Mauritanian Ideal of Beauty

This week i'ld like to investigate a standard of beauty quite unfamiliar to those of us living in the western world in the year 2014.  Today, one of the most important characteristics of a beautiful western woman is her thinness.  While we can easily launch into a discussion on the damaging effects of our obsession with being thin, or about how only 60 years ago, and for much of history, plump women were preferred, I think a look into a current society where bigger is still more beautiful would be more appropriate.

 

Mauritania- No snarky comments are available
for this map 

You have likely heard about Mauritania as a result of the media outburst that took place just a few weeks ago.  If you haven’t seen any recent articles about Mauritania, then here is a brief introduction.  Mauritania is a West African nation almost entirely within the Sahara Desert.  Mauritania is predominantly Sunni Muslim with a Sufi minority and a tiny group of Roman Catholics.  The country is split up between a fairer Berber minority in the north, and a black majority in the south.  Slavery is more prominent here than in any other part of the World.  However, this is not why Mauritania recently received quite a bit of press attention.  Ever since the military coup in 2008, the government has encouraged a return to traditional values, among which is the love of overweight women.  That’s right.  Mauritania, this isolated Sahara nation, is one of the few places left on Earth where heavy women are still seen as the ideal. 

When shown images of thin western
celebrities, Mauritanian women
laugh at what would be considered
hideously thin by their standards.

Mauritanian men don’t even idealize your ordinary zaftig woman, no, they like their women morbidly obese, with stretch marks to testify just how fast they gained weight at puberty.  Before you recoil in horror at such an ideal of beauty, understand where it comes from.  This is a thousand year old Berber ideal, such a long held tradition does not die easily, even as the government petitions women to maintain healthier weights.  In a poor Sahara nation, fat, which equates to wealth and bounty, is certainly more beautiful than the starved look of a skinny woman.  Further thin women are seen as being ‘sick. ’  Sick can literally mean slightly ill, but is often used as a euphemism for having AIDS.  Finally extra pounds equate to curvaceous femininity to most Mauritanians. Essentially if you were born in Mauritania, and wanted to look like a wealthy curvaceous woman who doesn’t have AIDS, you would strive to be obese.

 

A Mauritanian mother force feeds her daughter.  Pinching her
feet between wooden sticks is a common form of
punishment for not eating enough

How far will Mauritanian women go to achieve this ideal?  In cities women will overeat and take illegal diet pills intended to fatten up herd animals.  In the countryside a practice called gavage or leblouh predominates.  Gavage is the practice of force-feeding girls to encourage them to rapidly gain weight.  Some girls are sent to force-feeding camps where they are expected to eat constantly, and punished if they stop eating during mealtimes, do not finish the food they are given, or vomit.  In order to get girls up to a weight worthy of attracting a husband, they may be forced to consume 20 gallons of camel milk, and two kilos of pounded millet mixed with two cups of butter a day.  Instead of condemning Mauritania for the dangerous weight women are expected to achieve to be beautiful, consider how this ideal of beauty isn’t too far from our own.  Both cultures encourage girls to put their health at risk in search of an ideal centered on their weights.  Encouraging western girls to eat more, and Mauritanian girls to exercise more isn’t the solution to the serious health problems associated with the pursuit of a physical ideal.  Presenting a diverse range of bodies of different sizes, colors, and physical abilities as ideals, or beautiful, or even normal within the media, will greatly reduce the hardship individuals put themselves through to change their bodies, because they will be shown that their bodies are already beautiful.  A good example of this is the Debenhams diversity ad campeign http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/04/15/debenhams-look-book-plus-size-models-paralympian_n_3083547.html.   We as a culture must also get over our obsession with beauty—which sounds ironic coming from a fashion blogger. Only when we learn to appreciate appearances as a personal art form, not as a metric of a person’s worthiness or value, will we cease to obsess over becoming the impossible, and realize that we already are exceptional.