blogwatch
11 Nov 2008
Should "Pro-Ana" Sites Be Banned?
Blogs that validate anorexia are one of the potential targets of the Government's internet censorship plan. What do these bloggers have to say on the subject, and why should we listen?
Recently we've heard calls for the banning of sites that apparently promote anorexia, or are at least equivocal about it. The federal Government's intention to filter the internet for the entire country has been seen as an opportunity by some to tighten access to sites that they deem dangerous or illegal.The desire to block access to child pornography has been the driving force behind the Government's rhetoric, expressed here in the words of Senator Stephen Conroy: "If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd-Labor Government is going to disagree."
Already though, other interest groups have lobbied to have their targets included on the "black list".
Federal Labor MP Anna Burke has proposed the censorship of pro-anorexia websites, and Health Minister Nicola Roxon has promised the Government will consider concerns over such sites.
Anti-anorexia groups argue that "pro-ana" websites (as they are called within the online community) have become instrumental in maintaining the cycle of the disease by providing community and encouragement to those who would otherwise be isolated in their condition. "The number of websites promoting anorexia and bulimia has increased by 470 per cent in a single year," says teen checkup.
"Pro-ana website creators say these are internet destinations for people who are looking to connect with supportive, like-minded, anorexic people like themselves. If you're as disgusted as I am right now, just wait. It gets better. Stanford researchers report that 96 per cent of people who have visited pro-eating-disorder sites said they've learned new weight-loss or purging techniques."
The words of pro-ana bloggers are certainly confronting:
"I've been using laxatives, over-the-counter diet pills and metabolism boosters, replacing meals with diet soft drinks and cigarettes, have become vegetarian and I'm purging several times a week. I know I have developed an eating disorder and I know some people might think I need help, so commenting on it will be irrelevant. What I want to know is, why am I not losing weight?"
To which other users dutifully reply that her metabolism has shut down.
Sometimes these sites make almost painful reading. A typical post by pro-ana blogger "Ana Regzig" (whose site Dying To Be Thin has, she says, had over 30,000 visits) includes lines like:
"This weekend's three-day fast (the first one I've done in about a year) was a huge success. I actually felt like I was starting to go a little crazy off of the pure euphoria. There is no other way to describe the ridiculous HIGH I got from starving for three straight days ... Starve on, ladies (and gents!)"
Her readers comments are full of praise and admiration: "Oh wow! Wish I had the will-power to do the 3 day fast. Maybe I will. :D Good job!!" Also: "I just wanted to say thankyou for constantly updating your blog. It so helps me to stay on track." And, "We can do it, we just have to be strong."
But there's a lot of the down-side too, like this post on proanorexia at LiveJournal:
The quotes reflect a serious problem out there, but do they justify taking away people's freedom to access this information and contribute to these communities?"Today, I realized that my eyes are going out because of it. My skin is shit. My hair is falling out. Due to laxatives, well, let's just say sometimes things don't go so well. I'm pretty fucked from this disease and I feel like I'm being mocked when people say "I joined this and lost weight yay!" or ANYTHING like that. I mean, I'm not saying people are faking it, I just don't feel the bond of the suffering and what not."
Jennifer O'Dea an Associate Professor of Health and Nutrition at Sydney University told The Sydney Morning Herald that freedom of choice does not apply to anorexics because "they cannot make a sensible judgment". But as many bloggers point out, this class of people who we deem unable to decide for themselves has proven to be a very expandable category depending on who's doing the deeming.
The contrary notion that sufferers have every right to choose a lifestyle with consequences ranging from chronic ill health to organ failure and death is certainly a challenging one, but it comes up again and again on the blogs.
Blogger Ana Regzig says on her "About me":
"I love my eating disorder and I hate you, so FUCK OFF!///// Haters comments WILL be deleted.///// If you aren't ana [anorexic] but wish you were, fuck off, go count your blessings and eat a sandwich. Wannarexics will not be tolerated.///// If you are disordered and love it, I love you too. Be strong and THINk THIN.///// If you are disordered and in recovery, do yourself a favor and close this page now, call your doctor, and confess that you've been searching for pro-ana sites online. Don't leave me a message, don't leave me a comment, go away and concentrate on fixing yourself. Don't try to fix me — I am not and will not be broken. Someone loves you enough to try to help you — you shouldn't be looking at this site..."
