So how does an awesome girl like me get an Eating Disorder?

[This may be triggery, especially if you have an eating disorder and you click on the links to BusyGamer/Gamettes below.]

If you’ve ever wondered how a girl like me gets an eating disorder, I think it may be time for us to sit down and talk. Because I think there are some misapprehensions out there, and it’s really time I get them cleared up.

To start with, I suffer from ED-NOS (which is Eating Disorder – Not Otherwise Specified). I have Binge Eating Disorder, with a side of Anorexia. Only because I am teh Death Fats (hat tip Leslie @ Fatshonista.) Now, to put this in perspective, I am not “as fat” as Leslie. Yet my BMI says I am morbidly obese (see where we get Death Fat?) and doctors have had serious conversations with me about my weight.

So I can’t actually be anorexic, no matter how much I starve myself, even if I lose a massive amount of weight suddenly and unhealthily through that method.

Okay. So that’s ED-NOS. (Any further questions about the specifics of my ED which are addressed to me respectfully and with grace will be handled as I have grace and spoons to do so. Trolling comments and questions will be unrepentantly deleted, if I’m feeling kind. Mocked if I am not.)

Now. I am not your ordinary “girl.” Some of you may have seen pictures of me all done up with a fur and red lipstick. That’s me. So is the girl who says, “That’s right bitches, I’m back,” while playing a particularly vicious Traffic Attack race in Burnout: Revenge. So’s the girl in the tank-top and jeans who’s got a wrench in her hand and is desperately trying to remove her showerhead from the pipe so she can install the new one. So’s the girl up to her static-strapped wrist in tiny-screws who’s dismantling a computer to install a new hard drive because she’s tired of relying on friends to do it for her.

I’m a girl who bakes cupcakes, and a girl who fixes cars. I’m a girl who rewires electronics, and knows how to put on fake lashes. I’m a girl who tells sex jokes, knows how to qualitatively evaluate beers, and uses her cellphone for the internet in her pocket and to text love notes to her boyfriend.

So that’s me. You may be wondering (because I would be, if I were you) how someone so kick-ass and clearly awesome gets an eating disorder. You may be asking yourself (because I would be, if I were you) how someone who has so many great qualities just scratching the surface (and that’s all I did there…I haven’t told you a hundred thousand OTHER awesome things about me) can lose faith in herself.

I was hit with a blindingly clear example of what drives the bad tapes in my head today. I debated linking it, because it’s a piece of trash in many respects, and I hate to give it even my tiny (and it is, teeny tiny) linkjuice. But I decided I can illustrate my point better if I link to some pictures, so I am going to do so.

Let me open with the Frag Dolls, beautiful women of a variety of ethnicities and sizes (although they don’t deviate too far from the societal “ideal”). Now, their homogenity in terms of “traditional attractiveness” can be understood somewhat…they’re a paid marketing tool of Ubisoft. But even Ubisoft recognizes that a) girls play their games too, and b) that guys might be attracted to something other than a broom handle wearing a paper-plate smiley face for a head.

That might be enough to give me a complex, but hey, I’m not that different from those girls. I mean, I might weigh a little more, and I might not play quite as much Rainbow Six, but…I could be like their slightly less attractive because I’m not paid to play XBox and make public appearances sister.

They’re not what does it.

What does it is sites like Busy Gamer, with their Gamettes. (And don’t even get me started on the gendering of a non-gendered word that manages to make it sound juvenile and “cute.” We’ll be here all day if I do.)

Take a look at that page, and the “Gamettes.” What do you see? What I saw, as soon as I logged in?

All the women chosen by this site to represent them are very thin, white, and acceptably alternative. They may or may not be actively involved in the nerd community, as defined by the site in it’s application, I have no idea and I’m not willing to spend the time getting intimate with these women to find out. Because that’s not the intent of the site, and that’s what I’m addressing here.

These women are not presented as women, they’re presented as marketing, for a website ostensibly about games. Unlike the Frag Dolls, who are required to have game skills and who are paid as much for the possession of those skills as their appearance, they are paid (not in money, but in exposure and merchandise, which gets into a whole other transactional issue) to be the very societal image of the only acceptable body type for someone of my interests.

How does a girl like me get an eating disorder? She gets told that the only way it’s acceptable to be so awesome is if she attains an impossible ideal (or dies trying, as many with untreated eating disorders do every year). She gets told that the nerd/geek community accepts all, but no one will actually find her attractive unless she becomes something she is not, something it will damage her to become. She gets told day in and day out that unless she looks like this she might as well be invisible.

How an awesome girl gets an eating disorder is the same way any other girl gets an eating disorder. Because she’s internalized the message that no matter how awesome she is, she’s never awesome enough.