The Darkside of the 2014 Tumblr Era

 

    Trigger warning: Mentions of eating disorders and body image

    In 2022, people have been nostalgic wishing for 2014 Tumblr to come back. People want to go back to the good ol’ days where they could post soft-grunge pictures and listen to The 1975 all hours of the day, except there was always something darker underneath the surface. One minute you can be scrolling through pictures of smoke and fire and the next you’re seeing pictures of sickly thin girls in knee-high socks. The hashtag ‘Pro-ana,” starts flooding the screens of thousands of girls.

    Pro-ana is short for pro-anorexia, the content under this hashtag promoted extreme food restrictions and anorexic behavior to impressionable teenage girls. Pictures of collar bones and calorie charts were some of the things you’d see under that hashtag. You’d find blogs teaching young girls how to be stick thin and how to maintain that. Tips and tricks on how to avoid getting caught by your parents, teachers, and doctors flooded the site.

    The community was huge, thousands of people would reblog posts of Barbie dolls posed next to toilets and text posts like, “skip dinner, end up thinner,” and “your stomach isn’t grumbling—it’s applauding.” Years before this, in 2012, Tumblr tried to block all pro-ana content from the site, but bloggers found other clever ways around the new guidelines. They usezeros instead of o’s and use the blue butterfly emoji to let other bloggers know they are pro-ed. Even today, in 2022, there are still very active pro-ana blogs that still post.

    Munmum De Choudhury’s research paper, “Anorexia on Tumblr: A Characterization Study,” showed that social media interventions, like Tumblr attempting to ban pro-ana content, without educating teens left them feeling isolated and alone with their eating disorders because they didn’t know where to go to find accurate information on recovery. Deep in the pro-ana tag, you could find blogs dedicated to helping people find the proper resources for recovery, but after that ban, a lot of teens were left alone. It’s too late to dwell on the past of how Tumblr should have handled it and now it’s time to look at the present.

    Where is pro-ana now? Well, it seems like TikTok filled the void Tumblr left. TikTok is a great platform for creativity but there is still room for improvement. On Occasion, depending on your ‘for you’ page you’ll find ‘What I Eat in a Day’ videos that normalize eating hardly anything as if it’s healthy. There are also times when a girl will just post herself dancing and people will comment, ‘Guess I’m not eating today.’ There are users on TikTok that will call out people for their pro-ana and thinspo behavior. Although more needs to be done than just a call out. Content that talks about eating disorders in an educational way need to be pushed forward more than content that is centering around enabling eating disorders.

References

De Choudhury, M. (2015, May). Anorexia on tumblr: A characterization study. In Proceedings of the 5th international conference on digital health 2015 (pp. 43-50).

OnlyFans: What is the appropriate age to start one?

 

    OnlyFans is a website where content creators can monetize their work directly. In the recent years the majority of content creators on OnlyFans are young women, 18 years old or older, that make explicit NSFW, not safe for work, content. OnlyFans has given creators a platform to do sex work without facing the exploitations found in the porn industry. Creators are given full control over their income and how they distribute their content. Although OnlyFans has sexually empowered women and helped them explore their sexuality, there is something concerning about the rise of young girls creating OnlyFans accounts as soon as they turn 18.

    Last year, Danielle Bregoli, known by her stage name Bhad Bhabie, made an OnlyFans account the day she turned 18. According to Billboard, Danielle broke OnlyFans record earning over $1 million dollars in just six hours. This year Danielle posted on her OnlyFans earnings on Instagram and made over $55 million dollars. OnlyFans as a platform is not the problem, nor is sex work. The issue is that Danielle’s content was consumed by older adults. There is speculation that many older adults were waiting for Danielle to make her OnlyFans since she was a minor. This speculation comes from Reddit where there are many forums dedicated to ‘counting down’ the days till young celebrities and influencers, mainly girls, turn 18. The speculation is, somewhat, confirmed when Danielle made a tweet insinuating that she created her OnlyFans account because she grew tired of her fans asking for it.

    There’s no surprise that people are infatuated with ‘barely legal’ girls. The porn industry, for example, has categories surrounding ‘barely legal’ girls and uses the schoolgirl trope a little too much. Around Halloween time one of the most common costumes is a schoolgirl or a Japanese schoolgirl. This is barely the surface of the iceberg, according to the Girl Scouts of America alone one in ten girls are catcalled before they turn 11. This is a problem, a major one. There are young girls out there that see content creators around their age do these things and think to themselves that they can do it too.

    The Daily Mail released an article saying that police and child protection services have received reports of young girls, youngest being 13, who have used OnlyFans to share explicit content of themselves. The article talks about at 14-year-old girl that used her grandmother’s passport and bank information to set up an account for her. They also found a 17-year-old girl that was selling videos of herself on the platform and received over £5,000 from her subscribers. The article reports similar things happening in the U.S. where school safeguarding officers found children as young as 12 using OnlyFans to reach out other adult creators and wanting to meet up.

    OnlyFans took this seriously. They closed the accounts, refunded people their money and have worked closely with law enforcement to flag optional accounts run by minors. Though these efforts are good, more must be done. When young girls see their favorite content creators joining a platform and making large sums of money, they’re going to want to do the same thing. Too many young girls are waiting to reach 18 so sexualize themselves in this way. They should be able to express themselves sexually without the eyes of strangers. A possible solution for a part of this problem could be OnlyFans raising the age to 21 to make an account. 21-year-olds are more mentally developed then 18-year-olds, so they should be able to make decisions like this.

References

Mailonline, K. F. F. (2021, April 10). Girls as young as thirteen are tricking onlyfans age verification system to share explicit content. Daily Mail Online. Retrieved April 10, 2022, from https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9624827/Girls-young-thirteen-tricking- OnlyFans-age-verification-share-explicit-content.html

Mamo, H. (2021, April 2). Cash her online: Bhad Bhabie breaks onlyfans record, earning $1M in 6 Hours. Billboard. Retrieved April 10, 2022, from https://www.billboard.com/music/rb- hip-hop/bhad-bhabie-earns-1-million-dollars-onlyfans-9550662/

One in ten girls is catcalled before her 11th birthday. here are 6 things parents can do about it. Girl Scouts of the USA. (n.d.). Retrieved April 10, 2022, from https://www.girlscouts.org/en/raising-girls/happy-and-healthy/happy/stop-catcalling-girls- and-sexual-harassment.html