Anorexia is Gay

Anorexia has always been performative, and it is not performative for the benefit of men. Men find anorexics repulsive for the most part because the woman’s body (most anorexics are women) is robbed of its femininity. The acute anorexic sails through the childlike/pubescent state that many men desire to the desert island of the scrawny scarecrow as body weight and muscle tone is lost.

Once anorexia gets going, it means the cessation of a woman’s monthly periods, a huge decrease in hip and breast size, and a subtraction of womanliness in every conceivable sense. Anorexics become mean because they are obsessed with food, subsisting in a perpetual state of being hangry with serene, delusional transcendence that the building is not on fire.

The models

Modeling is for women. Modeling largely exists to sell “fashion” in the form of clothes, hair, and makeup to women and girls. Men generally don’t want to become models and male modeling is not seen as a legitimate career among men. The 2001 Ben Stiller/Owen Wilson comedy Zoolander would not have been funny if the model-protagonists had been female. Female models, on the other hand, are taken seriously.

When models are on the runway, they are not trying to sell fashion to men. The model aesthetic — that of a tall, dramatically thin, gaunt woman loping down a platform while crowds ogle her body — is making a sexual appeal to women. Men generally don’t care for tall girls, especially not in person. Any woman who has had to live down the plight of being north of 5’10” in high school knows exactly what I am talking about. If the tall girl is lucky, she can find a tall boy to date, provided he is not already dating one of the many short queens who always get boys of every size. Many tall women end up settling for shorter men because it’s them or nothing.

Making tall, thin women into the beauty standard was a decades-long process. Until the early 1960s, the beanpole with no hips, butt, and itty-bitty titties was not someone who was blessed/cursed with the banner of sexiness. The great push towards emaciation started with It Girls Audrey Hepburn and Twiggy and gradually became the dominant force that spawned the current crop of extreme GLP-1 abusers. Men want the kind of model that doubles as pin-up: Les Wexner’s and Jeffrey Epstein’s Victoria Secret featured the exact type until they went woke in the 2020s. Women want the kind of model who pouts and slouches on a glossy magazine cover. She looks aloof. She is too cool for school. She looks like a gaunt, 13 year old boy, and women want to both to be her and to be with her.

Naturally, the men and women who control the modeling industry (which is the human trafficking industry with better PR) are gay. Epstein was (is, because he is still alive) reportedly Les Wexner’s bisexual lover. Ghislaine Maxwell (who also seems to have escaped prison and has left her body double/clone there to rot) personally initiated the girls who were sent through Epstein’s rape machine alone and in orgies. Fashion designers are almost always gay — it is odder to find a straight one. This makes perfect sense if you think about it: you cannot understand how to appeal to a woman’s gay side if you are straight as an arrow.

Nuder than nude

The modern push towards public nakedness is not curated to the male viewer. One trend I have found alarming is that of 10-17 year old girls wearing what used to be called hot pants. Hot pants or microshorts reveal the butt cheek above the line of demarcation between leg and rump. When Catherine Bach wore the jeans version of microshorts in the 80s television series The Dukes of Hazzard, they were dubbed Daisy Dukes after her character and considered scandalous. We were not allowed to wear them in my high school days as there was a dress code forbidding that amount of exposure. Nowadays, little girls wear them to the frozen yogurt shop. If I had a daughter, I would forbid her from wearing them.

Girls don’t wear short shorts for boys, though I’m sure the boys do not mind the spectacle. They wear them for each other. Any given anorexic’s selfie collection will likely include pictures of herself and other anorexics (“thinspo”) modeling in their underwear or some state of undress. The point of becoming a modern anorexic is not to cover oneself up in baggy clothing. Anorexia is a form of exhibitionism. The normal drive to gather the attention and titillation of other females goes above and beyond into the realm of thinness. When no more clothing can be removed, you strip your muscles and fat down to the bone so onlookers can see your skeleton.

The hollow ribcage, shrunken breasts, jutting hipbones, and knobby knees of the anorexic serve two purposes: 1. To appeal to other women who fetishize skinniness and 2. To draw more converts into the anorexic cult. Starvation is reframed as the final boss of femininity. “You want small? I will shrink myself to death,” says the anorexic to her mirror and her screen.

Anorexia is fetishistic. I don’t know why I have to be the first person to say this. Perhaps I am the only person who has figured it out. I think it is obvious. Anorexia is something women get off on. I believe this has always been true of anorexics, including the anorexics of the distant past. There is a sexual element to anorexia as a self-punishment regime. Those who lose sexual viability via starvation seek gratification through masochism. The flex in anorexia is to see how far you can go and how much you can hurt yourself before you literally die.