Megan Warin, an anthropology/sociology Ph.D. candidate in Australia, recently identified the "cult of anorexia" -- an obsessive aspect of the eating disorder that leads to the creation of a secret club with its own codes and behaviors and in which only the other members truly understand the rules. This is what the pro-anorexia movement embodies and offers to its members: a group of like-minded people who share a very specific pathology.

Ironically, it is not unlike the 12-step phenomenon, only the goal is illness instead of freedom from illness. As 15-year-old Jai puts it on her home page, "There are some people I've seen that call people sick and stuff for being pro ana, but I just ignore them because they don't understand anorexia the way people in the pro anorexia web rings do. I guess they won't understand until they experience what we experience. People who live around me don't know anything about my anorexia."

The pro-anorexia movement is not a development that is entirely new. Therapists have been observing this kind of behavior in hospitals for years. Girls who are admitted to an eating disorder program will band together: "When girls live and go to a group together we get symptom pooling," says Levenkron. "People who have just been restrictors [who severely limit their caloric intake] learn about laxatives and vomiting and exercise and diuretics and enemas. It becomes a culture -- they begin to bond. They find there are people like them and they are relieved because they aren't so crazy."

But in scale, hospitals can't compare with the Internet, where curious anorexics can instantly find thousands of other anorexics to chat with. On a fundamental level, anorexics are seeking friendship and support; and frightening as it may be, the pro-anorexia movement gives that to them. But this vast cyber-bond, offering the constant companionship of people who uphold the collective delusion that eating a half-cup a rice and a cube of jello a day is perfectly fine, makes therapists extremely nervous. "These sites are dangerous," says Ponton. "It normalizes anorexia."

In fact, even writing about the sites offers a bit of a conundrum: The last thing you want to do is point sick anorexics toward the groups if they don't already know about them. As Warin put it, when she declined to be interviewed for "ethical reasons": "I know people with anorexia who do not know about these sites, but once given the information, they will access them to support and extend an illness that is a sure road to a life of misery and possibly death."

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A post from the Paperweight Perfection bulletin board:

Ladies, if you are in your teen years and want a boyfriend you better never get fat. Because everyone knows that hot guys only go for the skinny girls with big boobs. I hate it when guys say that size doesn't matter, that is the biggest fucking lie in the whole universe!!!!! If size doesn't matter then why are none of the fat girls popular in high school?

That is why we anorexics have to give off the right image, we have to be skinny and make all of the popular guys like us, but then turn them down or expose them as the mean people they are by saying something like, "how come you never liked me when i was fat?" We also have to not be like the rest of the fucked up world, we have to see people for what they are inside and act nice to everyone, regardless of their size! I am totally Pro anorexic, but i am just saying that we all, all of the pro anorexics out there, have to band together and raise to a higher level above this fucked up society.

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A lot of chronic anorexics actually attempt to recruit others to their "lifestyle" to feel better about themselves. "There are a whole lot of people who haven't given up yet and could recover; for those people, to get involved in pro-anorexia, it's like taking the kid who stole a pencil and putting him in a maximum-security prison," says Levenkron. "It's going to change those girls -- the girls will absorb the idea that you never get better."

But the pro-anorexics don't seem to be very worried that they are wooing others to their lifestyle. Charity offers typically circuitous logic about this: "If a young girl or boy is smart enough to know about pro-anorexia -- smart enough to find [it] online and smart enough to read through everything -- then they're not likely to kill themselves."

Michelle also claims that pro-anorexic sites are no more "triggering" than a copy of Vogue magazine. "You can't turn the page of a magazine without seeing triggering pictures of beautiful models whose ribs show or whose collarbones are accented by what they are wearing," she says. "Society glamorized the anorexic look. Turn on the television and what do you see? Slim Fast commercials. Society itself constantly promotes anorexic looks." (And even promotes it among anorexics, it seems: After I joined a few pro-anorexia clubs, Yahoo began serving me ads that promised to help me lose 10 pounds in a month at eDiets.com.)

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