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This paper is an introductory discussion of the pro-anorexia movement and some of the questions it raises about representation. It links the emergence of pro-anorexia to a growing area of public debate about anorexia’s relationship to the media and advertising industries. It argues that pro-anorexia exemplifies a complex and contradictory set of meanings about the cultural and subjective management of the female body in which notions of individual agency and empowerment are confused with those of social oppression and control. By addressing some of the problems raised by the use of fashion and advertising imagery on the websites (‘thinspiration’) it suggests that pro-anorexia participates in the same structures of power which feminists for a number of years have identified as sources of women’s oppression and unhappiness. By interpreting pro-anorexia as a symptom of overwhelming cultural constraints on women’s bodies, it raises a concern about the use of the internet as a technology which encourages ‘disembodied’ modes of communication. It suggests that if pro-anorexia can be interpreted as a symptomatic expression of cultural constraints we need to take care in considering the ramifications of censorship or enforcing further constraints upon its methods of representation