MINTZ: “Anna Rexia” isn’t a joke

Whatever the reason may be, we as a society love horribly offensive Halloween costumes almost as much as we love sexy Halloween costumes. Take, for example, Wal-Mart’s Israeli Soldier costume for kids. Or last year’s sexy Ebola nurse costume — also available for men. And then there’s the “Call Me Caitlyn” costume, a way to wear someone’s transgender identity, something that they have likely been struggling with for their entire life, for just one night as a cheeky joke.

But by far, the most nauseating to look at for me is the Anna Rexia costume, sold in Halloween stores everywhere. If you choose to buy the costume, you will be masquerading as the mental illness with the highest mortality rate — with a sexy twist, of course, because it’s a tight dress with a short hemline. The costume, which has the tagline “you can never be too rich or too thin,” is a black dress with a skeleton print on it. It comes complete with a ribbon belt that looks like measuring tape, and a heart-shaped badge proudly proclaiming the name “Anna Rexia.”

This costume has been making the rounds for the past four Halloweens, and I am not the first girl with an eating disorder to make some noise out of it. In fact, on Tuesday, BuzzFeed wrote about a blog post from two years ago in which a girl explained what other things should be included in the Anna Rexia costume. She ended her post with the powerful line: “Want to dress as ‘Anna Rexia’? Just go as a vampire, or a zombie. Because one-third of us are dead.”

Back in 2011, when the costume first made the rounds, it topped many a list as that season’s most offensive costume. The costume’s manufacturer, Dreamgirl, which makes other costumes such as this tiny piece of misogynistic fabric and this culturally insensitive winner, released a statement addressing the controversy.

“We understand that some people will not find the dark humor funny … Or that they are sensitive to the topic it addresses,” said the company’s marketing director. “While some people may not like a particular costume — it is a matter of taste and personal discretion.”

But is it really “taste” when you run the risk of offending any of the millions of people worldwide who suffer with the very illness that you’re wearing as a costume?  Is it really “personal discretion” when you never know who is struggling, and seeing their eating disorder characterized as a tight, sexy dress might be enough to send them back down the rabbit hole?

The marketing director said in the statement that Dreamgirl is a company run “by women, for women,” which not only somehow makes this disgusting costume worse, but it’s also blatantly untrue. On its LinkedIn page, Dreamgirl lists a man named Christopher Scharff as its CEO.

But I don’t actually care about Dreamgirl lying about the genders of those who run the company. And I could not care less about the length of the dress, or even the tightness of the dress or the fact that the plus size version of the dress looks significantly looser.

I care about the continual mocking of an illness that has probably cost me years off of my life and messed with my brain functions so badly that I barely remember the entire year of 2012. I care about someone being able to wear for only a night the disease that I’ve been struggling with since I was nine years old, and wearing a badge that says “Anna Rexia” for a few hours when I will have to live with the label in my medical chart for the rest of my life.

Mental illness of any sort is not funny, and eating disorders are not a joke. People lose their lives to anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder and OSFED (Other Specific Feeding or Eating Disorder) every year. At any given moment, anyone around you could be just developing an eating disorder, or even in the throes of one, and you wouldn’t even know it. Not everyone who is suffering has the thigh gap or the collarbones to prove it, but it doesn’t make their struggle any less real. In fact, it can often make it worse: people who present as having normal body weight can often feel like their eating disorder is not “good enough,” leading their illnesses to increase in severity.

All throughout my life, I have had to watch my family and friends struggle to wrap their heads around my eating disorder and how I just did not seem to want to get better. I’ve watched my mother sit by my hospital bed stoically and heard my sister cry over me far too many times to be okay with a company making a joke out of something that could have likely killed me.