[EDIT: See Zeller's New York Times piece that followed, and my wet-blanket remarks therein.]

Over the past couple of months, there’s been a great deal of fresh hysteria about Myspace, sex offenders and the “dangers” of kids going online without draconian supervision. (Which, I’d like to remind parents, your children will subvert. Consider fostering trust and openness. I know it’s harder work than just instilling fear, but it produces much brighter humans.)

This moral panic is nothing new. Every year or two there’s a fresh bout of breathless reporting about a predator who used the Internet to lure some 14-year-old out of her Kentucky trailer and into a Taco Bell, then before she knew it she was in the back of a van in Miami being used as an ashtray. Setting aside the underlying chronic social horror that this guy seemed a better option than whatever was going on back in that trailer, this is another example of confusion about what is dangerous and what is not.

Much like plane crashes and anorexia, the media – in reporting these rare but sad situations – conducts a feat as stunning for its logical acrobatics as it is its fallacy by positing that these situations should force us to ask if the Internet is organically dangerous.
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Last week I wrote a piece on anorexia, and my feelings that we as a society get very mixed up when we talk about “eating disorders.” I’ve belabored my points in the comments therein, so I won’t rehash them here. Many received it well and seemed to agree. There are a couple of things, if I had it to do over again, that I might phrase a little differently. But the piece caused a huge stir, my points were taken out of context, there was a great deal of shouting and gnashing of teeth and discomfort from a dozen or so blogs, several thousand people read it, I was personally attacked by feminazis, and now I have a strange rash. All – to me – signs I was doing something right.

It all brought two unrelated issues to the surface for me. First, people often see what they want to see in an article whether it is there or not. For example, I was accused of confusing anorexia with restraint when I was trying to do the opposite. In my piece, in fact, I delineated them – accusing women of mixing up restraint behaviors with anorexia and emphatically asserting that they are not the same thing.

The second issue is that all the attention and conversation generated by the piece has refreshed my frustration with the medium of blogging.
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Alex Williams penned a salacious piece in today’s New York Times centered around the “weight anxiety” experienced by girls leading up to Spring Break. That we are, for “sufferers of eating disorders,” moving into “the most dangerous time of year.”

Self-denial and restraint in America? Now that’s dangerous – to our way of life.

Setting aside that the backdrop of alcohol abuse over Spring Break dwarfs any danger of starving oneself into a bikini, I should start by saying that I understand anorexia nervosa can be debilitating and dangerous for those affected by it. Just as I sympathize with people in plane crashes or victims of pit viper bites and lightning burns.
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