"'... by squeezing a stick between their toes. I isolate them and tell them that thin women are inferior,' she says.... According to Elhacen, a woman’s job is 'to make babies and be a soft, fleshy bed for her husband to lie on.' The force feeder even enjoys additional payments for stretch marks, hailed as a crowning achievement for any Mauritanian woman trying to gain weight.... Exemplifying this relationship between obesity and attractiveness, a Moor proverb asserts that 'the woman occupies in her man’s heart the space she occupies in his bed.'... Girls as young as five are sent to 'fattening farms' to gorge on calorie-dense foods such as millet and camel milk.... Disciplined by their mothers or force-feeders, girls may be force-fed up to 16,000 calories daily, which can include up to five gallons of milk.... [T]he 'zayar' technique involves positioning a girl’s toe between two sticks and pinching it when she resists leblouh. The supervisor may also 'pull her ear, pinch her inner thigh, bend her finger backward or force her to drink her own vomit...."
I'm reading "Force-Feeding and Drug Abuse: The Steep Price of Beauty in Mauritania" (Harvard International Review).
I got there via "Buccal fat removal is a new take on an old theme: a means to keep women in their place," a columm by Martha Gill (in The Guardian)(noting that "female beauty standards vary between cultures").
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26 comments:
Seems like a lot of standards vary by culture.
Exemplifying this relationship between obesity and attractiveness, a Moor proverb asserts that 'the woman occupies in her man’s heart the space she occupies in his bed.'
"How could I leave this... behind?"
Big Bottom
The bigger the cushion, the sweeter the pushin'
That's what I said
The looser the waistband, the deeper the quicksand
Or, so I've read.
My baby fits me like a flesh tuxedo
I love to sink her with my pink torpedo.
Big bottom
Big bottom
Talk about bum cakes
My gal's got 'em.
Big bottom
Drive me out of my mind.
How can I leave this behind?
I saw her on Monday, twas my lucky bun day
You know what I mean.
I love her each weekday, each velvety cheek day
You know what I mean.
My love gun's loaded and she's in my sights
Big game's waiting there inside her tights.
Big bottom
Big bottom
Talk about mud flaps
My gal's got 'em.
Big bottom
Drive me out of my mind.
How can I leave this behind?
Can we bring back foie gras now? I think Lizzie would approve.
Let's hear it for the Religion of Peace from you Democrat feminists!
I guess that Lizzo would be worshipped over there, yes?
I dunno. Fat girls don’t do it for me. My mom was an electrical engineer and later, a lawyer. She was the most well-read person I’ve ever known. A walking encyclopedia. But she was a big fat lady. When she farted, it reverberated through clapping layers of butt blubber. As much as I cared for her, it was repulsive.
- Krumhorn
The movie "Destination Wedding" (an odd and marvelous dark comedy) has the man describe female facial beauty as the Golden Folds of Aphrodite. It means the line of a woman's cheek curves toward the corners of her mouth, especially when she smiles.
Once you see it you can't unsee it. Any size woman, any race -- it is a universal standard. Buccal fat removal is a surgical desire imo to create that look, and it never quite gets it right.
"According to Elhacen, a woman’s job is 'to make babies and be a soft, fleshy bed"
One of the most frightening stories I ever read was "Consider Her Ways" by John Wyndham, adapted for TV on Alfred Hitchcock's hour. It concerned a woman who, while participating in a drug trial similar to LSD, had a vision of a future where men had died off due to a virus enabled by a "Dr. Perrigan" and certain women were bred to be "queens" like ants or bees—their only purpose to "make babies". The woman in the story comes out of the vision determined to kill "Dr. Perrigan," which she does, only to find later that she had killed the ELDER Dr. Perrigan, and that his SON is the doctor in question; the future she has "imagined" will come to pass.
My description probably doesn't do justice to the actual terror that the story describes, nor does it do justice to the terror described in this post. "Cultures" are indeed different.
This story is supposed to:
(1) make us want to visit Mauritius
(2) make us admire this religio-cultural practice
(3) make us grateful we’re not bullied by stupid and vicious people into damaging our bodies
(4) make us grateful we don’t have to pay good money to read this flaming wreck of a once-serious newspaper
(5) _________________(your guess)
Pick one.
“I'm reading "Force-Feeding and Drug Abuse: The Steep Price of Beauty in Mauritania””
I suspect quite a few American men are now checking an atlas and planning a vacation in Mauritania to comfort the “ugly” girls.
Don't be judgemental. Remember that all cultures are special, and none more so than those that beat and torture little girls to make them conform.
Keep women affordable, available, and taxable, and the "burden" of evidence aborted, perhaps cannibalized, then sequestered in darkness of sanctuary states.
Are we allowed to say:
1) that obesity is not a good thing?
2) that some cultures are superior to others?
"I like big butts and I cannot lie,
What other brothers will deny . . ."
More celebration of Islam's wonderfulness.
The ridiculousness of Islam is only exceeded by its cruelty.
Wasn't Chinese foot-binding aimed at creating similar sexdolls?
That toe thing is no joke by the way. Works on fingers too.
Don't ask me how I know.
It's a form of control, by limiting the ability of women to move around and interact with the outside world. Foot-binding in China worked the same way, and was also supposedly erotic for the man. It's also a way for a man to show off that he's wealthy enough that he doesn't need to have his wife doing physical labor.
Vice News did a story about the women of Mauritania a few years ago.
Yet again, we've got another case of a "societal standard" being blamed solely on the men, with zero agency or responsibility assigned to the women involved, who're also the actual enforcers.
Like as not, a goodly chunk of this BS exists only in the minds of the women involved, because the men are pretty much going to "go along to get along" with whatever gets them access to "womanly charms".
Precisely none of this sort of thing, anywhere, is solely the responsibility of a particular sex; in every case I've ever seen or researched, there's always a very strong component of the "victim sex" doing much of the enforcement and "standards maintenance". It's never just one sex forcing this crap on another, although there is always a lot of blame assigned by the enforcers, which again, generally exists only in their own minds.
If you want to put an end to this sort of thing, you need to stop framing it in adversarial terms; all that does is anger the wrong people, and fail to address the actual source of the problem, which usually comes in from an entirely off-axis direction.
Like as not, were you to work on food security in Mauretania? The idea of a fat wife representing success and happiness would probably eventually evolve into something healthier. Eventually; that sort of thing happening naturally takes time, but that's the only way it happens, when the root causal factors shift.
Ah, the terror we can inflict on our children. Whether it is force feeding for weight gain or giving them the name Biden, it is for their own good.
I'm glad I live in the West.
Barbaric.
I am so old, I remember when female circumcision was a hot issue and considered mutilation and abuse.
google earth mauretania and see what you think they can do for food.
Mauretania has outlawed slavery at least twice in my life time. It doesn't take. They still have slaves. They can't buy and sell them anymore, that would be illegal. They inherit them and the slaves voluntarily stay because it's a cultural thing and they have no where else to go. The slaves are Black. The owners are Arabs.
I can't joke about something so disgusting. These are real children being seriously abused.
My single-parent mom was smart and not abusive but once, when I ate several finger-swipes of a block of cream cheese after being specifically told not to do so, she decided that I should be made to eat the entire rest of the block as punishment. I was about six years old at that time and can remember it well. It was horrifying to me and I felt I did not recognize this woman as my mother---a major violation of my bodily integrity.
It's Africa, and Islam.
What are you gonna do?
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