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When I first moved into my suite and I met the five girls I would be sharing the bathroom and living room with this semester I got a little nervous. They are all very sweet girls; our personalities don’t match enough for us to become OMGAWD BEST FRIENDS 4EVA!!, but they never gave me any reason to hate their guts. What made me so nervous was that they were all very attractive and, most importantly, skinny. My girls are a little ditzy, so of course the “Oh my god! I’m so fat!” line would be thrown around once in a while, but not quite as much as I expected. So, here I am, about done with the semester and cringing over the seven-millionth OMG! FAT!!! banshee screech. These girls can’t be more than a size five jean size, a size I, most certainly, can only dream of being. Now, dear readers, just so you know this is not an article on my weight or learning to deal with living in Barbie’s Dream house from Hell, but I thought I should mention how I came to venture towards this dark-side of the internet. We are all aware of what the cruder aspects the internet has in store for us: pedophilia sites, bestiality, scat, snuff, not to mention identity theft. However, I was surprised to find some other sites that I was not expecting. They’re not nearly as bad as child pornography or raping women in comas, but still, these certain sites are in no way positive for people.

My first venture towards the dark-side began with a Livejournal.com community hunt for support with dieting (yes, the girls made me feel fat. I’ll get over it). What did I find? Pro-anorexic and bulimic communities. All I did was type “dieting” into the search engine and suddenly hundreds of young women are supporting each other, and potentially me, to starve, or as they like to phrase it, “fast”, to lose weight. My immediate shock came when I was browsing through some of the sites and found that some girls weighed less than 100 pounds (one girl claimed she weighed 85) and were trying to lose ten to twenty more. What makes this worse is the other girls were supporting them! I even managed to stumble across a porn site (I think that’s what it is) featuring anorexic women. Not only are women being encouraged by one another to choose an unhealthy weight lose plan, but they’re being told that the skinnier they are the more sexually attractive they become (I don’t think it’s sexy when thongs are so large on these tiny girls that they look like big granny panties, personally).

I decided to expand on the subject and see what other people besides those on Livejournal.com had to say. I typed in their key word “fasting” into google.com to see what I would get. The first pages of results almost all say the same thing: Pro-fasting is not pro-anorexia. Now I’m confused. The only difference I see between fasting to lose weight and anorexia is a medically diagnosable disorder. So, what’s the difference between fasting and anorexia? According to raderprograms.com, a website to address eating disorders, “Once the disorder of Anorexia Nervosa takes hold, the individual usually ends up with an extremely restrictive diet that is sometimes limited to only a small number of foods.” Anorexics also abuse laxitives, vomit, or chew their food and spit it out instead of swallowing, but primarily restrict their food intake to incredibly small portions. What do people who are fasting do? Well, they mostly try to stick to a water diet, which includes diet soda, low fat juices, soups and ice.

However, fasting and anorexia is not necessarily the same thing, as a further look into the subject proved. Fasting is not eating for various reasons: religion, protesting, and in livejournal.com’s case it’s for weight lose. Fasting is usually supposed to be short term and to help reach the goal of a healthy body weight. Anorexia is having such a distorted view of the body that the sufferer will struggle to maintain an unhealthy diet and weight out of fear or being overweight. However, a problem occurs when anorexics are encouraging dieters to take on anorexic behaviors, as some of these sites and communities are doing. Most of these sites don’t distinguish fasting from eating disorders, and I feel that the results will cause some young dieters to take on unhealthy eating disorders that were encouraged from anorexics.

While scanning through some of these fasting livejournal.com communities I also noticed that a lot of girls were or had previously been cutting themselves. This was never addressed as a concern from any of the other girls as well. Searching back on livejournal.com’s community, I found over three hundred self-injury communities, many of them also related to anorexia communities and in favor (they show off pictures of their cuts) of self-injury. There are self-injury sites all over the internet, as a further search on google.com revealed, with about 1/3 to a ½ of them in favor or in defense of self-injury.

What does self-injury have to do with anorexia/fasting? A large amount of research suggests that it has a lot in common with coping with overwhelming psycho physiological arousal, such as punishing one’s self or to stop self-hatred feelings, or to handle a sudden explosion of uncontrollable emotions. That would make sense if anorexics are already having overwhelming emotions about their self-image, particularly their weight. For cutters, self-injury is a way to calm themselves down. For anorexics, self-injury maybe a way to punish themselves for giving into the desire to eat food, particularly very fattening foods. Both anorexics and self-injurers are thought to take part in these actions to have some sense of control over a part of their lives.

Reading a support group for cutters, I found the same theme over and over again. These people feel as if they have no control over their lives. They cut because it gives them control over something; in this case their bodies. Today people can feel as if they have no control over their lives. Go to work/school, come home, do some chores, maybe socialize with people, go to bed, repeat. Going through life like that can become very monotonous and could cause one to feel as if he or she has no control over their life. Cutting and anorexia at least gives people some control over something.

However, it should be mentioned that self-injurers and anorexics are not always necessarily the same. Statistically mostly young women and a few men suffer from anorexia due to peer pressure and susceptibility from the media or other influences. Generally, self-injurers could be anyone. They could be your best friend, your boss, or even your grandmother. While most anorexics don’t recognize right away that they’re doing their body a great harm, most self-injurers know what they’re doing to themselves, but their goal isn’t to harm themselves on purpose, but rather to relieve whatever emotion is causing them mental pain through physical, more distracting pain.

I feel that the reason for the growing support for eating disorders and self-injury is because there is little intentional marketing for young people that dissuades them from physical harm. Most sites that I find in opposition to EDs and SIs are stuffy and dry. There is no inspiration to become healthy like there is to become thin. No one is supporting skin clean of injury or saying “hey, it’s cool to be scar-less”. In addition, people have little idea how to help those that obviously need help. What the girls, and some boys, in these online communities need is positive reinforcement about their weight or self-image, regardless of what it is. No one is telling a 130 pound girl that she’s lovely for being a healthy, nationally under-average weight (nationally it’s about 140ish).

What needs to happen is that there should be more sites and communities on blogging servers and message boards that dissuade people from partaking in these behaviors. We can’t censor these sites and communities because it would be a violation of the First Amendment and the rights of free speech. However, I believe that these sites are going to become a bigger problem as more confused adolescents and teens stumble across them looking for outlets. Without people using the internet as a tool to support one another in these unhealthy forms of control there might be fewer cases of dangerously underweight teens and cutters. It frightens me that people get together to create a community to support one another on such dangerous behaviors instead of confronting the real issues that are bothering them, such as life.

Sources:
Rader Programs: ED information
SI support & information
Livejournal listing of communities that came up under the search word "dieting". I would take a look at 0nlythreeweeks and __perfect body. Ana is another word for anorexic.
Livejournal listing of communites that came up under the search word "cutting". I would take a look at 21_gashes
Only 18 listed communities under the search word "anti-anorexia"
Useless "how to stop self-injury" transcript
treating an eating disorder in 4 vague steps?