About Thinspiration and Pro-Ana
With the masterclass we temporarily used a wordpress.com account before transferring it to our own server. But this blog turns out to be a very good test for the worrying interest in the subject of Thinspiration and Pro-Ana. Just look at the blog statistics from September 26th 2006 below from mastersofmedia.wordpress.com after a blogpost about the subject.
Top Posts
Title / Views
Thinspiration / 225
We’ve moved!!! / 2
Locative Media / 1Search Engine Terms
Search / Views
thinspiration / 61
pro ana / 40
pro-ana / 20
pro ana site / 15
t / 7
pro-ana op hart van nederland / 5
pro ana website / 4
pro anorexia / 4
pro ana superkuiken / 3
pro-ana site / 3
This is definitely worrying, because we can’t let a movement like this go by without anticipating on it. And this raises the question how to anticipate on groups that support psychological symptoms, or as others might say ‘a different normal’, and the question if they should be allowed. Because is banning it the way? Probably not, because subjects that go underground are even harder to check and anticipate on.
What could work is to let professional people integrate in these websites and provide different insights, to have a balanced view on the subject and not simply glorification. To show the downsides of the anorexia and inform them on the subject. I can only stress the importance of initiatives like Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty, to make especially women feel good about themselves.
If you’re looking for more information on the subject check out fellow New Media master student Jeffrey van Schie’s blog about his research on pro-ana and thinspiration.
neWMW 
Thanks for your comment, We must certainly look into other possibilities for our old blog and the popularity of the Thinspiration post mustn’t be ignored. It started out as ‘just an assignment’, but maybe we can transform our old blog into a anti/pro-eating disorder discussion blog. It’s worth a shot and maybe we could make the issue more visible by promoting serious discussion on a blog which is neither commercial nor pro-ana.
jeffvansky
September 27, 2006 at 12:04 am
The Dove Campaign loses all credibility, once one realizes that its parent company Unilever also owns Axe. Axe’s advertising uses extremely unhealthy models, that are usually portrayed as sexual objects. Try again for a positive media role in this whole issue…
mary kate
May 29, 2008 at 9:15 pm
@mary kate. I wrote this post some time ago and I have to say that I totally agree with you on Unilever. The campaign for beauty of course is a smart marketing trick that is used to atract a certain market. However, in any case, we can only applaud the use of a more healthy (female and male) image in advertising. Perhaps once Unilever sees that this campaign is working, they’ll change (I know… it’s a utopia 🙂 )
newmw
May 29, 2008 at 11:37 pm