examples of self harm propaganda on tumblr

tumblr and self harm

Three minutes. That’s all it took to create an account on the social networking website Tumblr and find a notice telling me how to slit my wrists most effectively; how I can make them almost impossible for doctors to stitch up.

Three minutes, and I’m plunged into a surreal world of pain, in which I see images of a young girl hanging from a noose, another hyperventilating as blood runs down her thigh, and a boy in a toilet cubicle holding a gun to his own head.

The images flicker like half-glimpsed scenes from a horror film. This world, barely a few clicks away, is at once terrifying and compelling - a uniquely disturbing combination of innocence and corruption.

Helpfully, Tumblr offers me a ‘You Might Like This Too’ panel alongside these images: a list of recommendations based on the photographs I’m looking at.

I click on a picture of a heavily bleeding arm, captioned: ‘I hate it when the cuts don’t turn out so deep.’ The author of the post appears to be a pretty young girl with big eyes and blue hair.

I click on her followers. One of them posts mostly pictures of a slim girl in her underwear showing off her hipbones and ‘thigh gap’ - where her legs are so slim that the tops of her thighs don’t meet.

Some of the images have been deleted, ‘marked for review’. So someone, somewhere, is monitoring this stuff - although clearly not closely enough to censor a picture of an entire arm, scars layered upon scars, some fresh, others healing.

Next to it is a horrible photo of what looks like an infected cigarette burn.

The most disturbing image is that of a lithe young thing who has marked herself up in black pen, like a surgeon’s marks on a patient who’s about to go under the knife. Dotted lines outline her waist, inner thighs and underarms, with ‘cut here’ instructions, rather like those you might see on a paper doll. Her breasts, by contrast, are marked for enlargement.