Cigarettes, tiny liquor bottles, and body image issues
By Gabby Sabia
Photo by Lindsay Love
tw/ in-depth discussion of eating disorders
With the renaissance of pleated skirts, tattoo chokers, and angsty heroin-pop music, the trend cycle has officially made its way to every ‘02 girl’s middle school fantasy – 2014 Tumblr. Although I, like many others, am glad that the cringe things we wore in middle school can now be labeled “ahead of its time,” there is a big concern that comes with the Tumblr girl revival. Because the romanticization of the fashion and music will inevitably come with a romanticization of the culture.
Fatphobia plagued the blog site throughout the 2010s. In between posts of Halsey lyrics and purposefully blurry pictures of a twilight sky were tips on how to starve yourself under the ‘pro-ana’ tag.
I wouldn’t go as far as to say that the pro-ana movement purposefully inducted thousands of teenagers with the promise of an aesthetically pleasing eating disorder to garner notes and reblogs – but nonetheless, that was what the tag, and Tumblr itself, was doing. In reality, the movement was born as an, albeit harmful, coping mechanism for predisposed victims of eating disorders. But because of the competitive and ruthless nature of eating disorders, it ended up evolving outside of its original circle and exposed itself to vulnerable audiences – audiences who would then be trapped inside the algorithmic social media bubble and forced to face the dangerous, toxic mindset every single time they logged on.
Even with site-wide content bans, Tumblr couldn’t ever fully control the pro-ana tag. Imagine what would happen if TikTok got their hands on it. The hive-mind mentality in TikTok doubled with its exponentially advanced algorithm is a recipe for disaster in any scenario (think of all of the trends that have completely overthrown TikTok – the couch guy, reality shifting, etc).
Maybe I am being pessimistic. Maybe I’m underestimating the collective comprehension in today’s media. The only thing I know for certain is that if this thing were a meteor, I can see it coming – and that’s something that unsettles me more and more everyday.
What do you think? Are black skater skirts and ballet flats worth it if it means dragging all of this baggage with it? Is there a way we, The Media-Consuming Mass, can separate the good and the bad?
