Pro-Ana: The Body and Pain in Cyberspace

Culture
Written By Haaniyah Angus

The legacy of Pro-Ana and the codification of bodies in digital space.

Sinead Campbell

Content Warning: Mentions of Eating Disorders

The dawn of Web 2.0 now seems like a hazy myth. We are haunted by the internet of our past, yet its original user base is shrouded in mystery and folklore. The internet is like a phantom limb—we can't see it physically, but we know for certain it's there, and we live our lives with this predetermined notion of its ever-present existence. In cyberspace, meaning is never fixed. Pain becomes beauty, illness is considered a lifestyle, and the physical body is rendered obsolete. There's a myriad of ways the history of the internet alludes to the changing relationship we have with our bodies and the connections we build with one another. In particular, one facet of this history reads like a parable or even a cautionary tale.

For context, ‘Pro-Ana’ stands for pro-anorexia, and its sister term ‘Pro-Mia’ stands for pro-bulimia. These are the names given to the cavities of the internet in which eating disorders are a basis for online communities. Pro-ana is a subculture, an ideology, a religion or even a cult. It rests broadly on the idea that eating disorders are not conditions to be chastised; it is a lifestyle, not a disease. Like eating disorders irl, pro-ana’s user base is mainly female, the age range spanning from teenagers to people in their early twenties—though users outside this demographic continue to populate these spaces. Pro-Ana found its home in groups and forums on Myspace, Angelfire and Livejournal, now ancient internet relics. As with the nature of early Internet history, its genesis is unclear. Wikipedia says it began somewhere in the late 1990s. However, studies have located Pro-Ana’s influence to take full shape in light of its appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show in the year 2000. Pro-Ana’s legacy survives in the stories of its original members, the remaining webpages still floating in the ethers and now, with its recent resurfacing with a newfound generation of young people online.

At the dawn of Web 2.0, the ebbs and flows of beauty clung for life at the side of impossibly thin. This standard of beauty was objectified by the models and photographers of the time, such as Davide Sorrenti and Corinne Day, what Bill Clinton coined ‘heroin chic’. Pro-Ana arrived at a moment where thinness was idealised in pop culture and consumer culture alike— it is as much a symptom of an anorexic society as it is a perpetuator of its ideals. It should not be reinstated here that commercial beauty incentives have a solely causal relationship to something as complex and interpersonal as an eating disorder—this is an age-old myth and a reductive explanation. As a poem on the Pro-Ana page, ‘TheSkinny’ writes: ‘Madison Avenue assaults you with these images. Images of gaunt, ideal figures, a deformed Barbie type!’ But the wider thinness imperative was a figure of inspiration (or ‘thinspiration’) for Pro-Ana users, with usernames and thinspo images of Kate Moss as staples on these sites. Their true God, however, was not the skinny celebrity of the moment—it was the eating disorder itself. Personified as ‘Ana’ and ‘Mia’, anorexia and bulimia were worshipped like matriarchs, maligned like dictators and beloved like imaginary friends, each having a distinct incarnation in the online realm.

Even though Pro-Ana was a sequestered zone, it wasn't totally divorced from outside its digital basis. Meet-ups occurred, and the signal of the red bracelet further codified the Pro-Ana communities in a way that extended beyond the digital terrain and into the physical world. More than a weight loss program, it was a community, a call for relatability surrounding a shared affliction, one that is far too often misunderstood. The 'digital' aspect is the bedrock of Pro-Ana, and it beckons the question— how can you transmute the material body into a strictly online zone? Strict rules and codes marked the mutable body, and much like the body-checking practices of incel communities, there were benchmark characteristics one had to prove to be accepted. Collarbones, thigh gaps, ribcages, weigh-ins, calorie counting and group fasts coloured the surface of the Pro-Ana body. They demarcated the point of entry, deterring those who couldn't prove themselves to fit the criteria, the hunger artists known as 'wanarexics'.

These strict gatekeeping practices were constructed under two premises: 

  1.  If a sense of community relied on a shared experience, then this experience had to be authentic amongst its participating members.

