Of all the sick and creepy subcultures that flourish on the internet, few are more disturbing than the pro-ana websites devoted to the celebration of anorexia - not as a mental illness but a lifestyle choice.
There are dozens of these shocking sites. Some of them are big-production numbers with well-designed photo galleries of scrawny models and external links to websites selling food substitutes and appetite suppressants.
Many of them are just sad little blogs by individual women who diarise their battle with their own body and share tips on how best to emaciate themselves.
I came across these websites for the first time a few weeks ago while reading a story about Kate Middleton unwittingly becoming the latest pin-up girl for the pro-ana movement.
Recent photographs of the duchess looking particularly thin have been hailed on pro-ana websites as an example of what women can and should look like with a bit of self-discipline.
The problem, of course, is that in holding up the naturally thin Kate as an example for every woman who is destined to be a perfectly normal size 12 or 14 or 16, these websites are subjecting their readers to a dangerous guilt trip that can easily result in an eating disorder.
What is worse is that most of these websites dispute the very notion that anorexia nervosa or bulimia are eating disorders at all. They feature image galleries under the title Thinspiration, where users can admire photographs of the most gaunt and malnourished models. In these dreadful galleries, Kate Middleton looks quite voluptuous against the most coveted women who appear as if they had walked straight out of a concentration camp.
I won’t name any of the websites I looked at, as I certainly don’t intend this piece to be a handy user guide for aspiring anorexics. To give you a sense of what they contain, one of the larger sites I read started with the following misleading warning: ``Remember, this site is for entertainment purposes. Seek medical help if you feel you have an eating disorder’‘. Right below this warning were a series of links to the websites diet section, where topics included ``How to hide an eating disorder’’ and ``Tips to curb appetite’‘.
Readers were urged to make a hot tea out of cayenne pepper which bloats the stomach and suppresses appetite.
Brazilian cocoa and seaweed are also good. Smoking, of course, is highly recommended. If you still find your tummy rumbling, just punch it really hard. Other sites had advice on how best to make yourself vomit and how to use laxatives to induce diarrhoea and dehydration.
In the microscopically calibrated world of the anorexic, women are encouraged not only to drink nothing but water, but to drink ice cold water, as the body expends a teeny bit more energy when the digestive system warms it up.
If the pro-ana movement has a heroine it is Kate Moss, whose ill-advised comment to a fashion website a few years ago that ``nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’’ has become a mantra across this subculture.
Moss said at the time that her quotes were taken out of context but they have taken off across the net, with young women being urged to repeat the words to themselves whenever a pang of hunger strikes.
The disturbing thing about all this dangerous information is that you don’t have to go to a pro-ana website to find it. Google will take you there. A young woman who has no knowledge of these websites simply needs to type the words ``lose weight’’ into Google - a pretty popular search term for women you would think - and the search engine will present them with plenty of pro-ana sites clogged with the deadliest diet information.
In Spain a couple of years ago, Microsoft shut down four Spanish-language pro-ana websites, one of which was offering a prize to the reader who ate the fewest calories that month.
About 10 years ago, Yahoo shut down a couple after Oprah Winfrey did a show about anorexia and examined some of these websites.
While it grates with free-speech sensibilities, it is very difficult to see what redeeming value these websites have at all.
The Federal Government, through Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, had canvassed the introduction of a net filter to blacklist extreme pornographic and terrorist websites.
Personally I can see no reason why websites that encourage young women to embrace an eating disorder as a way of life should escape such a ban if the filter were ever introduced.
One report in a psychiatric journal stated that anorexia had the highest mortality rate of any mental illness, with 20 per cent of sufferers dying from the disease. That in itself seems a decent reason to shut off access to these screwed-up sites.
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