Fire At Their Fingertips: Excerpt Two

“Well, actually, officer, this is a healthy support system for fellow eating disordered patients. Perhaps it can be seen as driving one another into the throes of a deadly bout of anorexia and/or bulimia, but it’s just not all that bad. In fact, I would have really appreciated a Pro Ana or Pro Ana message board where there was safety in numbers and we would have been able to battle the pervasive loneliness. You must be able to understand that, don’t you?”

“But these so-called “Pro Ana” and “Pro Mia” websites have died down substantially from their heyday between  2000-2010.  Practically everyone knows by now that “Pro ana” means Pro (or, for) Ana (Anorexia) and “Pro Mia” (For bulimia). Someone must have investigated and spent an inordinate amount of time coming up with these cute little pet names, not to mention combining  “Inspiration” with “Thin” and coming up with “Thinspiration, or “Thinspo” if you can’t bring yourself to type out the entire word.)

A now-defunct social media conglomerate known as Xanga was a gathering pot for those teens who already had a serious eating disorder and their bitter enemies, known as “Wannarexics” and “Fauxlimics” those spoiled brats who wanted an eating disorder so they’d be bikini-ready or in time for their weddings. Disgusted with these fakes,  Tried and True Anorexics and Bulimics went after their foes with the rabid, tooth-gnashing hatred whose energy was so electrified that it could potentially light up an entire city.

But this was 2019 and the “Xanga Self-Starvers” and “Self-Serving Saviours” and the fifteen-year-old girls cam-whoring in their underwear and flexing their bony backs to millions of ogling and admiring wannas of 2005 are now fourteen years older, making the majority of them twenty-nine, nearly thirty. I have to wonder whatever happened to these gals. Are they still living at home and conspiring with cohorts to “starve for perfection” or have they moved on to adulthood, including university, college, marriage, a family perhaps? I would be interested in finding these things out and I’m certain there are ways, but it just feels a bit too ”stalkerish” for my tastes. When Xanga flushed itself down the virtual toilet, these skinny-starved girls scattered like frightened geese, never to be seen or heard from again.

The answer is anything but simplistic.  Natalie’s desk top computer’s hard drive was confiscated by police after an anonymous tip had proof that Natalie Platt had been a victim of online predators and because of something the poor girl did or said.  Two years before, there had been a sad case of fifteen-year-old Amanda Todd, who got herself in a twisted tramp when she quickly flashed her adolescent chest at a most likely salivating child molester who was old enough to be Amanda’s father. This sick freak went on to blackmail Todd by threatening to show everyone that a fourteen-year-old grade nine student from Coquitlam British Columbia was little more than a loose young hussy who wanted everyone to get a look. Nothing could have been further from the truth.