  2. If the gates of the Pro-Ana network were open to anyone who could access it, then the ideology would be witch-hunted by those who didn’t understand it.

This second premise was not unfounded. Social and health services have lambasted Pro-Ana for its dangerous and harmful influence. Its accessibility today is just as ambivalent as its beginnings. Blogs have been discarded due to the scarcity of archives or blocked for reasons of harm prevention, as reports on a supposed crackdown on Pro-Ana content on Tiktok have recently surfaced. Even though the pro-ana body co-aligns with aesthetic ideals of thinness, it falls out of line with wider sensibilities of health and wellness—this is the ultimate paradox. We are encouraged to consume through representations of underconsumption. We are told to love our bodies but only to the point that they can conform to conventions of how a body ‘should’ be.

Could it ever be possible to abandon the body? The internet is a place to fashion identity—at worst, it extends the idea of community into social contagion. For this reason, it can be dangerous even to those who find safety in its borders. It is often said that the corners of the internet which fester the most harmful ideas are socially deviant rather than cruel exaggerations of our current conditions. It is also said that these digital crevices are merely symptoms of individual isolation and social alienation. These assumptions fail to consider the more insidious implication that being chronically online constitutes being removed from oneself and one's own body almost entirely. Our culture is obsessed with bodies and the endless desire to regulate them. As we feel and become more and more socially disenfranchised, the body poses as the last location where we can exercise a sense of control. On the internet, we can bargain this control for a semblance of corporeal release but only towards a nefarious end. When we can exist without a body as a digital organism, there evolves a pernicious distrust of what the body can or is 'meant' to do. When a predictive internet system readily satiates our bodily desires, it becomes increasingly difficult to comprehend what is left to be hungry for.

On the internet, the body is liberated, and you can experience yourself and your surroundings in an aesthetic existence. In 2021, Katherine Dee wrote on her substack that pro-ana is ‘the nexus of all internet communities’. As with the nature of internet aesthetics, Pro-Ana exists within a bricolage of adjacent online trends which operate in a mimetic dialogue. Traumacore and its predecessor ‘morute-core’ (morbid cute) partnered with Pro-Ana hashtags, placing them into a larger umbrella category in which pain, death and trauma are presented through romanticised imagery - a sort of ‘macabre-core’ if you will. Waif and coquette aesthetics also neighbour Pro-Ana, depicting a body and lifestyle ideal which is both hyper-feminine and childlike, almost always white and, of course, thin. It should be stressed that these labels possess their own distinct individuality and are not necessarily ubiquitous with eating disorders. What’s pertinent is how the digital ecosystem creates a Pro-Ana ‘mood’ stylised by its online counterparts. A sphere in which angst, girlhood and melancholia reigned supreme.

Possibly, this stylisation found its heyday at the turn of the 2010s, a moment in which Pro-Ana sensibilities bled outside of its borders. In 2009, Laurie Halse Anderson released her novel 'Wintergirls', telling the story of a young girl whose battle with an eating disorder is exacerbated by her frequenting Pro-Ana blogs. In the same year, Lana Del Rey sings in her unreleased single 'Boarding School': 'I'm a fan of pro-ana nation, I do them drugs to stop the f-food cravings'. Later in 2012, Marina and Diamonds crooned in her song 'Teen Idle': 'I want blood, guts and angel cake, I'm gonna puke it anyway'. Much like its relationship to heroin chic, which predated and coincided with Pro-Ana's inception, the apex of the subculture's influence can be seen through its transition from an underground network into more mainstream-leaning art and culture. In recent memory, these were hallmarks for a milieu of Tumblr girls concerned more with signalling the aesthetics of Pro-Ana (and its adjacent trends) than the literal practice of its teachings. Like a case of cultural bulimia, the bodily ideals of the early millennium were devoured and purged into digital ethers for repurpose. Pro-Ana mediated a changing fashion through which thinness prevailed. 

