Oop! I've changed my mind: body checking, eating disorders online

A topic that I've actually entirely changed my opinion on, and why

I am going to share my thoughts on a controversial topic, and it is going to seem pretty much entirely contradictory to what I’ve said on the topic a few years ago. I never shared my changed opinions about it on TikTok, because that was my executive decision. I didn’t want to upset anyone who felt supported and took comfort in my original take, and I also don’t have the energy to re-invest in such a draining discourse. But I will share it here.

I used to talk a LOT about eating disorder recovery on TikTok, especially regarding how recovery interacts with social media. This included a staunch tirade against body checking on TikTok, demanding trigger warnings, etc. My stance was that girls who are “obviously sick” showing their bodies, and “body checking”, needed to be stopped. This was in response to an influx of anorexic girls, even those still in hospital, making content where they were showing their emaciated bodies. I said, at the very least, that it needs a trigger warning. I do still stand by the fact that those videos are inherently problematic and damaging.

The response to that was pretty typical of what you’d expect from brainwashed mass opinion regurgitating phrases they barely understand but picked up from some wall of text - “They’re not responsible for your triggers”, “real life doesn’t have trigger warnings”, “their body doesn’t need a trigger warning”, “this is chronically online”.

I think these responses were completely lacking nuance, basically braindead . . . but also right. In retrospect, I actually agree, but with a lot more elegance and actual analytical thought:

My main issue with my original take is that it encourages policing. It emboldens audiences to police and regulate and scrutinize young women’s content, ostensibly in the name of some ethical defense of a marginalized group. It encourages policing and projecting the intentions of young girls’ content, and more sinisterly, it encourages policing and interpreting their bodies. This take endows the public audience with the authority to determine who is sick, whose body is too dangerous to see. There is a massive ambiguity to this policing, which is what makes it so harmful.

We actually have no idea who is sick. You have no idea who has an eating disorder just by looking at their body. The unintended fallout of my original take is that 1) it perpetuates the sole image of an eating disorder as visibly emaciated people, 2) it actually supports and contributes to those people’s illness. By being shocked and outraged at their body checking, the public affirms what the poster wanted to hear, which is that they starved themselves enough to be shocking. Encouraging policing of body checking actually serves to fulfill the ultimate purpose of sick girls’ body checking, which is to provide an audience that will consistently react in ways that prove they got sick enough to get people’s attention. Accusing an anorexic girl of body checking harmfully is like giving her a gold star.

The other issue is that the “real world doesn’t have trigger warnings” trope unfortunately actually has some truth. I am a long-standing hater of this sentiment, and I am generally fully supportive of practices that make existing less stressful for traumatized people, including trigger warnings. However, eating disorders are a social disease - they will always thrive off of attention/shock, and I think this is a new development of the disease as a result of the emergence of social media. As a society changes, the conditions that shape disease symptoms change along with it. Social media has introduced a new “public” for which the social aspect of eating disorders can be performed. It must be accepted as fact that anorexic girls will always exist online. They will always be there, sucking in their stomach, lifting up their shirt, dancing with their thigh gap. They will also always be there in real life - the girl in your friend group who makes a big show of standing in the mirror saying she looks fat, waiting for someone to tell her she’s shockingly skinny.

What I’m trying to get at is that a critical component of recovery is acknowledging and being prepared for the fact that you will continue to exist alongside people who are still sick. You will see them, you may even interact with them. A “recovery” that is contingent upon never seeing someone that’s sick or really skinny is not a sustainable recovery. A recovered person may very well be upset or triggered by it, but they would have the skills to cope with this in a way that prevents relapse. If this is not the case for you, then we must be able to entertain the possibility that you are not recovered enough to be on social media yet. And I hate saying that, I hated when people said that in my comments - “If it triggers you then get off social media”, shit like that. But it actually kind of has some truth, but in a much more empathetic and holistic way.

I think there’s also something to be said for what “recovery” actually means - the ambiguity hurts this discourse. To some, recovery means “I had an eating disorder but I don’t anymore, although I never went to treatment to fix it.” To others, it means “I was admitted to a hospital and went through a comprehensive inpatient treatment that gave me robust tools to maintain recovery.” Those two people may both identify as being in recovery, but may be in very different places in terms of being able to cope with seeing an anorexic girls prancing on their FYP.

All of this to say: what really needs to be done is to ignore them. That’s all you can do. They will always be there. They desperately want your attention. If you are not at a point in recovery where you can just pity them and silently scroll away, then you may need to consider new ways to engage with social media that account for the fact that other people are still stick, and will still behave like sick people.