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The truth about ana
A look at disturbing pro-anorexia sites and the enslaving mentality that nourishes them
By Emilie Forst
Diet-conscious tips then gave way to tips on how to vomit correctly and how to cover up extreme weight loss from friends and family.
Have you heard of “pro-ana”? In glossy magazines it is touted as “the rage” in Hollywood. And in factual black-and-white ones, it is defined as an online movement gaining popularity among young women.
Being a young woman, I had to find out more. So I googled “pro-ana” and found a long list of Web sites dedicated to the support and promotion of anorexia. I began to explore.
At first, the sites seemed rather tame, many included poetry and drawings that were clearly posted by pubescent girls and had nothing to do with anorexia. Others gave lists of low-fat foods and exercises that burn the most calories.
These diet-conscious tips then gave way to tips on how to vomit correctly and how to cover up extreme weight loss from friends and family. Some even had photo galleries of severely malnourished women, the kind you see in advertisements, usually involving dewy-eyed children from Africa or Asia.
What I thought was an insight into anorexia ended up being more like a horror show.
More deeply disturbing than the human ghost photos, the gagging tips or any other material was the notion that pro-anorexics perceive the result of anorexia as beautiful and advocate extreme thinness as the path to happiness and perfection.
And society and media encourage this belief, even if in subtler ways than pro-ana sites.
Body image is the new corset. It turns women’s bodies into unnatural shapes and puts a superimposed feminine ideal over women’s health. It keeps them in a constant juggle of wearing the correct clothes and training their bodies into new aesthetics, whether or not these images are healthy for our unique bodies.
If you follow the rules of correct body image and fashion, you are in jeopardy of being shallow. If you don’t follow these rules, you are in grave danger of being a prude.
In other words, body image is a way that society controls women and suppresses individual freedom. Almost like an “Orientalism” of the sexes, with the male gaze controlling this female “other” via unrealistic, neurotic notions of what is beautiful and worth being desired.
The reality that the pro-ana sites missed is that beauty is not actually an image: it is a choice. And it is a personal one.
When we let society judge our idea of beauty, instead of defining beauty for ourselves, our own beauty dies. It becomes ignorant, enslaved. Until women discover this, we will continue to jump through hoops to be more like how we are told to be, blindly eating the media’s air-brushed images, which cater only to large corporation’s advertising budgets and men’s sexual fantasies.
And we will nourish our obliviousness to the fact that being puppets of the demands of the male gaze is more than just a sexual game — it is socially demeaning.
When women’s beauty belongs to women, anorexia will not exist. Anorexia and all the other diseases caused by loss of personal freedom will not exist when women take back their beauty for themselves.
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