love of vulva

Studying eating disorders in women and girls is so fascinating to me because there is a paradox. Eating disorder (and other self harm) communities are dominated by women, and there are 2 different distinct sides with opposite goals.

On one side you have the wanting to feminize yourself. You have “I want to be tiny. I want to be petite. I want to be picked up easily.” They have the Victoria’s Secret model worship. They have the “I need to wear outfits, but I can’t wear them because I don’t have the body for that yet.” The “I want be fragile. Pretty and loved.” The tinyspo, fawn-like, coquette, dainty type of anorexia and bulimia. This want to be anemic and pale and frail and delicate. This was very popular mainstream pro stuff for a long time.

But now, on the other hand, you have another side of it, which is the wanting to defeminize yourself. It’s more brutal and honest. The relinquishing of womanhood and the seeking to be less obvious of a woman. “I want my breasts to go away. I want my ass to go away. I want to look sick. I want to be weak. I want people to feel bad for me. I want people to worry about me. I want to look sick in the way of how I feel inside. I don’t want to be sexualized. I want men to ignore me.” Bonespo, deathspo, wanting to not look like a girl, not look alive even. It reminds me very much of this drawing: “Just take them and leave me alone,” by Raoof Haghighi

It’s this asking to finally be free of the female markers. I want my period to go away, I want my teeth to rot, my arms and legs to grow hair, I want to be repulsive and look the way I feel. I want to be ignored as a sexual object, and I want a different kind of attention finally: see me disappearing and worry about me like a human.

And if you look at edtwt and other pro ana spaces, you will see a very large portion of these girls fall into either one of these two sentiments, often simultaneously. This is what’s so fascinating to me about this. Is that the disorder and the starvation does the same thing to your body. There are no 2 sides really. It both takes away your breasts, but it also makes you small and petite. You look sickly and lose your teeth and grow hair and feel tired and cold and lose your period, but you are also fitting into the outfits like the models and mannequins do and meeting the beauty standard.