http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/6935768.stm

I consider stuff like this to be along the lines of a hate site. It’s hateful and evil.

On another note as a parent of a daughter who had a friend involved with these sites a few years ago, I used it as an opportunity to talk to my daughter and her friends about body image and how women are presented in the media. One of her friends who was borderline anorexic (she kept her weight at around 110 pounds and wanted to get lower) kept expressing that boys wouldn’t like her if she was fat and she wouldn’t be attractive. I just told her over and over that wasn’t true. Her own mother was very fat and encouraged her daughter to be very thin and wasn’t very concerned with her involvement with these sites.

Finally I suggested to her to make a list of all the women and girls she knew who were married or had a boyfriend, including random women she saw at a store or somewhere who had a wedding ring on. She and my daughter did, and it was like a light bulb went off in her head because she listed many women including her mom, me, her teachers, librarians, moms at the park, her mail carrier, etc…and none of us were television/model thin, some of us were fat, and all had men. Not that having a man proves your appeal or worth or whatever, just that for this girl it broke her belief that she had to be thin to be attractive. and it made her see that men don’t really care about weight/fat the way the media portrays they do. Just opening her eyes and looking around her community showed her the truth.

She started eating and regained her weight, about 125 lbs. She is slender and fit but to the way she thought before 125 would have been very very fat.

So while I think these sites are dangerous,I think it’s more important that teen girls have involved parents or some adult who cares.

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