Abstract
In 2001, glossy lifestyle magazine Cosmopolitan unveiled ‘the world’s most dangerous secret society’.1 This wasn’t the paramilitary wing of a terrorist organisation, or a Nazi paedophile network, but a motley band of interlinked websites promoting something described by the magazine as ‘pro-ana’: a romanticised, fetishised take on eating disorders that bestowed a mythic status on anorexia as a state of purity achievable only through the ascetic discipline of the dedicated faster. So what, you might wonder, if a bunch of weirdoes want to starve themselves in the name of some bizarre quasi-religious cult? But then came the media scare: this could be your daughter, teenage and troubled, innocently surfing the web, stumbling across horror sites filled with skeletal pictures of starving women (‘thinspiration’), seductive imagery, and ‘tips and tricks’ for cheating your family and friends by concealing the extent of your eating disorder, and before you can set the parental controls on the computer, she’ll be brainwashed by this evil sect ….
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Recommended reading
• Brotsky, S. R., & Giles, D. C. (2007). Inside the ‘pro-ana’ community: A covert online participant observation. Eating Disorders: The Journal of Treatment and Prevention, 15(2), 93–109.
• Malson, H. (1998). The thin woman: Feminism, post-structuralism and the social psychology of anorexia nervosa. London: Routledge.
• Tierney, S. (2008). Creating communities in cyberspace: Pro-anorexia web sites and social capital. Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing, 15(4), 340–343.
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© 2016 David C. Giles
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Giles, D.C. (2016). Does ana=Anorexia? Online Interaction and the Construction of New Discursive Objects. In: O’Reilly, M., Lester, J.N. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Adult Mental Health. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137496850_17
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