Ana and Mia:
Your Two Back-Stabbing Best Friends
Who's Ana and Mia, you ask? Why, our fashion industry's inspiration and coleague, ANorexiA and BuleMIA.
My original intention for this site was to teach people about the detriments of fat-hatred. I felt little need to expound on the danger of eating disorders, since I thought most people already knew how deadly and how evil Ana and Mia are. Well, I'm here to tell you: Ana and Mia are murderesses. They are not your friends, they are not your goddesses, they are not your lovers.
There are websites springing up all over the internet devoted to worship of Ana and Mia. These internet sites contain information on how to overexercise, how to eat less than 500 calories a day, how to eat nothing at all, how to purge, and how to hide your weight loss from your parents.
If this is new information for you, please don't go gallavanting through the internet trying to find these cesspools of illness simply out of morbid curiousity. If you have a low self-esteem, if you have an eating disorder or are in recovery from an eating disorder or, heck, you've ever daydreamed about having an eating disorder, please consider not going! Most of them are designed to unabashedly "trigger" ED's - images and words that click perfectly into the insecure adolescent's mind with astonishing accuracy and unlock a flood gate of ED feelings. Sound melodramatic? Well, it is, but that doesn't make it any less true.
Why on earth would anyone make a website devoted to the pursuit of a disease? To put it bluntly (and I say this as a woman who has danced with Mia), misery loves company. Anorexics, notorious for being competitive, also find comparing numbers to be a stimulus for their disease. Most importantly, all individuals with eating disorders are lonely. They have to close themselves off from people around them who may care for their health and well-being in order to maintain their destructive lifestyle. It's the sufferer and "Ana" or "Mia" against the world. But in pro-Mia or pro-Ana sites ED sufferers have found the support they need -- not the support they need to live, but the support to die.
The psychology field, the press, and society in general has been horrified and shocked by these sites. And maybe that's the only positive thing about it. The statistic of roughly 10 million girls a year falling to these illnesses didn't cause the media to do much more than bat an eye. At long last, perhaps the incredible horror of a site like this will wake us up. Perhaps a fashion magazine editor will venture to this world of darkness and find one of their very own models held up as the anorexic image of perfection with the encouragement "This'll trigger you baby!"
The pro-ana sites aren't saying much that's new, although we might like to pretend that they are. They are simply regurgitating (pun intended) the images and words and concepts that the media is throwing at them. What's horrifying, perhaps, is having to see what we as a culture and a society have done to these girls who fearlessly and shamelessly shove the product of a thin-obsessed culture in our face. As one girl from the Dying to be Thin group stated "So what if some people would rather be dead than fat -- society has already told us that fat people do not belong."
Sickeningly true. Congratulations, Pro-Anas. I think you got our attention.
The Side Effects The ugly side effects of the disease that seeks beauty.
Who's Mia? The emotional and circumstantial causes of Bulimia
Who's Ana? The emotional and circumstantial causes of Anorexia.
Cousin Characteristics The shared causes of both eating disorders.
My Story My dance with Mia, and how I got her out of my life.
Helping Your Loved One A guide to helping your ill loved one recover.
About Fat Acceptance
Email: ericaherron@hotmail.com