Beauty is in the eye of the beholder: fattening up
Everybody knows how fashionable it has become for Western women to starve themselves for beauty. And recently I wrote this post on how many other ways we’ve pummeled and badgered and beaten the body in the quest for greater attractiveness (and by “we,” I mean both sexes, although in our society and many others, women do seem to pursue these things more—um—vigorously).
Beauty, of course, is not only in the eye of the beholder—it’s in the society of the beholder. And it turns out that in Mauritania, thin is most definitely not in. The retro, Rubenesque look is so popular that young girls are fattened up with special diets—and even steroids—not for the kill, but for the opposite sex. Mauritanian men prefer them that way.
I said they weren’t being fattened up for the kill, but doctors believe the process may end up killing some of them anyway, from diseases such as diabetes that are far more prevalent among the overweight. There’s a campaign going on to educate people in Mauritania on the risks involved, but it’s not getting too much traction. Old habits die hard.
The Mauritanians are not alone in liking their women more corpulent than we do, but apparently they have taken it to unusual extremes. For decades women there were subjected to a procedure known as gavage (after the French process of force-feeding geese to create the delicacy known as foie gras). The details were quite ghastly indeed, and such extremes are now rare in the country, although overeating and drug abuse to gain weight are not.
Like most of these practices, it is probably the case that women tend to perpetuate them on themselves or their daughters. But in this they are driven by the desire to be the objects of male desire—an understandable motivation, to be sure, but one that, taken to extremes, can certainly lead to problems. And although these problems are hardly confined to Mauritania, the particular form they took there—the human, rather than the goose, gavage—is (as far as I know) unique to that country.
Gavage is bad, and I’m happy to hear it’s mostly been phased out. But the mulafa sounds awfully fine—ladies, your search for the most slimming garment on earth may be over:
Mohamed el-Moktar Ould Salem, a 52-year-old procurement officer, blames the brightly colored, head-to-toe mulafas that hide all but the most voluptuous female curves for shaping the men’s preferences. A slender woman, he said, “just looks like a stick wrapped up.”
The Mauritania link isn’t working for me
Pingback:University Update - Diabetes - Beauty is in the eye of the beholder: fattening up
“Mohamed el-Moktar Ould Salem, a 52-year-old procurement officer, blames the brightly colored, head-to-toe mulafas that hide all but the most voluptuous female curves for shaping the men’s preferences. A slender woman, he said, “just looks like a stick wrapped up.”
This calls for some wet mulafas’ contests!
Futuremarine’smom: I fixed the link. Thanks.
This reminds of a great, 70s reggae song Fatty, Fatty by the Heptones. Lyrics:
I need a fat girl, fat girl, fat girl tonight…
Cause I’m in the mood, mood, I’m in the mood
I’m feeling rude, rude, I’m feeling rude
I need some food…
Marisa Tomei said she was never so attractive to men as when she gained 20-30 pounds for
“The Perez Family”. Men were so taken with her – so much more than normal – that she seriously considered keeping the weight on. But, needing clothes to look good on her on film, she decided to lose the weight.
I have found this to be true for most of the men I know: the skinny, ballet dancer look is not their most preferred look.
Luckily – for a possibly skinny neo – being a beautiful person is way more important than exterior packaging!
Petite, not skinny. The bone size and length adds a sizable weight modification to folks.
Last year, the Discovery Channel presented a program entitled “Fat Fiancee”:
“For the Hima people of western Uganda, fat is beautiful – at least for women. Men measure a woman’s attractiveness by her obesity, and a young woman is prepared for marriage in ways guaranteed to “fatten her up”: the least possible activity and the most possible food. By the time of her marriage, the young woman may be so fat that she cannot walk, only waddle. At the wedding, onlookers comment on how beautiful she is, noting with approval the cracks in her skin caused by the fatness and the difficulty with which she walks. Once married, a wife is kept fat by consuming surplus milk from the cowherd – often coerced to do so by her husband long past the point of satiation. The wife leads a life of “leisure” – she is assigned no heavy physical work, rarely leaves home and spends her days in sexual liaisons with a variety of men approved by her husband. These sexual relationships cement economic ones: the obese, conspicuously consuming wife is both a symbol and an instrument of her husband’s economic prosperity.”
Here’s more: http://somewhereistan.blogspot.com/2006/05/bountiful-brides.html
As Mma Ramotswe of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective agency would say, “Not fat, but traditionally built”.
To the degree a man’s model of female appearance is formed by his mother’s appearance and what his mother considered to be the standard of female beauty (especially during his childhood), we must conclude that women, not men, primarily determine the culture’s standard of what is to be considered female beauty.
Here in the West we can look back on numerous eras in which the standard of female beauty swung away from the preferences of most men. In the flapper era of the Roaring Twenties, women considered the flat chest to be stylish. And was the bustle of an earlier era of women’s fashion a trend led by men or women? Today, most men prefer a woman about one or two typical short-term crash-diet weight loss goals heavier than the stick-figure models featured in the women’s-interest magazines. What gcotharn remarked about Marisa Tomei’s experience of being more attractive to many men when she was 20-plus pounds heavier is not at all unusual.
Pingback:Chubby Grannies Chubby Blonde Mature Chubby Mature Thumbs