The obligatory beach photo: we’ve all done it. If Miami beach-goers lay back, relax, and don’t document their envy-worthy day with a picture of tan knees and white sand, did they really go to the beach?

While browsing the web a few days ago, I stumbled across a blog called Hot-Dog-Legs. The premise of said blog is that some of the images are of girls not so subtly showing off their toothpick legs and prime towel locations, and others are of hot dogs.  Even the most ardent believers in their ability to identify women’s legs from the popular baseball game snack have difficulty determining which image is of which. Beyond these uncanny sausage doppelgängers, the really unsettling thing is that the comparison is, in reality, pretty disturbing. What may seem like just another entertaining website is actually promoting a major violation of women’s rights to equality: the comparison of women to meat. Throughout history, women have been represented by headless bodies, therefore both symbolically and literally cropping out a woman’s voice. The site’s photos also suggest that the subjects aren’t exactly human, which harkens back to the time when only men were considered humans. Back in 1978, a famous men’s magazine released a cover of a woman’s legs entering a meat grinder, with the caption, “We will no longer hang women up like pieces of meat.” Hot-Dog-Legs once again brings this same issue to the forefront by making its unsettling visual association.

Furthermore, Nathan Cushing of RVA News, argues that the site’s platform,  ,Tumblr, has a giant pro-anorexia and pro-bulimia audience, and Hot-Dog-Legs is a disturbing manifestation of the thinspiration and body-image issues many girls using these platforms deal with. In order for legs to be comparable to hot dogs, they must be tanned and have thighs that don’t widen out at the bottom. The pictures chosen for the site are usually plucked straight from these platforms – pictures tagged with ITG, a proliferation of the hopelessly unrealistic standard of an inner thigh gap, or with links to body dysmorphic disorder-encouraging tags. By typing in any of these tags to tumblr, a person can scroll through thousands of photos posted by and for a pro-eating-disorder audience. In fact, the issue of this easily accessible and encouraging community’s existence is so large that Tumblr officials are trying to pass a policy change stating that any image or blog tagged with these names will immediately be taken down. Not only is the comparison to chemically encased fatty foods probably distressing to those girls who pride themselves on their thigh gap, but it also further trivializes a much larger difficulty for the health of many young girls.

I’m not saying that the creators of this website made it with any intent further than to create the newest brilliant Internet meme. But while this blog might seem funny at first, it’s actually feeding those hot dogs right into the mouth of a culture that is already full of images that portray women negatively. The line between Internet humor and hurt is fine; being conscious of what we put out onto the Internet is a skill, and if we disregarded how our content would affect others then, well, I guess we’d all be weiners.