Ana Death

The Pro-Ana Movement- Dying to be thin.

"I was ana, hurt, pain, cutting, suicidal, all of it…it all started with a pro-ana site." Twenty year old Crystal Jones knows all too well the damage that can be done by the new cult of "pro-ana"- where girls actively seek to develop an eating disorder and tempt others into the same fate via the internet.
The term itself you may not be familiar with. "Ana" is short for anorexia (or anorexic), but the phrase is often personified by the sufferers. "Ana" is their friend, they worship her, they are constantly answering to her, trying to please her.
Over the last few years, hundreds of Pro-Anorexia websites have sprung up, most of which will be shut down by their server almost as soon as they are created. After researching these sites, I found them to be disturbing and dangerous.
Every site has a "tips and tricks" section. Use a spoon handle to purge when your finger stops working. Roll up in a ball to ease your hunger pains. Want some "thinspiration"? You are taken to a page where there are pictures of emaciated girls and women, every ana striving to be just like them. Thin dying women, every bone in their body poking through the skin, their body aching for something to eat.
The content of these sites may be shocking but one can hardly be surprised by their existence when eating disorders are becoming so widespread. In the UK, approximately two in every one hundred girls attending secondary school suffer from anorexia, bulimia or binge eating disorder, and on a wider scale a huge eighty per cent of all women claim to be dissatisfied with their shape.
The question remains of why anyone would want to read or create this alarming material, but to teenage girls it may not seem so frightening- instead simply one step further than the dieting pages in an average women’s magazine. Worryingly, it is true that most females in our society want to lose weight, and these sites are an aid in that despite also being unsafe.
The girls (and boys) feel accepted there, and can share their experiences with others on the same quest- to be beautiful, thin and successful. Of course what they imagine their efforts to result in could not be further from the truth. In fact, 15-25% of people suffering from anorexia will die as a result of their disorder.
How can anyone, you might well ask, defend these sites?
Crystal is one of one of many recovering anorexics who were once in favour of pro-ana but now feel very differently. Eighteen-year-old Melissa is another, who now has set up her own website that is designed as an alternative for anorexics and offers support and advice. Melissa also publishes on it her own diary describing her struggle to live a normal life without her eating disorder. However, before seeking help for her illness she relied heavily on pro-ana websites and even fought for "ana-rights".
She explains "My biggest argument was that this was just another way of expressing free speech. As a pro-anorexic we believed that this was a life style and that we needed to be allowed to have free rights to communicate with each other through our websites."
Alternative arguments are that the websites act as a life line- "if it weren’t for these sites I would be in a much worse state….we turn to each other only because the rest of the world has shunned us".
Although in some cases this may be true, in many sites it is obvious that support and recovery is not the emphasis but rather to glamourise the disease, persuade girls that this "life style choice" will benefit them no end. "You will be remembered as the thin beautiful one," claims one, "…he will regret ever rejecting you." It is easy to see how impressionable young people, perhaps already feeling pressurised by the everyday barrage of stick thin successful women in the media, can be sucked in.
Melissa is a living example of the massive negative effect pro-ana often has. After first seeing the subject spoken about on a talk show she then became addicted to the sites, logging on at every possible moment, and the effect was dramatic.
"My weight dropped drastically and I isolated myself completely from the world. I had no intentions of ever getting help or trying to recover. I made everyone believe I was fine when really I was dying, literally."
Unfortunately, her story is not unusual but luckily she was able to eventually get help and is now on the road to recovery, although its not an easy ride.
Does she believe pro-ana should be completely banned? "Absolutely, girls do not realize what they are getting into until it is too late. I feel it would be best to not have them even though the girls already sunk into this feel differently. I think it can be a major prevention for some people's EDs and also maybe the site owners will seek out help if they do not have the sites to keep them sick."
Despite this view being widely held, a ban is proving almost impossible to enforce. Although most servers responsibly shut down pro-ana sites when they are created, for every one being shut down another one will pop up in its place.


This is coursework for one of my courses and will also go in the college magazine. Thanks again for your help, as you can see it was put to good use!
~Lorna