
Trigger Warning: This article discusses eating disorders, body checking, self-harm, and pedophilia in detail. If these topics are likely to cause you emotional and/or psychological distress, please read something else here at A Little Bit Human.
In this article:
- Eugenia Cooney is a YouTube star whose videos seem like standard fare on the surface: makeup tutorials, fashion videos, and confessionals about her feelings.
- But critics say that the seemingly standard content is coded with messages that encourage disordered eating and an unhealthy body image in her audience.
- Pro-ana is short for pro-anorexia, and it’s a community, of which Cooney is believed to be part, who treat eating disorders like they aren’t serious, life-threatening mental illnesses.
- Pro-ana communities and pro-ana figures like Eugenia Cooney pose a threat to the mental wellness of minors on the internet.
YouTube stars have a strong grip on internet culture. They can launch obscure games into breakout fame, popularize makeup trends, and build million-dollar businesses off of their online reputation. Whether you think you’re too cool for them or not doesn’t matter: at the end of the day, they have tons of reach and that gives them the power to alter the way people think.
Even if what they’re changing is how people perceive their own bodies.
Eugenia Cooney, a YouTuber who became famous through her fashion and makeup videos, is one of the most famous (and infamous) among them. The 27-year-old has come under fire for promoting eating disorders, associating with YouTube pariah Shane Dawson, and allowing sexual predators to target minors on her official Discord server.
Who Is Eugenia Cooney?

It’s not uncommon to see internet personalities develop a mental illness following their rise to popularity, but it’s not every day you see one who starts their career already unwell.
Eugenia Cooney is one of the few that has.
She is a 27-year-old YouTuber from Boston, Massachusetts. Cooney was subjected to a lot of bullying throughout her childhood to the point that her parents had no choice but to homeschool her.
In her video, “How To Deal With Bullies,” she credits homeschooling as the reason she started her YouTube career. There was nothing else to do and no one around to judge her in person which made putting herself on the internet easier.
Cooney started her YouTube channel back in 2011, but it was only on May 19, 2013 that she truly became popular thanks to a video titled “How to Ratchetly Twerk.” Ratchet, for those of you who don’t know, is a slang term for promiscuous behavior and has connotations of being literally or figuratively dirty.

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Despite its title, the video is very tame and doesn’t go beyond being a dancing tutorial. There was nothing notable about the video that warranted it going viral in the following days. Well, other than Eugenia Cooney herself.
Even in her earliest videos, Cooney has always appeared unnaturally thin, sparking allegations that she had an eating disorder. Her emaciated figure also ironically made her the target of cyberbullying from people who claimed she was unattractive.
Cooney remained unfazed and turned her five minutes of fame into a several-years-long YouTube career. Today, she films videos that show her doing her makeup, trying on seasonal outfits and costumes, and occasionally talking about her feelings. It’s all standard fare for a YouTuber, but under each video, there are hundreds of comments telling Cooney that she needs to get help.
Eugenia Cooney and the Pro-ana Community

There’s something unsettling about Eugenia Cooney’s videos that you won’t notice unless you know what to look for.
There have been several petitions from Eugenia Cooney’s viewers and detractors asking streaming and video platforms to permanently ban her.
Critics of these petitions claim that attempts to deplatform Cooney are the same thing as body-shaming her, and experts believe there’s nothing inherently wrong with what Cooney does.
Additionally, she has never overtly promoted an eating disorder on her YouTube channel.
For many psychologists, removing Cooney’s videos won’t change the fact that young women and girls compare themselves to their favorite stars.
While all of this is true, it doesn’t exclude the reality of how Eugenia Cooney’s content is heavily eating disorder coded. Recent changes to the way companies moderate social media platforms and increased public awareness have contributed to better control over the spread of triggering content online.
But it hasn’t made them disappear. In many ways, approaching content moderation with an eye to just controlling content that’s overtly harmful has made it harder to catch the spread of content that promotes mental illness and harmful behaviors. Every generation and subgroup has its own dictionary so if you don’t know what to look for, you’re not going to see the ways it’s tied to pro-mental illness communities.
A word like beans sounds innocuous to anyone who isn’t in the know. But if you type that into Twitter right now, you’re going to see images of people’s self-harm injuries. Similarly, words like cat scratches, bar code, and styrofoam are all part of the hidden self-harm dictionary that anyone who hasn’t already been exposed to these communities would not know about.
The same is true for Eugenia Cooney’s content.
Pro-ana, a cutesy abbreviation for “pro anorexia,” is an online community that can be found on popular social media sites. Pro-ana groups love to collect photos of thin, conventionally attractive women and post them with seemingly innocent captions like “I love you to the bones.” Some girls will talk about their “best friend” Ana and/or Mia. The former refers to anorexia and the latter refers to bulimia.
Doug Bunnell, PhD knows just how harmful these online groups can be.
“They promote a myth that eating disorders are choices, rather than a physical and mental illness,” he says. “In my group of patients, these things are really damaging. Patients are supported in their illnesses and encouraged to stay ill by these websites.”
So what does this have to do with Eugenia Cooney? Well, not only do her pictures get passed around pro-ana communities as thinspiration, but she often mentions experiencing problems that pro-ana communities see as “attractive” and she makes several nods to pro-ana in her content.
In many of her streams and social media accounts, Eugenia Cooney talks about how cold she feels all the time. Viewers have also noticed how often Cooney seems to forget to move her makeup box before streams, which has led to her having to struggle on camera with how heavy it is. In one video, she shows off her butterfly necklace to her viewers.
Much like how beans don’t make sense to anyone who hasn’t been exposed to the self-harm community, it’s easy to write off all Eugenia Cooney’s behavior as not having any additional meanings.
Butterflies are a popular pro-ana symbol that people who support pro-ana behaviors use as a way to tell each other that they’re “part of the club.” Complaints about being cold all the time are subtle references to the way pro-ana communities glorify feeling cold.
Feeling cold all the time is taken as a sign that you’re becoming “skinny enough.” Staying cold is also used as a weight-loss technique since keeping yourself cold means your body has to burn additional calories.
Objects being too heavy to lift? That’s one of the things pro-ana groups wear as a badge of pride because if items are always too heavy for you to carry, it means you’re “skinny enough” to be frail.
Whether or not Eugenia Cooney is promoting pro-ana is up for debate, but given how aware she is of the signals used by pro-ana communities, it’s clear that she knows what they mean and that she understands how well known she is within pro-ana circles.
It just so happens that anyone who isn’t intimately acquainted with pro-ana wouldn’t notice any of this, so any detracting comments about Cooney’s behavior end up looking like a simple case of cyberbullying and body shaming.
At the end of the day, Eugenia Cooney is just another girl who’s suffering from an eating disorder and it’s going to take more than YouTube comments to get through to her especially when you consider that her own friends were unable to stop Cooney’s increasingly disordered behavior.
Is Eugenia Cooney Recovering?

