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Online Communities

Page history last edited by Andrew Winckles 13 years, 2 months ago

“Food is just like art; it should be looked at and not touched.” This quote from a pro-anorexia (also known as “pro-ana”) website is one of hundreds that girls struggling with anorexia, calling themselves “Anas,” keep in the front of their minds daily.  If one were to Google Search “pro ana” they would come across hundreds of these websites.  People who consider themselves pro-ana believe that Anorexia Nervosa is not a disorder or a disease but a lifestyle choice.  They tend to be people who have anorexia (called “Ana” within the eating disorder communities, so it will be used in this essay) or have recovered from anorexia, but still consider it an ordinary lifestyle like a gluten-free diet for Celiac disease or a vegetarian diet.  95% of people with Ana are female – the other 5% male – so the Anas mentioned in this essay are all female.  Pro-ana domains are secret societies for these Anas to communicate with each other and have a place where they can take off their masks.  In this community, each girl feels pressured to be absolutely perfect, there is a strong sense of sisterhood and support between Anas, and the different motivations and triggers are very religious-like.

 

Every Ana’s need to be perfect is a prominent theme in pro-ana societies. This stems from their need for control.  These girls believe that they must be a perfect model size or a perfect weight, generally a severely underweight measurement, in order to have control in their life.  They control what they do or don’t eat.  One time, while I was on a chat room for the website PrettyThin.com, a girl told me her ideal weight was 95 pounds.  She said she was 5 feet and 9 inches tall and her current weight was 110 pounds.  Even when I told her she was already very skinny, and didn’t need to get that skinny, she didn’t believe me and continually told me that she would be fat until she reached her 95-pound goal. Anas believe that when they reach their goal size and weight, their life will be somehow better – all their unhappiness will be gone and life will be perfect.  These delusions in the anorexic mind are exactly why so many deaths occur within this community.

 

While spending time interacting with girls on pro-ana websites, I have come to find that they have a very close-knit and sisterly form of interaction.  The girls are very supportive of each other – whether one is talking about a month-long fast (a period of time in which an Ana doesn’t eat food, but occasionally may drink liquids with calories) or contemplating recovery, there are always other Anas right by her side.  I have been a part of various conversations where an Ana was pleading for help – for someone to comfort her in the darkness – and everyone else puts aside their own struggles for the one girl.  She had “binged” and eaten 500 calories that day, and was trying to figure out a way to make up for it.  The other girls told her different tips, like drinking water or going to the gym for a few hours.  They also gave her kind and hopeful messages like: “don’t worry, hon, tomorrow will be better” and “just learn from it this time, so when you’re tempted next time it won’t happen!”  When dealing with such serious and scary issues in secret like these girls do, I suppose it would only be natural for Anas to be extremely close and sympathetic towards one another.

Another interesting twist to the pro-ana community (and the eating disorder community as a whole) is the personification of the disorder.  Many Anas will give anorexia a personality named Ana.  To some, she is a friend.  Ana can also be considered a saviour and/or someone a girl needs to prove herself.  Ana can be threatening, but she can also be kind and comforting.  She has a “give-and-take” sort of personality, which comes through in many of the rules and motivations written online, I.E.: the Ana’s Creed, Ana’s Pep Talk, and many more.  In Ana’s Pep Talk, which I found on www.tips-and-thinspo.xanga.com, Ana tells the desperate girl that she will give this girl a perfect, small body – as long as she shows control and does not eat. This gives Ana a very threatening type of power for all the girls who become stuck in her web.

 

Not only do the Ana girls have this wicked voice in the back of their head named Ana, but some of the more dramatic and hard-core Anas consider the disorder a religion.  I have come across many Ana blogs where the girls say prayers to Ana – begging for her to give them strength to not eat and to lose weight. Most of these girls also review Ana’s Creed, which is a set of beliefs any successful Ana must have, regularly and live by it.  The creed touches on moral issues within the Ana belief system with passages like: “I believe in bathroom scales as an indicator of my daily successes and failures.” There are also pseudo-religious passages like: “I believe in salvation through starvation” and “I believe in a wholly black and white world; the losing of weight, recrimination for sins, the elongation of the body and a life ever fasting.”  There are also two major rituals performed by Anas.  The first is fasting.  This is when one goes days, sometimes weeks, without food.  Most Anas perform water fasts (all they drink is water for a designated amount of time) when they feel they’ve been eating too much.  The other ritual is varying degree of self-punishment for going over a calorie count or eating on a fast day.  This can range from sleeping in the cold without comfort to self-harm like cutting or purging.

 

The pro-ana society is filled with dark secrets and complexities – ranging from the different traditions and beliefs to the relationships between the different members of the community.  Many people are unaware of this online society, but it is so easily accessible to everyone.  With 500-or-less-calorie diets, various tactics of avoiding food, and obsessive scale checking as a basis, many of these people consider anorexia a way to live.  There are hundreds of people suffering from this problem – making it much more common than people expect.  They aren’t just the super skinny girls – they are the normal-sized, quiet, nice girls who behave properly and make great achievements.  Hopefully there will be a day when these men and women suffering from Anorexia Nervosa will see the light in the darkness and recover, but in the meantime they still have the support and bonds from their communities.

Works Cited

 

Pro-Ana: Tips, Tricks, and Thinspo. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Sept. 2010. <http://www.tips-and-thinspo.xanga.com>.

Watson, James. PrettyThin-. N.p., 14 Sept. 2010. Web. 12 Sept. 2010. <http://www.prettythin.com>.

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