This is Not a Diet Issue #29

A look inside the pro-ana phenomenon

By Ashley Harris
Published: September 1st, 2006 | 3:28pm

What's up with anorexia lately? Even those who (aside from an occasional obsession with Laguna Beach) generally dismiss the fluff can’t help but confront “America’s Next Top Stickperson” over and over again. Her image, vacillating between sickly and sexy, seems endlessly captivating. Yet she is an icon for a generation of young women deliberately starving themselves and documenting their experiences on pro-anorexia Web sites, blogs, and chat rooms.

There are now more than 400 pro-ana communities since the original Web site was created in the mid-nineties. Pro-ana has garnered some mass media attention but tends to be writ as extreme dieting among adolescent girls. A recent New York Times article discussed the phenomenon as a product of bikini anxiety prior to spring break. This is an all too familiar story of teen girls absorbing mainstream beauty ideals and dating pressures only to take dieting too far in an attempt to fit in. Part of the problem with the popular critique of pro-ana thus far is that it neglects individual agency in the anorexic pursuit. Pro-ana is a response to the silencing of the anorexic.

At first glance, many pro-ana sites and blogs are almost indistinguishable from any other cultural text produced by or marketed toward adolescent girls. Upon entering “Show Those Ribs,” a pro-ana blog at livejounal.com, one is greeted by a peppermint candy–like color scheme. Sprinkled with celebrity faces and fashion advertisements, the page is spare and unobtrusive in muted pink and green with icons of smooth and smiling girls attached to every entry. The journal layout makes the content easily accessible. One need only click on an entry or username to be quickly transported from one area of the site to another. A brief scan of the first page shows that participants address the community affectionately with “Hi Lovely’s,” often signing off with a series of Xs and Os.

A closer look at “Show Those Ribs,” however, reveals its more tormented side. Participants may post a blog entry called a “binge” or respond to one previously posted as a “purge.” “Binges” such as: “That little voice tells you that you’re a stupid lazy selfish cow. … Fuck me. I feel revolted at the mere thought of it” are juxtaposed with others like this one: “I am so very excited all of my pants are too big … it rules … so I just bought three really cute belts.” One user’s freshly scrubbed and grinning icon sits above another who calls herself “dietingordeath,” and the attached photo is a neck-down shot of the young woman wearing handcuffs and red and black lingerie. “Wanna get dirty?” she beckons to her fellow community members. The question rings just as true as her smiley-faced counterpart, who seems to say, “Wanna get pretty?” Here, thin means both.

Anorexia isn’t new. The first case of anorexia outside of self-starvation for religious sacrifice was documented in 1813. It has since mystified medical practitioners, psychoanalysts, and cultural theorists alike, who have identified sexual repression, fear of food, fear of adulthood, poor mothering, and our misogynist, image-oriented society in attempts to define the root cause of the disorder. We know now that most of the supposed neuroses that were previously thought to cause anorexia are actually more likely to be effects of prolonged starvation. Duh … you’d probably feel listless or jumpy (what psychoanalysts used to call “passive” or “antisocial”) if you’d been surviving on 500 calories a day for weeks or months too.

But the scene of anorexia is different. In the past, “experts” have been in the privileged position to define anorexic behavior and personalities. In 2006, girls and women put their eating disorders online to say whatever the fuck they want to say about them. The declarative name of the first and now defunct pro-ana Web site, “Anorexic Nation,” was rather apt to what I am talking about here. It is a scene complete with insiders and outsiders, innovators and followers.

I don’t know how many times I have heard people say, “I don’t understand why she won’t just eat! She would look so much better if she gained a little bit of weight.” As well-meaning and sincere as these comments are, they totally lack the perspective of the anorexic herself. The pro-ana Web sites are the voice of the collective eating disordered, unfiltered by doctors or social theorists. Though pro-ana disrupts medical and feminist notions about eating disorders and disease, it also feeds back into them as women strive to meet the qualifications of anorexia — to be authentic.

Picture getting stared at everywhere you go because your ribs are visible through your T-shirt and your hair is falling out. You know you’re skinny but you’ve been starving for a long time and it hurts to eat. Besides, as far as you’re concerned everyone else wishes they were skinny too. Conversely, picture spending the majority of every day trying not to eat, only to end up downing three boxes of cookies and afterward, puking them up. Then, everyone tells you how great you look.

Now imagine that you have an online community where your day-to-day experiences are mirrored in the stories of other girls and women. Imagine that the secret that alienates you from friends, family, and lovers allows you some kind of celebrity status in the pro-ana community. Imagine that your eating disorder marks you as “hardcore” as opposed to “sick.”