This is the strange logic of the pro-ana blogs. "Feel lucky if you aren't in our position, but if you are — Welcome: you ROCK!"
The thinspiration (or "thinspo") stuff is one of the most scary parts of some of these blogs (have a look at some here). In a nutshell, it's material — usually pictures, but also video — that anorexics use to strengthen their resolve not to eat. Mostly it's a lot of images of very thin women.
In the mainstream media you find a lot of talk about the way media and advertising distort our image of what's attractive and normal, and how it filters down into our consciousness to make us unhappy with ourselves — but it all sounds pretty indirect and vague and it's easy to dismiss it (especially for those who never really dug semiotics). But there is nothing indirect about the way thinspo images are being used to inspire and reinforce the already seriously distorted self-image many anorexia sufferers have.
If you feel that the bombardment by images of thin women we see all around us is generally harmful, then it's easy to understand why some people regard thinspo as the most destructive of these images, targeted at the most vulnerable people (by themselves) with chilling precision.
On the other hand, there are many bloggers and commenters who feel very strongly that pro-ana comuinities are not the real problem, and are in fact part of the solution:
"I'm new to the Pro-Ana community...but since i've been here, not once have i seen anybody without an eating disorder encouraged to develop one, on the contrary, i've seen nothing but disdain for "Wannarexics", people who just want to lose a few pounds and treat this like a diet. Whenever somebody has mentioned recovery, i see only support and that's the key word in all of this — support.
"People with eating disorders often also suffer from depression as i do myself, they also, particularly teenagers, feel they cannot tell anybody else about their disorder. So, would you rather these depressed and disordered individuals simply had no outlet, that they sat in their rooms in their own thoughts?
"Pro-Ana allows people to see that they're not alone, that there is somebody to talk to and somebody who will support them. If one single person comes online and decides that their life is worth living simply because of the support they received, support they could get nowhere else, isn't that all worthwhile at the end of the day?"
And again:
"Suspending pro-anorexia communities will not make anyone suffering from the disorder become healthy again. Allowing them to exist, however, has several benefits. It reassures those who join them that they are not alone in the way they feel about their bodies. It increases the chance that the friends and loved ones of the individuals in the community will discover their disorders and assist them in seeking professional help."
As another commentator on museum of hoaxes says:
"The thing is, these sites can make the illness a lot less scary and despairing for people. They will do it anyway, except that having these sites helps them to ward off depression and other self damaging behaviours. Anorexia is all about control — and it's a hell of a journey to get it."
Are these comments just self-delusion? Are they merely disclaimers necessary to stop their sites being shut down by nervous ISPs? Or are they in fact doing the best they can to navigate a very strange space where individual freedom to choose, and freedom of expression is applied to something that is clearly very bad for you (as many of them freely recognise).
Perhaps they are all of the above. There is another issue that may help many people to decide: money. Does the idea that a blog receives revenue (eg in the form of a cut from advertising) change the way they think about the community value of pro-ana sites? There's another one for the regulators.
Meanwhile, aside from the debates over whether or not these sites do more harm than good, there's also the very tricky question of whether banning them is even possible.
As bloggers like Antony Loewenstein and Geordie Guy argue , the idea of creating a "clean internet feed" for Australia is fundamentally flawed. There are deep concerns that such censorship is enormously expensive, will slow the net down considerably, won't help problems like anorexia or child pornographers exchanging material, and will seriously impair free speech.
"Why does the government think censors are the ones who can fix this and not law enforcement?" asks Michael Meloni on leading anti-internet censorship blog Somebody Think Of The Children. "Mandatory ISP filtering is about protecting votes, not children."
Syd Walker, who runs the blog Building The Great Australian Firewall Brick By Brick, comments with a different take on the motivations behind the Government's push:
"If it was a matter of votes only, the Government would have given up on this one a long time ago. A recent opinion poll cited by a TV channel suggested popular sentiment is 4:1 against. [The] utimate goal of those pushing the legisation is political censorship. Child protection is window-dressing.
In any case, many bloggers argue that it's not the internet promoting the plague of anorexia, it's our whole culture.
