A community of starvation : the convergence of teenage girls on pro-eating disorder websites

In this paper, I will explore the topic of young women and eating disorders. I will specifically focus on the use of the Internet as a place for these women to express the new idea of being pro-eating disorder, as in choosing to have an eating disorder. These women create pages to encourage others to maintain their eating disorders and to find a community that will do the same for them. I studied over 20 pages created for this purpose in this paper. I begin by finding the similarities in the pro-eating disorder websites and the possible cultural situations that have allowed for these types of websites to emerge in such great number. In the second chapter of this paper, I am interested in the ways in which these websites form communities for those who participate in them, both in a silent and active way. The nature of the Internet creates a new type of community for those who choose to be involved in the pro-eating disorder discussion. In the last chapter of this paper, I studied pro-ed pages on the social networking site, Myspace. I was able to compare the Myspace pages that centered on an individual and those in the previous chapters that express the needs of a community.