Eugenia Cooney has tried to get on the path to recovery before, but she struggles with acknowledging her condition in the first place. It’s common for people who are mentally unwell to downplay their symptoms and insist that nothing is wrong, the same way that Cooney continues to ignore the health effects of a decade-long, heavily documented descent into anorexia.
To be clear, it’s not her fault she’s unwell. Acknowledging the possibility of mental illness alone can be psychologically distressing for a lot of people, and Cooney herself has admitted that she feels that way, too.
“It’s still hard to see things the way other people do sometimes,” Cooney said in an interview with therapist Kati Morton. “It’s hard to admit that to yourself.”
Eugenia Cooney’s avoidance of her mental health has led her friends to stage an intervention for her that involved getting Cooney temporarily committed to a hospital. Though forcible commitments can often do more harm than good, it seemed like it was the “wakeup call” that Cooney needed at the time, seeing as she later flew back to Connecticut to enter an eating disorder treatment program.
Eugenia Cooney Controversies: Shane Dawson’s Exploitation and a Discord Full of Sexual Predators

Kati Morton wasn’t the only person Eugenia Cooney talked to about her experience with trying to recover from an eating disorder. Cooney has also been interviewed by none other than Shane Dawson.
Dawson’s “The Return of Eugenia Cooney” has been criticized by experts for being harmful to Cooney and to viewers suffering from eating disorders. People have pointed out that Dawson’s coverage of Cooney exposes his viewers, who are mostly young and female, to eating disorders and the eating disorder community. Additionally, others have picked up on how Cooney refers to her eating disorder in the past tense, despite only having been in rehab for one month.
That said, Cooney isn’t always the victim of the controversies she’s involved in. Eugenia Cooney has previously been called out for allowing sexual predators to groom minors on her Discord channel as well as allowing the proliferation of pro-ana messages.
Is Eugenia Cooney Really That Dangerous?

The main argument for deplatforming Eugenia Cooney is that her online presence harms her and her audience. Cooney’s detractors claim that being online isn’t doing her health any favors and the comments about how skinny she’s getting only serve to encourage her disordered eating.
As of 2022, Cooney has lost a drastic amount of weight again.
But what about the claims that her channel encourages other people to engage in disordered behavior?
Here’s the thing about eating disorders: they are mental illnesses spread through ideas and images. Eating disorders are, in a way, culture-bound disorders. They’re especially prevalent in Western, developed countries and, around the time they were first diagnosed, were virtually non-existent in other corners of the world.
In an increasingly globalized world, however, eating disorders are becoming more common and their victims are getting younger.
A study has found that excessive internet use is strongly associated with the development of eating disorders in adolescents, even after controlling for other psychological factors. Incidentally, the number of adolescents who have been hospitalized due to an eating disorder peaked during the COVID pandemic lockdowns, a time when minors had few outlets for socialization outside of going online.
As more and more young people are exposed to pro-ana communities and are hospitalized because of the culture of self-harm that they perpetuate, social media platforms will have to change the way they make judgment calls on what counts as sensitive content.
Until then, all we can do is keep an eye on anyone who might be at risk of developing anorexia, bulimia, or EDNOS.
She’s prettier than you, Allia.
Neither one of them knows who you are or wants anything to do with you or cares about your opinion, being an Internet troll is the lowest of the low