Blogs act as summary debates — they are there for you to read and decide where you sit on the issue. As well, blogs can be one of the best things about an open, free, confident and evolving society of people working to improve their understanding of the world around them. Any reading of the pro-ana sites is certainly revealing, and at the very least gives sufferers a forum in which they not only feel supported, but also can express themselves without self censorship. Anyone seeking to understand the mindset and feelings of a person suffering from this kind of problem — and through that to help them — would learn a lot from reading their thoughts and the way they communicate with each other.
If there is any truth in the idea that pro-ana sites offer valuable shelter for desperate people, and that turning them off without replacing that support with something just as good or better, then we've kind of shot ourselves in the foot.
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I find the concept of banning pro-ana sites ridiculous. I struggled with anorexia as a young person, before the internet was widely used, and still managed to find new ways of starving and purging - through books, other people with anorexia and especially while in hospital receiving treatment. Yet, I also managed to recover, despite mixing with other people much sicker than I on a daily then weekly basis.
Pro-ana sites are not comfortable reading, yet having anorexia isn’t comfortable either, and sites like these may feel like the only place where these people can say exactly how they feel – imagine the reaction of family members, friends and health professionals to these thoughts and feelings. Anorexia is an illness, and many people don’t get better, and are unable to imagine a life without their illness.
The idea that the world (or the internet) can be censored "to protect the children" is naïve at best, and a complete waste of money. And Conroy’s strategy of calling everyone who disagrees with him a child pornographer just unhelpful in having a mature debate about these issues.
Let’s extend the logic of banning "pro-ana" blogs to other activities that are harmful to people’s health…and you’ve no doubt already thought of a dozen mainstream activities that would be banned.
And I’m afraid the logic that anorexics are "unable to make a sensible judgement" begs the question: who is? The significant number of people who eat too much of the wrong food; smoke; drink too much; drive too fast; ingest unknown chemicals; have unprotected sex; watch hours of rubbish television; read junk mags…
I’d go so far as to say no-one has perfect judgement and it’s impossible to define "sensible" in this or any other context.
One good thing about leaving these sort of activities on the web is that parents, counsellors and others can read them and get some insight into both the way sufferers are thinking and feeling and the practical strategies they may be following. If you take it off the mainstream web, this information will go underground. And if sufferers are on the web, they’re just a click away from advice that might help them deal with anorexia.
I think child pornography (or, in fact, any material that involves the mistreatment of children) is one of the very few things virtually all of us can agree there is no justification for giving people freedom to publish.
In all other cases that I can think of there are situations where publication is justified. There are, for instance, the famous videos of people being beheaded by Al Qaeda and its ilk, which were linked from many mainstream media sites, usually with plenty of warnings. I know there are also nasty scenes of animal mistreatment put on the web by animal rights groups to press their case.
I’ve thought about it and decided I don’t need to see these to be informed. However I don’t feel anyone has the right to decide this sort of thing, for instance, should be filtered.
Similarly with every kind of hate speech and extremism. There are some very nasty people in the world with, to my mind, hateful and unacceptable views. But it’s very hard to decide where to draw the line in a practical sense. Wherever you draw it, you’ll allow something bad to slip through at the margins and you’ll be banning some legitimate activity. How, for instance, do you program a computer filter to distinguish between a "pro-ana" site and a site aimed at helping parents understand their anorexic children, the way the condition progresses, their strategies and the way they think about it. The words will very likely be the same, only the context changes.
SRayner1: Precisely! No one can stamp out stupidity. Of course the thought of children looking at porn is not a wholesome idea. Nor was The Renaissance a wholesome period of history, but out of it came triumphant art. You cannot have progress whilst demanding censorship. By invoking the ‘kids looking at porn’ rule the Holy Brigade will merely end up re-enforcing our existing two-tier society. The smart kids will find a way around the system, and the less smart will continue to be the drones that labour in our auto industries. This dubious spiel about protecting children is nothing more than attempt to censor society, and,as usual, it is the ‘God Botherers’ leading the band.
Children have to learn the rules of society. Not have the rules whited-out. Why should computer users have to put up with mediocre and reduced speed of access, in order to protect the ‘kiddie widdies’? It’s the Arthur Rylah principle waxing strong. He used to be a Liberal Party (Victoria) hack, way back when….who used to justify all forms of censorship by the words, "I’m not allowing anything (newspapers, books, movies, nude statues etc.) which would offend my teen-aged daughter." Trouble was; he didn’t have a teen-aged daughter. And eventually the voters woke up to him. Not before he had purchased himself a knighthood. Which was perfectly legal way back when…..
