Slimness is again the strong trend, I read, and I surf around among great Instagram profiles, Victoria Beckham, Gine Margrethe, Frida Aasen Chiabra, and many, many more.
And I can’t stand it.
Image from Norwegian model Frida Aasen Chiabra’s Instagram.
I just want to scream and I don’t really mean to say a bad word about these women, they have their own lives to fight with. But they are all, knowingly or not, part of the pro-ana movement that has emerged online, and which, like all subcultures, has its own slogans. “Bones are beautiful”, reads one. “Be strong, starve on”, another.
Pro-ana is not an organized movement, just the name of a phenomenon that has exploded in recent years, and where the participants – often unintentionally – present anorexia as an elegant and chic lifestyle, and not as a disease that kills and causes immeasurable suffering.
Now I have to conf to a closed ward with the sickest and I have heard the screams from the abyss. I have seen young girls slowly die. But on the other hand, I know what starvation does to a teenage brain, and I know all too well how you as a relative break down.
To see a person you love deeply, wanting to starve to death is unbearable, nothing else, and I also know how great the ignorance is among those who have not been affected. They don’t understand, maybe can’t understand either. Anorexia is such an evil demon, cold as steel, that it cannot be understood unless you experience it.
Victoria Beckham
But I wish people in general learned a little more about the pounding fury with which the disease strikes back. Often you can’t shake it, even if you do nothing but try, and cry yourself to sleep, and get the best help.
Anorexia is not a little fix, not a temporary invention but a life-threatening addictive disease, an unbearable and intense torment for those who carry it, often talented ambitious girls who want to feel that they control at least something in their lives, and even if they don’t there are unequivocal figures, most indicate that the situation is getting worse. The pressure on care is increasing, and no one doubts that there is a connection with the social media epidemic of thin women mouthing and showing off bony bodies – with the whole thinness trend, size zero, which is currently taking off like wildfire, and which even Kim Kardashian slimming down to a new worryingly skinny self.
The girls live in such an appearance-obsessed hideous influencer culture.
What the role models do online has an effect, and it affects even more when the person who has once become interested in something unhealthy is fed similar images around the clock according to the network’s emotional local algorithms, and I have no idea what we should do about it.
I just sit here with a dizzying feeling that we probably survived ourselves, thank you my dear child, while others didn’t, and I can only say that I bleed for you all, and that I think I understand a little what it’s like to be a young girl today.
The girls live in such an appearance-obsessed, hideous influencer culture where everything is measured, compared, and is so damn narrow and feigned happiness that I hardly understand how it is possible to stay healthy in such a sick world.