Why Is This Disturbing Halloween Costume Still for Sale?
Said disturbing costume. (Photo: HalloweenParty13.com)
You’d never dress up as a sexy cancer patient, right? If your friend were dying of ALS, would you dress up like him or her for Halloween? Probably not — so why would you dress up as a deadly eating disorder?
Anna Rexia, a cringe-worthy costume that refuses to quit, isn’t just one of the lamest costumes we’ve ever seen (a black dress with a skeleton printed on it? Really?) but horribly offensive to anyone who’s suffered from the crippling disease or watched a loved one battle it.
So much so that one survivor, Jessi Davin, penned an angry blog post about it.
“Think Anorexia is funny? Sorry. I am a survivor and find NOTHING cute about this,” Davin rips in her Tumblr post. She wrote it two years ago, but not much has changed:
Wanna dress up like an Anorexic? All it takes is:
I almost died from this. I know it’s supposed to be funny and shit and yeah I get that, but seriously. THIS IS NOT FUNNY. Anorexia is nothing to party about or laugh at. It’s real, it’s deadly, and should not be marketed as a slutty outfit.
Want to dress as “Anna Rexia”? Just go as a Vampire, or a Zombie. Because 1/3 of us are dead.
Two years late, Davin continues to fight for recovery — she’s seven months pregnant and still in treatment.
Jessi Davins (Photo: shart-nado.tumblr.com)
As we’ve reported before, anorexia is not only an incredibly painful, crippling disease but can also be hard for those who don’t have the disease to understand and treat.
One woman’s story went viral after she was refused treatment at a local hospital because her weight made her a “liability.” And new research was just announced that shows we may have been treating anorexia the wrong way all along.
Between the stigma of the disease (and make no mistake, it’s a disease — not a selfish decision) and the inability to successfully treat it, anorexia sufferers face enough already. It’s time to take insulting Halloween costumes out of the mix.
Read This Next: Is Everything We Know About Treating Anorexia Wrong?
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