The Rise of the Anaemic E-Girl: The Dangers of Aestheticising Illness

Words: Emily Manock

Make it stand out

As the girlhood content stream shows no sign of being syphoned out of our algorithms, you might have noticed that the regular programming of Sylvia Plath memes, Pre-Raphaelite paintings, and images of aged diaries is being interrupted by a surprising theme: anaemia. If you are unaware, anaemia is a condition caused when the body doesn't have enough haemoglobin or red blood cells to carry oxygen to the body’s tissues. It is characterised by symptoms such as pale skin, fatigue, and dizziness. It is commonly caused by low iron in the blood, so “low iron” and “anaemia” are often used interchangeably, particularly on the internet.

The condition has not only entered the sometimes-problematic “I’m-just-a-girl” pantheon but is making the rounds on male influencer’s TikTok pages as a desirable trait in women. While anaemia is not exclusive to any gender, it is more commonly experienced by people who menstruate thanks to the frequent loss of blood during a period. Arguably though, this is not entirely why the condition has been depicted as an expression of the feminine.

The connection between illness and femininity which persists today is not an ahistorical part of some essentialist female identity, but one which has developed out of thousands of years of patriarchal politics, medicine, and art. From the notorious hysterics of the Victorian era to the women accused of witchcraft then being diagnosed as mentally ill in the sixteenth century. 
___STEADY_PAYWALL___

Pathologising women’s dissatisfaction as something innate to the female condition allowed a patriarchal society to undermine women, while also not having to treat issues of reproductive health with dignity or respect. And although this pathologisation is less explicit than it was a century ago, similar language around illness, like that around PMDD - still surfaces in discussions of women’s health — especially gynaecological issues. Though anaemia is not a reproductive ailment specifically, its association with menstruation means it is also thrown into this category.

Seeing an illness in women as beautiful is not a new phenomenon either – tuberculosis (or consumption as it was known then) became a muse for artists like Dante Gabriel Rossetti and photographer Henry Peach Robinson. The 1850s opera La Traviata, had as its protagonist the consumptive Violetta, inspired by the French courtesan Marie Duplessis, who died of tuberculosis in 1847 at the age of 23. The depicted thinness, ghostly pallor highlighting veins, rosy cheeks, sparkling eyes, and red lips (indicative of a chronic low-grade fever) of tuberculosis epitomised a new ideal beauty of a proper lady, mirroring the appearance of a consumptive near death. Catherine A Day writes in Consumptive Chic how the association of the illness with the aristocracy rather than the lower classes was a factor in how it came to be seen as beautiful. 

“Beauty is still currency – it makes life easier.”

For those not afflicted by the disease, makeup was used to mimic pale skin and crimson lips. In contrast, other prevalent diseases of the time - such as smallpox and cholera - were far more grotesque and disfiguring, and so were not portrayed as delicately nor seen as feminine ailments. Day goes on to use the example of Charlotte Brontë writing favourably about tuberculosis to make the point of how pervasive the romanticisation of illness during this period really was. In personal correspondence with a friend in 1849, Charlotte wrote of her sister Anne that “Consumption, I am aware, is a flattering malady”. Brontë was still aware of the deadly nature of the illness — her other sister Emily had passed away at age 30 from the same condition in the previous year — yet she still shared in the same beauty ideals as her peers regardless.

The idea of a highly educated woman still ascribing to these standards when she knows that that beauty will kill her may seem absurd to our modern sensibilities. However, we are not as far removed from this as we might think. Beauty is still currency – it makes life easier. When I was dealing with anaemia myself, I was extremely pale and underweight thanks to a period which lasted three months. Despite the fact I felt like keeling over constantly  - and looked and felt very obviously not well - I was showered with more compliments than I ever had in my entire life, which definitely had an impact on how I viewed my condition. It was much more difficult to motivate myself to get better when I knew I would be giving up that positive attention.
If you are someone who ended up on a dark side of Tumblr growing up like I did, the romanticisation of a pale and thin body may sound concerningly familiar. Anyone who has had the misfortune to stumble into pro-ana spaces online will likely have had alarm bells ringing in their head when reading anything that glamourises illnesses like anaemia. A lot of the low iron content I have seen online reminds of those spaces that I spied upon as a teenager. While I was never active in pro-ana spaces specifically, I was involved in a lot of communities that romanticised mental illness, so waifish women were a regular fixture on my feed. These posts would never be explicitly encouraging an eating disorder, but it was worryingly easy to jump from an innocuous photo of thin legs in thigh high socks to a post explaining disordered eating in graphic detail. 

Anaemia and low iron content is not saying the quiet part out loud when it comes to romanticisation of being underweight in the way pro-ana spaces do. No one is using the “low iron, brown eyes, attitudes” TikTok sound to praise themselves audibly for achieving a peak of petiteness, but we are treated to the visual of that same smaller frame as the sound plays. But maybe that’s the point. A condition like anaemia is just common enough to be plausibly denied as banal enough to not be harmful. However, taking anaemia with the desire to be thin at any cost along with the insidious, all encompassing nature of social media, this trend might be just the latest in a long line to keep women frail and disempowered.