Feminine Aesthetics: The “pro-ana” aesthetic

Alissa Quart’s book on the buying and selling of teenagers has turned to the “pro-ana” movement in the second half of chapter nine. Before reading this, I couldn’t have told you what “pro-ana” was. It is most easily translated as “for anorexia.”

Needless to say, this part of the book is disturbing. More disturbing are videos such as this (Warning to more sensitive viewers: The video is a little racy at points, if you couldn’t already tell by the following still):

Such photo-montages are referred to as “thinspiration.” In the video above, the creator says that she “made this video for all the girls, that want to be the thinnest. for all those girls that want to be perfect. like i do.“

So perfection is equated, in the mind of anorexic girls, with being a gaunt, figureless apparition? I learned from Quart’s book that anorexia has been around for centuries, practiced in the middle ages by religious ascetics on prolonged fasts. By the 1870s, however, it was finally realized such a practice was very unhealthy. Quart then points out how, in 1950s teen magazines, girls were “warned” to be thin.

I, for one, am not in the least attracted to such extremely bony and fragile females. Some of the girls in the above video look, literally, like corpses more than warm bodies — like someone suffering in a refugee camp, starving (which is what they’re doing). Are other men attracted to this? Are these pro-anas trying to appeal to men, other women, the fashion industry, Hollywood? Or do they simply suffer from an emotional and psychological problem (as my very brief scan of some pro-ana websites seems to indicate)?

Girls and women (and boys and men) should strive to be healthy in their own bodies.