My mother thinks she made me beautiful but she made me sick

[Elvira]

Skinny women get no love in Mauritania

April 17 2007 at 09:53AM

By Rukmini Callimachi

She struggles under her own weight, lumbering up the stairs, her thighs shaking with each step.

Once she reaches the top, it will take several minutes for 50-year-old Mey Mint to catch her breath, the air hissing painfully in and out of her chest.

Her rippling flesh is not the result of careless overeating, but rather of a tradition of force-feeding girls in a desert nation where obesity has long been the ideal of beauty, signalling a family's wealth in a land repeatedly wrecked by drought.

To make a girl big and plump, the tradition of 'gavage' - a French word borrowed from the practice of fattening of geese for foie gras - starts as early as four, as it did for Mint, who was forced to drink 55 litres of camel's milk a day. When she vomited, she was beaten.

If she refused to drink, her fingers were bent back until they touched her hand. Her stomach hurt so much she prayed all the animals in the world would die so that there would be no more milk to be had.

Now, she has trouble walking and suffers from a combination of weight-related illnesses, including diabetes and heart disease.

"My mother thinks she made me beautiful. But she made me sick," says Mint, who asked that her full last name not be disclosed because she feels embarrassed by her past.

To end the brutal practice, the government launched a TV and radio campaign highlighting the risks of obesity. Because most Mauritanian love songs describe the ideal woman as fat, the health ministry commissioned catchy odes to thin women.



These efforts, combined with the rising popularity of foreign soap operas featuring model-thin women, has helped stamp out the practice among the country's urban elite.

Only one in 10 women under age 19 has been force-fed, compared to a third of women 40 or older, according to a survey by the National Office of Statistics in 2001, the most recent available. Those who were forced to eat were overwhelmingly from the country's rural areas.

But although the canon of beauty is changing, entrenched values are hard to uproot.

"My husband thinks I'm not fat enough," complained Zeinabou Mint Bilkhere, explaining that her husband found her pretty during the last months of her pregnancy. Since giving birth, the weight has dropped, however, and with it his desire for her.

Although force-feeding has decreased, many women feel pressured to be bigger-than-average and have turned to a more scientific method of weight gain, using foreign-made, appetite-inducing pills.

Wrapped in a floor-length veil, the 24-year-old who is roughly a size eight, opens her purse and pushes a fistful of change across the counter of a roadside pharmacy in exchange for a box of Anactine, a Moroccan-made antihistamine. The pills, commonly prescribed for hay fever, have as their side effect an unabated desire to eat.

A variety of appetite boosters are popular in Mauritania, including antihistamines made by the likes of Merck and Novartis. They replace a more blunt instrument, recently outlawed by the government - animal steroids intended for fattening camels.

"When I was little my mother hit me to eat because I didn't want to be fat. Now I want to be big because men like that," said Bilkhere who hopes the antihistamines will help her gain 10 to 15 kilograms.

A common Moor saying holds that the place a woman occupies in a man's heart is according to her volume. Even as infomercials tout the health benefits of being thin, many men say they prefer voluptuous women.

Isselmou Ould Mohamed says he loves his wife's 90-kilogram body and was secretly pleased when she began putting on even more weight during pregnancy. When he learnt that to shed the extra pounds she was walking around the soccer stadium in the Mauritanian capital Nouakchott, he was revolted.

"I don't like skinny women. I want to be able to grab her love handles," says the 32-year-old. "I told her that if she loses a lot of weight, I'll divorce her."

One Internet cafe owner says when he's closing at night, he sometimes finds computer screens left open to porn sites dedicated to XL women.

Obesity is a tradition across much of the Arab world, where nomadic peoples struggling to survive the harshness of the desert came to prize fatness as a sign of health.

Forty-four percent of women over 30 in Saudi Arabia are obese, as are approximately a third of adult women in Egypt, Bahrain and Kuwait, according to data from the International Obesity Task Force in London.

