I just ran across one of the most disturbing trends I’ve read about in a while. Women with anorexia find it hard enough to recover from their mental illness as it is; some, in fact, never even recover. So you might think that people with any humanity in their bodies would do anything they could to help them out, encouraging recovery and discouraging the body image that these women (and men) hold.

But apparently there are plenty of people out there who don’t have any humanity to begin with—people who lurk around anorexia support sites and contact the women there to ask them to be in pornographic films and photos that cater to an anorexia fetish audience. These women are told that they are superstars of starvation, that being beautiful only means being thin, and that they can make big bucks by continuing to starve themselves to make money in the anorexic porn industry.

Some women have even been held captive by people they met online in this industry, forced to starve and perform for men who think that malnourishment and bony bodies are a turn-on. In at least one case, a woman died as a result of this exploitation.

I’m not sure which is more despicable—the people contacting these women and encouraging them to starve themselves for money, or the men who pay for it. Both are pretty damn heinous and should be ashamed of themselves. I get fetishes and turn-ons; everybody has them. But getting off on women dying by starving themselves is on the same level—to me, anyway—of enjoying snuff films, child porn, and other grotesque exploitations of people. It not only sickly enforces the idea that it’s okay to do this to yourself to these women, validating their own poor self-image and worsening their illness; it also further desensitizes the world to their suffering, rendering it a joke or worse—in this case, something that’s supposed to be sexy.

Dying isn’t sexy. Starving isn’t hot. Just ask one of the millions of people of the world who are experiencing food shortage. Some blame this entire thing on the porn industry itself, saying that fetishes like this are born out of that, not out of the human mind. Others are saying men want to see these bodies because they’re sick of seeing fat ones, which is actually just as bad and perpetuates poor body image and distortion of health in an entirely different way. Me, I think it’s because many sadistic people like to see women suffering or be controlled—such as in snuff or rape films; even ones in theaters, like The Last House on the Left—and relish in their distortion and ultimately their death. Maybe it’s due to the desensitizing of our culture; I don’t know. I do believe desensitizing takes place—all you have to do is compare a kid today with one from ten years ago, then another ten, and see what they’re scared of or impressed by; hell, just between my sisters and myself, you can see a wide difference, and we’re only six years apart. I don’t know to what extent it is to blame, though.

I also know that consumers of this porn—men in particular—can stop it by refusing to take part in it and speaking out against it, just as men have the power to stop human trafficking and rape, if they did the same where they are concerned.