SAD: Watching Girls Die Online.

When people talk about Instagram accounts that fetishize anorexia, they tend to focus on the anorexic herself. Look at how thin she is, and look at how she’s encouraging others to be sick, they huff, as though one can reasonably attribute malice or even motivation to someone so ill.

But it’s the followers who are more culpable, the people who sign up to watch these young women sicken and die right in front of them. For a lot of people, there is something thrilling in watching a woman waste away, maybe because it seems like the ultimate expression of female self-denial, a feminine helplessness, a sexless kind of self-published pornography.

Social media quickly went from sharing photos of the kids with grandma to a high-speed vector for the spread of mental illness.