Quote:
Originally Posted by Brenda Connolly  I wonder how many in this group are of the younger age range. All I see running around seem to be emaciated emo girls it seems. I see them in thamall and my instinct is to grab them, buy them a Big Mac, some decent clothes and make them read some Naomi Wolf Books |
I'd say about all of them are either teenagers or young adults.
Because anorexia, real anorexia and not this "tee hee I'm gonna be pro-ana this month cause it is so ~fashionable~" is all about control, both over your body and your desires. It's not about being the prettiest princess or having a lot of boyfriends who will, tee hee, buy you cool shit. If it was about looking cool and glamorous, certainly not about half of anorexics would also be cutters... unless Vogue has declared forearm scars to be hip this month.
If you think back to your own youth, I think for a lot of us it was a time of insecurity and uncertainty regarding our own identity. Cutting and starving yourself are both ways to try to regain the control over your scary new developing body and an attempt to protect your fragile new self-image.
This is why telling them to eat a burger won't help them, it's not the burger per se they reject but rather weakness inherent in eating the burger (gosh, doesn't that sound fancy?)
Pro-ana turns this thing around and makes anorexia a prerequisite to living a cool, fashionable life and also makes anorexia itself into a glamorous lifestyle. It's a little bit like romanticizing tuberculosis, just updated for our modern age. Instead of making you fragile and pale and and oh so pretty anorexia makes you... fragile and skinny and oh so pretty.
This is why pro-ana is so vexing to me, it present a serious and dangerous sickness, something that will permanently fuck you up even if you don't die from it eventually as a glamorous lifestyle the just takes
discipline (oh yeah.) to achieve.
But
SL pro-ana? Fucked if I know. If it's all RP I stand by my previous statement of wanting to beat them with a copy of the DSM-IV.