What Ana Wants
The letter opens with a compliment. You’re so mature, so intelligent—your teachers say it, your parents say it. Your friends tell you that you don’t look fat when you ask. Your parents love you, of course they do. But here’s the secret only she will share: deep down, they’re all disappointed. From their daughter with all that potential, a fat, lazy girl has grown. And she—Ana, short for Anorexia Nervosa—is going to fix that.
I found this letter on a website I shouldn’t have been on, and I found it because a classmate had given a presentation about eating disorders in school that I came home from unable to stop thinking about. She mentioned online forums where people could exchange experiences—support groups, she said, where those affected could find each other. What she hadn’t mentioned, or maybe didn’t know, was the other kind.
Pro-ana culture has its own internet. Tip sheets for suppressing hunger. Exercise routines calibrated for concealment. Strategies for hiding weight loss from family. BMI calculators. Diet journals with comment threads. And the letter from Ana herself, addressed directly to you, welcoming you into a relationship where starvation is reframed as devotion, as self-improvement, as the only friendship you can trust.
Some of the forums required you to apply with proof of illness before you could see any of the threads. I made up a profile, invented symptoms, wrote what I thought they wanted to hear. None of them let me in, which is probably the right outcome—I don’t know what I would have done with access. But I found one with an unlocked section and posted in a thread called "Questions About Ana," asking why, saying I didn’t understand, noting that open pages like this were potentially drawing in other girls without meaning to. Everyone piled on immediately. No conversation was possible. I felt exactly as stupid as I probably was: a guy who’d sat through one forty-minute school presentation and thought he could say something useful.
The internet is like that with dark subjects. Instructions for building a bomb and methods for controlled starvation sit the same number of clicks away from a music blog or a recipe forum. The pro-ana content existed in this strange parallel web, partly shielded by the argument that people had a right to do what they wanted with their own bodies—a logic that failed the moment you saw the parents posting desperately in the public threads, begging anyone to explain what was happening to their daughter, what language to use, what door to try. They were completely lost. The locked forums weren’t protecting anyone worth protecting.
The fashion industry wasn’t exactly counteracting any of this. Victoria Beckham was busy popularizing size zero, establishing a standard designed to make ordinary bodies feel deficient by definition. There was some movement—underweight models starting to be excluded from certain runways—but culture moves faster than policy, especially when the culture is also selling you something.
One afternoon of horrified clicking didn’t give me any real understanding of what anorexia actually is. It’s a serious illness, not a trend or a choice or a phase, and I can’t claim otherwise from where I’m standing. What I understood was narrower: that those forums were doing active harm, and that the darkness they offered wasn’t going anywhere just because I’d found it.