The cover story of this week’s “Us Weekly” magazine features the young actresses from the CW remake of “90210.” They stand on the cover in party dresses, flaunting their 100-pound bodies for all the world to admire and envy their size zero-ness. The headline “Too Thin for TV” is emblazoned between them.

We’re constantly told that the images of the female form portrayed in mass culture today are unrealistic and contributing to an alarming number of eating and general health disorders on a daily basis. Dove makes campaigns to show that women of all body sizes are beautiful. Fashion councils around the world make regulations on the minimum weight models must be in order to walk in shows. And every season, television debuts a “real woman.”

America Ferrera, Sarah Ramirez and Debra Messing (with her post-baby body, that is) gave women of normal weight hope when their shows debuted. These women came after the television of the ’90s when the female casts of “Friends,” “Ally McBeal” and “The Practice” were so thin they appeared to be fighting for breath on a weekly basis.

But it really seems that much of the effort, and there has been some, has been for naught. As long as starlets continue to receive media attention for their dwindling weight nothing will ever change. It’s up to the networks to stop hiring underweight actresses and us to stop obsessing over them. Sure “Us Weekly” thinks they are doing a good thing by bringing attention to the issue but all they are really doing is encouraging this problem. Now that the article is on newsstands, the show will only gain ratings ensuring that actresses for TV series in the future will only continue to be hired on the thinner side.

Instead of focusing on the weight of these poor, starving girls, media platforms as popular as the gossip rag should be focusing their attention on actresses who don’t inspire us to feed them a club sandwich.

And it’s not like they don’t exist. “Mad Men’s” Christina Hendricks, who plays office manager and general vixen Joan Holloway on the period show, is an example of a woman with a very healthy body. Instead of showing women cover girls with jarring clavicles that stick out of their shoulder blades and knees so thin they could cut glass, perhaps magazines should consider exemplifying the positive.