half victim, half accomplice

when i’m not sure what i’m supposed to take away from an article

It is absurd to tell women to love themselves in a world that alienates them from their own flesh. No amount of one-quarter-moisturiser soap can wash away the knowledge of what your female body means to others: sex object, breeder, wank fodder, window dressing, on-set extra. The distress women feel when confronted with image after image of extreme thinness cannot simply be characterised as “I want to look like that so that men love me”. A woman might actually be thinking “women are supposed to look like that because men do not like us at all”. Or “I want to look like that so that my body will be less fleshy, less female and less real”. Women starve, binge and purge because they feel trapped in bodies that are not “theirs”. The trouble is, there’s never a female body that fits.

Such diseases [anorexia and agoraphobia] are caused by patriarchal socialization in several ways. Most obviously, of course, any young girl, but especially a lively or imaginative one, is likely to experience her education in docility, submissiveness, self-lessness as in some sense sickening. To be trained in renunciation is almost necessarily to be trained to ill health, since the human animal’s first and strongest urge is to his/her own survival, pleasure, and assertion… Learning to become a beautiful object, the girl learns anxiety about - perhaps even loathing of - her own flesh.

Exposely had a major selling point for kids in a similar position to So-Relatable: Its Google AdSense account would be a way for teens who’d been banned to still make money from ads. Exposely offered its publishers both pay per click and pay per conversion. The pay-per-click scheme worked like this: Exposely set up three garbage content sites with mindless slide shows—14 Celebrities That Look Like Mattresses—called Trending.ly, Styles.ly, and Eats.ly. There were ads on each page of the slide show, and the kids would post a couple slides from the site on their Tumblrs, with the right headline and text along the lines of omg this is so funny. The ads tracked which Tumblr sent the traffic, and the teens were paid 75 percent of the ad revenue for each click. The pay-per-conversion program could make more money, but it cost its users something else entirely. Hegstad got an account at a health affiliate network—a snake-oil sales depot. The idea was to create an advertisement mimicking a Tumblr post, and the ad would include a link to a diet pill site. If a person clicked on the ad, went to the site, and bought a bottle of pills containing synthetic raspberry ketone, the Tumblr user who reblogged the ad would get $18—after Exposely took a $20 cut…. So in between Tumblr posts about life’s daily tragedies, like someone stepping on the back of your shoe, there appeared these diet pill posts. A Tumblr user explained to me that So-Relatable had an advantage by posting these ads, because their blog had a theme of relatable quotes and life hacks. The fit was natural. “Life Hack: You can lose 20 pounds per month with this magic pill.”