Though this allure may have captivated the minds of an internet generation, it harpers back to an age-old trope in which pain becomes beautiful, what Susan Sontag describes as the romantic treatment of illness to make one ‘interesting’. Just as the glamour of thinness rests on the idea of ‘inconspicuous non-consumption’ and transcendental abstinence from the lure of indulgence, the romantic treatment of pain symbolises an intentional retaliation against the facade of toxic positivity. The mood boards of early Pro-Ana blogs are completely abject in their pairing of skeletal body horror with ethereal angel imagery, depicted in the poetry and drawings of its users. In its darkest corners, words and images of depression and self-harm are conjured. There is a demonstrated disdain for the body and an unyielding desire to escape from it. Insofar as the internet occupies a liminal space between the physical and immaterial, the anorexic body teeters on the edge between life and death. It is no wonder that Pro-Ana functions like a cult or religion. An early Pro-Ana blog named ‘Anastart’ even lists a set of ideals striving for salvation titled ‘Ana Creed’ and the ‘Thin Commandments’. As with fasting saints and mystics, starvation has historically expressed a yearning for the metaphysical, what Simone Weil described as the desire to ‘de-create’ herself. With pro-ana, it might be within the digital ethers that this otherworldly experience is deceivingly attained.

However, such cursory notions of romantic pain in cyberspace may, at times, obscure the starkly obvious fact at hand. Eating disorders are incredibly lethal and relatively fringe conditions, yet, this online subculture survives and proliferates in spite of the continued effort to dissolve it. Pain is pain, and an eating disorder is an eating disorder. As Leslie Jamison writes, ‘I remember that starvation is pain, beyond and beneath any stylized expression’. Within the cult of skinny, pain becomes stylish, and though this may offer solace for its members, they are still suffering nonetheless. Feminist philosopher Susan Bordo writes that anorexia is not a ‘philosophical attitude, it is a debilitating affliction’. To readily emphasise the styles and codes of pro-ana that seek to prove an ‘authentic’ mode of suffering may risk mystifying what resides at its core. Behind the ambient mirage of the internet, there are people who are bored, others who are lonely, those in deep despair and many who are all of the above. Almost all of us are trying to connect.

Now, Pro-Ana has resurrected more like a loosely tethered trend, albeit decontextualised from its beginnings. With algorithmically driven platforms miring any potential for ‘choice’ amongst its user base, the possibility of forming a sense of organic community online seems now like a radical suggestion. Whether driven by community incentive or aesthetic enticement, there was an ancient time when one was drawn to Pro-Ana somewhat of their own accord. Today, its online presence is largely permitted by interaction via technological coercion. The information swelling of the algorithm often results in unwanted exposure to images and ideas, which could harm users in recovery. Even those on the periphery are at risk as one Tiktoker identifies the unspoken phenomenon of user images circulating on ‘edtwt’ (eating disorder Twitter) as ‘fat-spo’. The growing malaise towards empty body-positivity mantras is beginning to bubble over, and our relentless revival culture is again paying lip service to a return to ‘heroin chic’ and 2010s Tumblr aesthetics. Predicting internet trends will always be a dubious venture, but one can only imagine this landscape might just be Pro Ana’s new stomping ground.

With all of this in mind, the history of Pro-Ana reads like a polemic for an Internet past, present and future. It tells us that the body online is a body in abstraction. Pain and illness are only as real as they can be stylised and proven to be so. The paradoxes of Pro-Ana exemplify a rudimentary state of the internet which has stayed with us over time. It mimics our cultural sensibilities whilst being deemed culturally unacceptable. It’s an exaggeration of the body ideal but a beckoning cry to be liberated from the flesh prison. It’s an escape from the solidarity confines of illness and a call for connectivity. But, in doing so, it’s often a process of further isolation.

Sinead is a recent university graduate from London who sometimes has ideas and occasionally writes about them. If you would like to read more of Sinead's writing in the future, she has recently ventured into the world of Substack and you can find her on Twitter and Instagram.

Works Cited:

  • Jamison, Leslie. Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain in VQR Spring 2014

Haaniyah Angus
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