"A man's goal is to marry a woman that fills his house. She needs to decorate it like an armoire or a TV set. If she's big, she gives the house importance. If she's thin, she disappears," said Seif l'Islam, 48, curator of a library of ancient Islamic manuscripts, including numerous love poems to plump women.

Although the old idea of beauty is far from dead, one sign of change is the recent fitness trend. In the dying desert light, chubby women in head-to-toe veils walk around the capital's dusty soccer stadium, visibly perspiring in a scene that would have been considered unseemly a decade ago.

When she first started walking laps six years ago, 40-year-old Ramla Mint Ahmed said she wrapped her orange veil tightly around her face hoping not to be recognised. Now she exercises openly. She is even on a diet hoping to lose the rings of fat encircling her stomach.

Her obese mother, who as a child was awakened in the night and forced to drink camel's milk, says she doesn't object to her daughter dieting. That doesn't mean the older woman's notion of beauty has changed.

Ahmed is the eldest of three daughters and the only overweight one. Her 22- and 26-year-old sisters are no larger than a size four and have long, gazelle-like legs. In America, they would be envied for their tiny waists, yet their mother sees them differently.

Asked which of her three daughters is the prettiest, she waves her hand dismissively toward the model-thin sisters, saying, "Definitely those two are not beautiful."

Her oldest daughter, like her, has garlands of fat on her belly, voluminous thighs and deep, heaving breasts.

"This one," says the mother, "has the face of a queen." - Sapa-AP

source: IOL: Skinny women get no love in Mauritania

Photo source: Overweight women ideal in Mauritania on Yahoo! News Photos

[MrsDark]

Wake me up at night to eat enchiladas, guacamole and/or reese's cups (instead of camel's milk) and I'll consider a relocation.

(j/k BTW)

[VenusInFauxFurs]

I'll pass on the camel's milk. A bit sour for my tastes, but wake me for something warm and chocolatey.

[blissfullyunaware]

I AM A GODDESS!!!(In Mauratania, anyway)

[McJag]

Hello, passport office?

[SVZ]

the juxtaposition of the really traditional dress of the women and the man jogging listening to a walkman is really weird.

[pacific breeze]

I've seen that juxtaposition a lot in the Third World, and Arab countries. I miss Grimm's sparkling pink burquas.

[MrsDark]

Aside from health, WTF difference does it make if you're a little chunky when you're covered from head to toe?

[blissfullyunaware]

Originally Posted by MrsDark

Aside from health, WTF difference does it make if you're a little chunky when you're covered from head to toe?

No kidding

[Femmefatale]

This is clearly the direct inverse of forcing someone to diet to the extreme and be super skinny, however I doubt it will be received as tragically by the masses , esp with this pro-chub movement going on. I know this custom goes back a long way when thick women were thought of as fertile and wealthy etc, its funny how the skinny-thing is somewhat of a new phenomenon

On the other hand, what I do think is fcked up is how no one talks about how the beyond stick thin, 80lb curvelss look is usually attained thru drug use. What I get sick of in the media is how they act like these chicks starve themselves to get to that pt--sure, they starve themselves but theyre also doing serious drugs

You can be 5'5 and 105lbs thru diet and exercise--but you cant be 80lbs without some sort of aid UNLESS you are clinically anorexic, and they are not all anorexic. I wish that was discussed more. These chicks arent size 2s or size 0s, theyre far BELOW that.

Women w bodies like eva longoria and christina aguiellera, halle barry, jennifer aniston are thin bc they watch what they eat and exercise--they are NOT in the category of super-skinny.

for example,
this is on drugs NOT extreme dieting
http://data1.blog.de/blog/s/sorryimn...dsay-lohan.jpg

[MrsDark]

80# is pretty obviously death's door, but I'd also say it would take drugs, starving or a combo for most people to even be 5'5" and 105#. That is an pretty low weight for that height on anyone who does not have a small, narrow frame. Plenty of the 80 pound anorexics used to be 0's and 2's until they started making sizes bigger about 20 years ago.