It’s not that anorexics don’t understand their disorders to be problematic, but many decide to live with it rather than fight it. They choose anorexia over fatness or bulimia, particularly when maintaining a healthy weight and diet seems impossible. It is typical, for example, to read suggestions on how to maintain an anorexic diet without ending up in the hospital. Pro-ana participants discuss anorexia as a “lifestyle choice.”

No one is more interested in anorexia, the course of the disease and the psychological process, than the anorexic herself. There is something totally unique about watching your own body transform into one so physically different and to know you willed it upon yourself. To be completely obsessed with your own thinness makes you all the more aware of other women’s bodies. One of the striking features of pro-ana is its homoerotic nature. In turn it also sexualizes one’s own body and the disorder itself.

One pro-ana blogger writes, “Of the girls I’ve liked … I’ve liked them to see how skinny I am because I find bones on other girls extremely sexy.”

And participants use the sites as forums to discuss issues around sexuality and labeling.

“I’m glad this community is here. Practically every queer girl I know doesn’t eat. But they don’t talk about it either. It’s like ana makes you a bad lesbian because you don’t ‘love’ your body.”

The assumption that sexual repression is the root of anorexia is so heavily writ into cultural feminist discourse that the possibility that there could be a sexual element to anorectic practices is totally rejected. Despite the overt sexualization of anorectic bodies in mainstream media, anorexic women are denied their own sexual desire — especially sexual desire for their own or other anorectic bodies — which is read as pathological.

As magical as it can feel to become what you perceive to be the physical ideal of yourself, it is all the more horrifying to watch yourself return to a body that is human and therefore felt to be flawed — a body that once again bleeds and sweats and can’t fit into jeans. There are perhaps as many bulimics and women struggling with overeating who participate on these sites as there are “true” anorexics (that is, maintaining a body mass index of 17 or less). However, this virtual meeting of girls in various stages of disordered eating is not met without friction. Hierarchies are formed with anorexia prominently in top position.

“i hate anorexics because i want to be one, and no matter how hard i try, i can't. i'm fatter now then i've ever been in my entire life (i've always been the fat girl, but it's ridiculous now). my friends all make jokes about how much i puke, but i think because i'm fat, they'd never consider that i could have an ed.”

I think that anorexics’ attitude toward bulimics is both smug and fearful. On the one hand, anorexics believe in themselves as having infinitely more self-control. But underneath the exterior they often fear that if they let go for just a day, they will lose it all. They know they can’t eat because if they start they will never stop.

Because anorexia in action is actually rather mundane — entire days and weeks measured into minute increments — anorexics rely on comparisons with others. They need to see what everyone else is eating to make sure they are consuming less. Pro-ana provides the perfect opportunity to monitor one’s own eating habits through others’ diets. And it sets a new standard. Not only must one eat less than “normal” people, but one must eat less than the other anorexics to be the best. Consequently, the pro-ana sites look something like a sisterhood (participants often refer to “ana” as a sister, goddess, best friend, or lover), and something like a contest of which the winners will likely die.

To live with an eating disorder is to exist in a constant state of negotiation between physical versus mental drives and personal versus social expectations. This process takes a dialogical form on pro-ana sites. Participants question the validity of categories such as “anorexic” and “bulimic,” particularly since they are often too simple to encompass individuals’ experiences.

How has anorexia become cool? Sometimes I want to blame politics or art or music. While we live in a political climate characterized by division and disillusionment, art and music don’t seem to offer the promises of the past. It is ever more apparent that kids today no longer hold their favorite bands to the standards of integrity they used to. Would-be punk rock girls seem just as likely as their prom-queen counterparts to embrace Lindsey Lohan. Yet the need to establish individuality as an adolescent is just as pressing as ever. Instead of turning to a scene built around cultural production, perhaps girls are communicating identity through manipulation of their bodies. While thinness in varying degrees has always been related to fashion (we all remember the waif look of the early ’90s), now the look of skinny is more acutely associated with disorder. It’s not about how skinny you look. It’s about how anorexic you look.

I see pro-ana as a scene started by creative, young women who demanded the space to communicate their eating disorders with both pride and shame. Many participants wear their anorexia like my high school friends and I wore pink hair or Bikini Kill T-shirts — a badge to display their edginess. Like any scene that grows and is appropriated, most of the original (political?) meaning becomes more diluted with each translation. Remaining are a bunch of Web sites that read like dieting manuals and a bunch of girls still looking for identities to claim.

Obviously, we should be skeptical of any analysis that makes pro-ana out to be empowering. At the same time, these Web sites provide rare insights that may very well debunk some traditional theory on eating disorders. As I see it, the drive for independence and the assertion of identity are key components of the anorectic struggle, even though these are among the attributes that anorexics ultimately risk losing.