Anyway, I wish to thank all censorship brigade for their tireless efforts to bring Australia back to the sanitized 1950’s. Doubtless you will succeed. By then you will have laundered society so completely that you will have created a fertile environment for the emergence of a totalitarian state. MOREOVER you will have done it all in the name of God. Poor God, he cops everything!
I think it’s very important to separate the argument about the ethics of censorship with the practical cost/benefit analysis.
It seems pretty clear, that practically speaking, censoring the internet carries way more costs than benefits. If it can’t be done without ruining the internet for everyone, it’s game over, protect people some other way. (parents maybe :-P ) I know for certain my young teenage kids when I eventual have some :-) will not be using the internet behind a closed door. If they wanna screw around, they have to risk betting caught in the open!
But the censorship ethical question is much more murky. Personally, I believe in the social contract and the concept of paternalism to a degree. I’m not inclined to say human beings should be thrown to the wolves of their own desire as a general rule. An ethical cost benefit analysis needs to be applied on a case by case basis..Once we decide, than decide if the measures we take are gonna work, or be wasteful and punitive.
Fact is, anorexia costs money, costs lives, destroys families etc etc. People
‘s lifestyle choices can have major effects on others…Perhaps that is the best yardstick to measure the need for paternalism?
The internet is a difficult call. With previous technologies it was much easier to socialise providers and consumers into acceptable norms. With the internet it is possible for these influences to come into our homes unseen and unchecked. I would like to see more discussion about the responsibility of providers in this debate.
The only possible answer as a consumer is to know your children well, retain their trust and if they need it intervene with love. Kids with Anorexia are characterised by a high average intelligence and an iron will. I would be very surprised if it was possible to stuff the pro-ana genie back into the bottle.
If you have kids why not talk to them about the pro-ana sites? What an easy way to bring up a difficult subject.
LukeMR and Dr Dog: Surely, as I said to begin with, you cannot legislate against stupidity, (if anything should be censored it should be the really stupid women’s magazines for accepting these weight-loss commercials.)
Yes, Luke, I understand where you are coming from in the costs to the community and anorexia. But hey, what about the cost to Oz if we allow internet censorship. Soon it will be books, movies and nude-statues, as happened in the state of VIC: when Arthur Rylah was in politics. Three examples only. My mother wanted me to read Ulysses; James Joyce, and Sons and Lovers; D H Lawrence-this was to broaden my literary horizon. One day she came home looking a bit crestfallen. Turns out the only copy of Ulysses she could find, was an under the counter deal, at a price she wasn’t prepared to pay. This is the sort of thing censorship produced. Michaelangelo’s David was brought to Oz-probably not the original-None other than Arthur Rylah imposed a fig-leaf on the statue. In case you hadn’t noticed, James Joyce and D H Lawrence are major, major literary ‘icons’, and I don’t think I have to explain to either of you who Michaelangelo was. These are some of the costs to the public.
Also, since when is it up to the public to be enforcing moral standards, when way back when….It was the job of parents to provide some guidance.
PS: I’m not sure but I think ‘The Vicar of Wakefield’ was also banned, because the writer was none other than James Joyce.
Cheers
V.
Here is the website of one amazing man who made it possible to maintain the freedom of the internet in the way in which we enjoy it today:-
http://www.blogger.com/profile/00121944171459090792
Ironically, the blogspot of this amazing man and the views he expresses is probably the TRUE reason the idea of censorship is starting to raise its ugly head.
First they will argue that it is for the good of our children, then it will be for the good of our community and then it will be because one political ideology cannot tolerate the xistence of another.
We allow censorship of the internet at our own peril.
Tech publication IT News reported yesterday that,
"Reversing his policy to restrict the filters to "illegal content", Senator Conroy has recently promised to expand them to cover online gambling sites, and sites discussing euthanasia and anorexia"
More details here:
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/88908,senator-conroy-expands-reach-of-net-…
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Rod McGuinness
Managing Editor
newmatilda.com
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