoughts:

• on one side: governments regulating the BMI... (large soda ban [wikipedia.org])... mmmm?
• on the other side: how's this different from laws against public indecency, laws which are well knitted into the fabric of westernized societies?

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