Anyone who has signed up for a new account, be it Facebook, Twitter or ESPN Fantasy Football, is familiar with the small box you must check to indicate that you agree with the “terms and conditions” outlined by the website. Equally well known is the fact that no one reads this long collection of vague legal terms indicating that if you “repeatedly infringe other people’s intellectual property rights,” your account will be terminated.
Further investigation on blogging site Tumblr’s terms and agreements reveal that you must also agree to the website’s community guidelines describing what Tumblr is and is not for. One of these guidelines states Tumblr is not for the “promotion and glorification of self harm.” Despite these guidelines, Tumblr has become a center for the recent social media craze, “thinspiration.”
“If you’ll gain just a little bit more weight, you’ll look like a pig,” reads a popular thinspiration post under the title You Will Get Fat If You Eat Today. “Models are the image of perfection and I bet you haven’t met a fat model,” the post continues. “To [sic] many people are obese. Fat people are selfish.”
Thinspiration, or thinspo, consists of pictures and other forms of media depicting very thin women or men, or malicious text stigmatizing eating and gaining weight. It is posted by people who use the images as inspiration for weight loss. Thinspiration is a fixture on sites that promote eating disorders, called pro-ana or pro-mia.
Tumblr user “disenchanted-skeleton” has been actively using thinspiration and pro-ana sites for three years. Struggling with body image all her life, she found the blogs to be motivating and became hooked on them almost immediately.
“To be honest, I hardly go a day without looking up some pro-ana site or else search it on Tumblr,” disenchanted-skeleton said in an interview with The Southerner. “Although I find them extremely triggering, it’s almost like I get a buzz from looking at them. One single photo on one of those websites is enough to drive me even further into my depression and eating disorder; it immediately makes me feel disgusting and revolting but it motivates me to keep going.”
Junior Rachel Starks was first exposed to thinspiration while using Tumblr.
“I thought, ‘Wow that’s really stupid,’” Starks said. “It makes it seem like you should look up to skinny people.”
Freshman Julie* started using thinspiration via Tumblr in middle school. Julie did not have a Tumblr herself, but used the site to search for images using the tags “thinspo” or “thinspiration.”
“For years, since like preschool, I always saw myself as big,” Julie said. “I didn’t like the way I looked, and I wanted to be thin.”
Julie is not alone. Eighteen percent of the 115 Grady students who responded to a Southerner survey indicated that they do not like their bodies and over half of survey respondents wish to change something about their body.
In a 2010 study entitled The Real Truth About Beauty: A Global Report researchers found that only 4 percent of women around the world consider themselves beautiful.
According to a global survey, two-thirds of women think that “the media and advertising set an unrealistic standard of beauty that most women can’t ever achieve.” Starks agrees.
“Through magazines, TV, everything women are shown how they’re supposed to look, how people are supposed to look,” Starks said.
In fact, the CDC calculated that the average woman is five-foot, four inches tall and weighs 166 pounds, while the average super model is five-foot-10 and 120 pounds. The disparity between the way models looked in thinspiration photographs and the way she looked in real life made Julie, as well as many other users of thinspiration, feel inferior.
“You’re so far away from what they look like,” Julie said. “[Thinspiration] is almost addictive.”
Julie explained that some social situations, not just mainstream media, made her feel self-conscious. Simply spending time around friends at the beach can be a devastating blow to a woman’s self-esteem.
Denise Martz co-authored a report, featured in the June issue of the journal Body Image: An International Journal of Research, that concluded that women often put themselves down in social situations in order to forge relationships. Martz dubbed this “fat talk” and declares it a social norm for middle-to-high-school aged females.
“I’ll go somewhere with my friends, and they’ll talk about how ugly they are,” Starks said. “You should love yourself.”
Loving themselves is evidently difficult for the 20 million women and 10 million men who suffer from eating disorders at some point during their life. The best known contributor for these disorders is body dissatisfaction, and the median age for adolescent onset of an eating disorder is 12 years old.
“Anorexia and bulimia have become a fad,” Starks said. “It’s just because people haven’t found healthy ways to lose weight, so people turn to anorexia because not eating at all works.”
Julie was diagnosed with an eating disorder and, while she has since gotten over it, there are still times when she doesn’t like the way she looks.
Disenchanted-skeleton has attempted to recover from anorexia two times, but she attributes her failures to thinspiration. She is still using the tactic as a way to lose weight.
“Thinspo is so powerful and triggering particularly to people who are in the deep end of an eating disorder, and it can have negative effects,” she said. “But I just find it makes me want to lose more and more weight, and I will look at thinspo whenever I feel hungry and that will sustain me even more than food does.”
Eighteen percent of Grady students surveyed said that they have heard of thinspiration. Only a small percentage, however, have used it as a means of weight loss, and 75 percent of those people confessed that using thinspiration was an unhealthy way to lose weight.
Tumblr user “thin-beauties” claims to be unsupportive of anorexia, yet the blog is adorned with pictures of rail-thin women and posts describing her miniscule, and sometimes negative, net calorie intake. Thin-beauties sets her goal weight at 100 pounds, stating she thinks every size is good, but she prefers skinny for herself.
Tumblr’s search easily makes thinspiration accessible to the millions of active blogs that use the site. Attempts have been made to contact Tumblr, but they could not be reached for a comment. The thinspo tag has a header that reads: “If you or someone you know is dealing with an eating disorder, self harm issues, or suicidal thoughts, please visit our Counseling & Prevention Resources page for a list of services that may be able to help.”
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*Name changed at source’s request
