[wvns] In Mauritania 'fat is beautiful'
Mauritania seeks to reverse 'fat is beautiful' ethos
By Sharon LaFraniere
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/07/03/news/mauritania.php?page=1
NOUAKCHOTT, Mauritania: At the Olympic Sports Stadium in this capital
city, a collection of dun-colored buildings rising mirage-like from
the vast Sahara, about a dozen women clad in tennis shoes and sandals
circled the grandstands one evening in late June, puffing with each step.
Between pants came brief explanations for their labors. "Because I am
fat," said one, a dark-eyed 34-year-old close to 91 kilograms, or 200
pounds. Another, a 30-year-old in bright pink sneakers, said, "For
myself, for my health and to be skinny."
It is a typically Western après-work scene. But this is the Islamic
Republic of Mauritania, the mirror opposite of the West on questions
of women's weight. To men here, fat is sexy. And in this patriarchal
region, many Mauritanian women do everything possible - and have
everything possible done to them - to put on the kilos.
Now Mauritania's government is out to change that. In recent years,
television commercials and official pronouncements have promoted a new
message: that being fat leads to diabetes, heart problems, high blood
pressure and other woes. The joggers outside the Olympic stadium
testify to their impact: Until lately, a Mauritanian woman in jogging
shoes was about as common as a camel in stiletto heels.
But in other respects, the message faces an uphill run. A 2001
government survey of 68,000 women found that one in five between ages
15 and 49 had been deliberately overfed. And nearly 70 percent - and
even more among teenagers - said they did not regret it.
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"That is a bad sign, especially among the younger generation," said
Maye Mint Haidy, a government statistician who also runs a
nongovernmental women's organization.
Other cultures prize corpulent women. But Mauritania may be unique in
the lengths it has gone to achieve its vision of female beauty. For
decades, the Mauritanian version of a Western teenager's crash diet
was a crash feeding program, designed to create girls obese enough to
display family wealth and epitomize the Mauritanian ideal.
Centuries-old poems glorify women immobilized by fat, moving so slowly
they seemed to stand still, unable to hoist themselves onto camels
without the aid of men's willing hands.
Girls as young as 5 and as old as 19 were forced to drink up to 18
liters, or five gallons, of fat-rich camel's or cow's milk daily,
aiming for silvery stretch marks on their upper arms. If a girl
refused or vomited, the village weight-gain specialist might squeeze
her foot between sticks, pull her ear, pinch her inner thigh, bend her
finger backward or force her to drink her own vomit. In extreme cases,
girls died.
The practice was known as gavage, after the French technique of
force-feeding geese to obtain foie gras. "There isn't a woman close to
my age who hasn't gone through this, maybe not with the torture, but
with the milk and other things," said Yenserha Mint Mohamed Mahmoud,
47, the government's director for promotion of women.
Mahmoud insists that the use of torture has died out, though some say
it lingers in remote areas. Still, Mauritania remains saddled with an
alarming number of women weighing 100 to 150 kilograms, according to
the Ministry for the Promotion of Women, Family and Children.
The same 2001 survey that documented overfeeding estimated that two in
five women were overweight - remarkable for sub-Saharan Africa.
According to the International Obesity Task Force, a research and
advocacy group based in London, Mauritania has the region's
fourth-highest percentage of overweight women. Government officials
blame a concerted effort by all but the poorest families to pump girls
full of milk, cream, butter, couscous and other calorie-rich foods.
In 2003, the Women's Ministry mounted a slim-down campaign, wielding
messages that were anything but subtle. One television and radio skit
depicted a husband carting his fat wife around in a wheelbarrow.
Another featured houseguests raiding the refrigerator because their
host was too obese to get up to feed them. Doctors were recruited to
explain health risks.
But messages spread slowly in the desert. Nearly three-fourths of
Mauritanian women do not watch television, and an even greater share
do not listen to the radio, said Haidy, the statistician.
Nor is it easy, Mahmoud said, to change how the sexes view each other.
"Men want women to be fat and so they are fat," she said. "Women want
men to be skinny and so they are skinny." Indeed, according to
Mauritanian stereotypes, fat men are womanish and lazy.
Mohamed El Moktar Ould Salem, a 52-year-old procurement officer,
blames men's preferences partly on the brightly colored, head-to-toe
mulafas that hide all but the most voluptuous female curves. A slender
woman, he said, "just looks like a stick wrapped up."
Fatma Mint Mohamed, a 35-year-old mother of five living in a village
south of Nouakchott, agrees. Blessed with an ebullient personality and
a radiant smile, she carries nearly 90 kilograms on her 1.5 meter, or
5-foot, frame. Her weight makes her husband "very happy, of course,"
she said, although her slimmer sister, 45 minutes away in the city,
warns that it could kill her.
Mohamed said she endured a comparatively mild form of gavage - "just
enough so our family did not get criticized or be thought of as poor"
- and was proud to emerge with a praiseworthy, roly-poly figure. Her
9-year-old daughter, Selma, with what her mother considers a
distressingly slim figure, has so far escaped the treatment, in hopes
that she will gain weight on her own.
Selma's sisters, now 20 and 14, were less fortunate. Mohamed said that
she spared them the "old-fashioned" techniques that made girls she
grew up with scream in pain. "But to tell the truth, I did take them
to the cows and made them overdrink," she acknowledged. "I did
overfeed them, just a little bit, just so they could look like real
Mauritanian girls. Forty days was enough to get them in the shape I
wanted."
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