The sick market..

[Gob]

''As you know, beauty has one name: being thin. Our models are underweight, skinny, thin, bony - just like you.

We want you. Regardless of the costs, we want you to join our agency. Let's face facts, on anorexic porn websites, men are masturbating watching your pictures.

You are a superstar of starvation and if you were selling and marketing your frame you would be more wealthy than most of us because men would pay any price for watching those pictures.''

This was the email Sasha McDonald was sent last year from a pornography agency specialising in anorexic images. McDonald was 15 when she was first diagnosed with anorexia nervosa.

''I was very lonely and felt worthless,'' she says. ''I retreated into an online pro-anorexic [pro-ana] community and shared everything. I didn't realise the danger I was putting myself under.''

Despite receiving professional support, McDonald found herself becoming more entrenched in the online anorexic world. She wrote a blog of her battle with anorexia, recording the small amounts she ate and publishing photographs of herself in her underwear as evidence of her emaciated body.

''I was dangerously underweight and so ill that I felt proud of the comments from other website users saying how beautiful and skinny my body was.

I relied on the judgments of the friends I had made on pro-anorexia websites because I assumed they were people like me - scared, depressed, exhausted and battling an illness that torments you continuously,'' says McDonald.

But McDonald was horrified when a fellow member of one pro-anorexia website emailed her requesting that she join a pornography agency.

''My anorexic friend was actually a 46-year-old male with a fetish for skinny women,'' she says.

''He had pretended to be a young girl and persuaded me to share sexually explicit pictures and tried to convince me to join his modelling agency for the super-skinny.''

McDonald also found that emaciated photographs she had published of herself on her blog had been posted on anorexia porn forums for users with fetishes about super-skinny women to admire.

''Beautiful girl - much prettier than all those meat mountains.

Bones and ribs must be very visible. If their BMI [body mass index] is above 15, they are not attractive,'' says one forum user commenting on a skeletal photograph of McDonald.

McDonald, now 19 and training to be a doctor, had recovered sufficiently to avoid being drawn into the world of anorexia porn, but others with eating disorders have not been so fortunate.

Anorexia porn is growing in popularity and the prevalence of pro-anorexia websites is making those with eating disorders easy targets for grooming.

Vulnerable users of pro-anorexia websites are increasingly being courted for their emaciated frames by pornography agencies specialising in images of extremely thin women.

Optenet, an international IT security company, reported that between 2006 and 2008 the number of pro-ana websites globally increased 470% to more than 1,500 and social networking and blogging has seen a surge in online pro-anorexia content.

One anorexia pornography agency admits to paying owners of pro-anorexia websites for each person who joins it after being contacted via the sites.

''I pay the owner of this pro-ana community a donation for every model I found here,'' confesses a ''skinny scout'' in the email to McDonald.

The porn agencies' websites have two roles. They sign up new clients and advertise images, films and escort-type services, such as body worshipping, fantasy role play and private photography sessions, for those ''hooked on skinnies''.

Some of this porn is free to access while other ''professional'' agencies charge a monthly membership fee for regularly updated sexually explicit images and videos of emaciated women. Agencies also host anorexia porn on YouTube and advertise on anorexia pornography forums.

These forums often offer advice on how to groom users of pro-anorexia websites into taking and sharing explicit photographs of themselves.

http://www.watoday.com.au/world/anorexi ... rom=smh_ft

[loCAtek]

There's this and other promotions of sickly thin... to watch for.

[Gob]

Who buys these fucking things?

A video company paid homeless men $50 to be filmed while scantily clad women punched, kicked and whipped them, according to a lawsuit filed this month in a Florida court.

Lawyers for two homeless men said the website www.shefights.net sells videos on the internet of the so-called "beatdowns," starting at $2.99 for a two-minute "sparring session" clip and increasing in price to $33.99 for a 33 minute clip of two women beating a man.

The lawsuit contends the beatings violate a state hate crimes law that specifically protects the homeless and that the producers are exploiting the poverty of transients for whom any cash is hard to come by.

"What type of society would allow this to happen?" said Neil Chonin, the lawyer for the homeless men. "This company preyed on people who are desperate."

http://ph.news.yahoo.com/lawsuit-homele ... 4-413.html

[oldr_n_wsr]

The lawsuit contends the beatings violate a state hate crimes law that specifically protects the homeless and that the producers are exploiting the poverty of transients for whom any cash is hard to come by.

Would it be ok if I, un-employed and cash-less but have a home, did (allowed?) the job for the money?