Pretty Thin?

Lately I’ve been enjoying reading the Sydney Morning Herald with my lunch, in the communal area at work. You can tell this by all the tomato-coloured stains that spatter its pages after 1 pm every afternoon. I have learned many exciting things. On Thursday, as I was shovelling pasta down my throat as fast as I could, I read an article about pro-anorexia websites, and how they’ve been damaging teenagers’ delicate young minds. What a melting-pot of the bizarre the Internet is!

I decided to investigate. (Hoping meanwhile that my employer doesn’t actually that employers’ regulate internet use – it would be so embarrassing to be caught surfing for bulimia tips. I can just imagine them thinking “so that’s why she eats so much”) I discovered an exciting world of pro-anorexia websites (or the jauntier ‘pro-Ana’, as The Kids are calling it these days). I was looking forward to being shocked, appalled and disgusted, and I must say it only partially fulfilled my expectations.

Mostly I was left feeling baffled. The sites included lots of the kind of mad diet tips only teenaged girls will consider - I think we’ve all been there – and many pictures of the skinny actresses, pop singers and models that fill mainstream magazines. But I couldn’t find commentary on the dangerously skinny, or on anorexia to the point of hospitalisation, either for or against, so I have no idea what their opinions are on such extreme self-starvation. Mostly it was just typical young girl babble along the lines of ‘I want to be thinner’ and ‘Oh my God Paris Hilton is so thin and pretty…!”

So, what the hell is ‘pro-ana’, anyway?

This site, which was featured in the Sydney Morning Herald article, http://www.prettythin.com/proana.htm was obliging enough to have a page actually entitled ‘What is pro-ana?’

This is the first sentence on the page: “Pro-ana was the term used to describe sites that catered to eating disorders (usually anorexia)”.* Now, on its own, I don’t find that terribly enlightening, but that’s about as specific as it got. It then continued:

“…it brought light to the whole movement and the anorexic rights issue, and
others who wanted to reach out for help with no where to turn was now able
to seek out others. Bad in that a sudden wave of people wanted to get
anorexia, and thought that being on the forums would give them the "ana diet."”

The writer talks about enabling people to reach out for help. Does that mean she thinks it’s good that anorexics were able to find help with their eating disorder? In that case she can’t be ‘pro-anorexic’, right? She says it’s bad that people wanted to ‘get anorexia’. On the other hand, she talks about ‘anorexic rights’. What the hell is that? There’s also this on another page:

“Anorexics usually have low self-esteem and sometimes feel they don't deserve to eat. The anorexics usually deny that anything is wrong. Hunger is strongly denied. They usually resist any attempts to help them because the idea of therapy is seen only as a way to force them to eat. Once they admit they have a problem and are willing to seek help, they can be treated effectively through a combination of psychological, nutritional and medical care.”

I don’t see how the Sydney Morning Herald can take offence at this site’s description of anorexia.

On the other hand, other parts of the site are devoted to dozens and dozens of pictures of skinny to dangerously skinny women. There are self-hate lyrics from Radiohead, the kings of dirge, and other emo poetry. The site’s visitors also send in ‘beautiful’ pictures of themselves looking skinny and bony. I imagine they spend hours and hours lying around at home, weak from hunger, studying themselves in the mirror and alternately hating/loving themselves. The narcissism of it all! Some sites talk about ‘haters’- presumably the people who scorn anorexics. But can they really wonder why other people despise them? These girls idolize ‘celebrities’ such as Angelina Jolie, Liz Hurley, Paris Hilton – those vain, greedy**, self-absorbed women who exemplify so much that is wrong in the West today. Take Nicole Richie, a woman whose luminous, inner ugliness is practically visible to the naked eye. This is the kind of woman whose picture they swoon over at Prettythin.com. To me, these super-rich celebrities may look thin, but I think they are obese in spirit. Anyone with such a big carbon footprint is fat in my book.

Now, I’m not trying to say I think it’s good to be overweight, or that an over-abundance of body fat is attractive. I don’t, and I think it’s a great idea to watch what you eat. Let’s think about food for a moment. Where does it come from? What is the relationship between the food we find on the supermarket shelves, and the environment? What impact do the all those cookies, flavoured drinks, instant this and instant that have on our planet? It’s no secret that if everyone had the same eating habits as we in the West do…well, it just couldn’t happen. There wouldn’t be enough land and resources to feed that many greedy mouths.

Food is indeed political, and I respect anyone who eats both healthily and ethically. Why not give up eating cage eggs? Refuse to eat pork and chicken unless they’re free range. Or even give up meat altogether – who knows how much rainforest has been destroyed so we can eat burgers?*** And what about milk? If you really think about it, dairy is a pretty morally disgusting industry. They forcibly impregnate animals over and over, then remove and slaughter their offspring, then do it all over again, just to keep the animals lactating. And as for convenience food…where does all that packaging go once you’ve eaten the contents? The easiest solution I can see is to buy locally grown fruit and vegetables, prepare your own food, eat meat and animal products sparingly and make sure you buy from humane sources.

I believe that anyone who starts to care about all this stuff and eats accordingly will not only be a better person, but will become slimmer too. That’s the kind of diet website I would like to see. I may not follow all or even many of the above suggestions, but if these girls on PrettyThin.com did, I may not want to go to dinner at their house (would there be anything to eat?!) but by God, I’d respect them. They would deserve to be slim, and they would be beautiful. But if you pore over celebrity magazines, obsess over how hot Calista Flockhart is and how she wish you could be like Paris Hilton, gorge yourself on fatty foods then throw up afterwards, you are not beautiful. The whole ‘pro-ana’ thing looks pretty pathetic to me.

But who am I to judge, anyway? The best explanation I can come up with for the puzzling jumble of inconsistencies of the ‘Pretty Thin’ website is that it’s written by and for teenage girls, a group not noted for their common sense or indeed sanity. God knows I did some stupid things myself at that age. (Though I didn’t launch insane websites). Perhaps I – and the Sydney Morning Herald – shouldn’t take it so seriously. It's just a bunch of silly, incoherent little girls.

I should add that I do feel sorry for anorexics and bulimics and I hope anyone suffering from this seeks the help they need. I’m sure they’re not all awful people by any means. I just don’t think anyone should be glamorizing their eating disorders on the internet, or to themselves. An eating disorder is an ugly condition. They need to learn to love themselves, but not the disorder. And let’s not forget, for every teenage girl who martyrs herself to thinness, there is an awkward, overweight and unhappy classmate who is made to feel like even more of a fat cow. It’s pretty difficult to learn to like your budding woman’s body when your skinny peers congratulate each other over every pound lost and act all grossed out over their barely-there hip fat.

I will leave you with this thought from Pretty Thin.Com:

“Over time the media has blown this term way out of proportion and making it out
to be such rediculous ideals as "cults" and that the owners were "recruiting"
others into an anorexic lifestyle. The very notion that the internet will give
you an eating disorder is lewd to begin with.”

Search as I might, I could not find any lewdness. Foiled again!


*Catering to anorexics?? You could go broke doing that!

**though obviously not greedy for food
***I’m sure somebody knows, but I don’t