With Lohan and those others, it's drugs....but also starving. The drugs just help with the starving because they kill your appetite.

[Femmefatale]

well i am 5'5 and fluctuate between about 107-114 and even at 107 I am nowhere near as thin as those chicks. I am very narrow and do have a small frame, but i also have in the low healthy range of body fat % bc im very fit and lean jsut due to genetics. I wear a 0-2--im sure 20 years ago a lot was different than it is today. But my pt is that magazines talk about how size 2s/0s are an unhealthy ideal and then use pics l ike the above of lindsey and nicole to illustrate those "unhealthy sizes" when they are NOWHERE near even a haute couture size 2/0. I just think its a false representation.

back to the force-feeding thou. In highschool and college my best friend was super tiny--5'3 and abt 85lbs. Bc of how tiny her frame was, she never looked unhealthy like nicole/lindsey. For example, in a bathing suit her bones were not protruding and she looked fine. However in clothes, she looked startlingly skinny since u never knew what was beneath the clothes (ppl assumed she was all bones). Her face was full, and her body fat was normal. Still, she grew tired of all of the whispers and remarks that surrounded her everywhere she went (once in a store a woman asked her if she had any eating disorder!)...so, she tried to gain weight.

Before she started to try to gain weight, her regular eating habits were pretty normal, esp for a teenager. Shed eat whatever she wanted (junkfood all the way for her) but never really consumed an enormous quantity of food. Shed eat 1.5 pieces of pizza not 3 like the others, or shed get something really bad like taco bell and eat one taco. She always chugged regular sugar soda too. This was just her regular way of eating, shed fill up fast. When she started trying to gain weight shed try to eat things that werent that filling but high in calories like doritos--yeah, sick! It did not work, she couldnt gain weight so she gave up and went back to her old eating habits.

Continuing to eat her normal way, she gained about 20lbs between age 17-24. It happened naturally. She didnt need to try and force herself. and to be honest, now she looks like ass bc shes flabby and out of shape even thou still small. I think that attitude of needing to gain weight and being too thin stuck with her even after she gained weight so she hasnt revamped her eating habits accordingly. I just dont think force feeding is constructive in any way--but i think the media sometimes makes that concept more positive than extreme dieting which i think is in error

[MrsDark]

Originally Posted by Femmefatale

I am very narrow and do have a small frame,

Exactly. For adults (not high schoolers) who don't (i.e. the majority) being 105# and 5'5" is way underweight, usually requiring a drug/starvation or combo if wanting to get there, regardless of what size this will put them at. I knew an anorexic who never got below a 6 (a 1987 6, which would be a 2 now) simply due to width of her hipbones, but she looked a fright.

[Femmefatale]

the chicks the tabs use to illustrate size "unhealthy" 0s-2s are far below those sizes, that is my observation. nicole richie at her skinniest was not wearing a 2 or even a 0. i know it and the tabs will say "omg size 2s and 0s are an epidemic in hollywood" and then use teeny chicks to represent this "epidemic" but the chicks they use are not size theyre talking about.

Jennifer Aniston, Christian Aguiellera, Halle Berry, Sara Jessica Parker, Eva Longoria--are size 2s and 0s and are not even in the same weight realm as the chicks that are used to represent those sizes as an epidemic. they outweight the sickly skinnies by 30lbs

[MrsDark]

Feh. A technicality, for reasons I just mentioned. Nicole, et al are used because it's obvious that they're an example of unhealthily ana. Plethora of ana's are 0's and 2's in the real world. When they're using celeb examples they can't use a 0-2er because this is a 'normal' size to those circles. Most people know it's not about the size per se, but whether or not the size is right for that person. Nicole would obviously have to gain to be a 2. So the size is not really the point.