Mauritania tells women fat is not sexy

Sharon Lafraniere, Mauritania
July 7, 2007

A Mauritanian Lady

AT THE Olympic Sports Stadium here, a collection of dun-coloured 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 labours. "Because I am fat," said one, a dark-eyed 34-year-old close to 90 kilograms. Another, 30, in bright pink sneakers, said: "For myself, for my health and to be skinny."

It is a typically Western after-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 to put on weight.

Now Mauritania's Government is out to change that. In recent years, television commercials and official pronouncements have promoted a new message: 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 roughly 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 the ages of 15 and 49 had been deliberately overfed. And nearly 70 per cent — even more among teenagers — said they did not regret it.

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, devised to create girls obese enough to display family wealth and epitomise the Mauritanian ideal.

Centuries-old poems glorified women immobilised by fat, unable to hoist themselves onto camels without the aid of men's willing hands.

Girls as young as five and as old as 19 had to drink up to 19 litres of fat-rich camel's or cow's milk daily. 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 is known as gavage, a French term for 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, a top government women's affairs official.

Ms Mahmoud insists the use of torture has died out. 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.

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. Doctors were recruited to explain health risks.

But nearly three-quarters of Mauritanian women do not watch television, and an even greater share do not listen to the radio, said Maye Mint Haidy, a government statistician.

Nor was it easy, Ms Mahmoud said, to change how the sexes viewed 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." According to Mauritanian stereotypes, porky men are womanish and lazy.

Fatma Mint Mohamed, 35, a mother of five living in a village south of Nouakchott, the capital, carries nearly 90 kilograms on her 152-centimetre frame. Her weight makes her husband "very happy, of course," she said, although her slimmer sister warned it could kill her.

Ms Mohamed said she endured comparatively mild gavage — "just enough so our family did not get criticised or be thought of as poor" — and was proud to emerge with a praiseworthy, roly-poly figure.

Other Mauritanian women have replaced gavage with thoroughly modern prescription drug abuse. At the capital's open-air market last week, a male buyer easily secured a gold box of Indian-made dexamethasone tablets, a prescription steroid hormone that can cause sharp weight gain.

The black-turbanned seller, his wares displayed openly on a plastic sheet, warned that the drug was dangerous. But it would fatten up the man's wife fast, he promised.

Ms Mahmoud insists the use of torture has died out. 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.

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. Doctors were recruited to explain health risks.

But nearly three-quarters of Mauritanian women do not watch television, and an even greater share do not listen to the radio, said Maye Mint Haidy, a government statistician.

Nor was it easy, Ms Mahmoud said, to change how the sexes viewed 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." According to Mauritanian stereotypes, porky men are womanish and lazy.

Fatma Mint Mohamed, 35, a mother of five living in a village south of Nouakchott, the capital, carries nearly 90 kilograms on her 152-centimetre frame. Her weight makes her husband "very happy, of course," she said, although her slimmer sister warned it could kill her.

Ms Mohamed said she endured comparatively mild gavage — "just enough so our family did not get criticised or be thought of as poor" — and was proud to emerge with a praiseworthy, roly-poly figure.

Other Mauritanian women have replaced gavage with thoroughly modern prescription drug abuse. At the capital's open-air market last week, a male buyer easily secured a gold box of Indian-made dexamethasone tablets, a prescription steroid hormone that can cause sharp weight gain.

The black-turbanned seller, his wares displayed openly on a plastic sheet, warned that the drug was dangerous. But it would fatten up the man's wife fast, he promised.

New York Times