It’s good that people don’t have that much time to calculate all the expenses they make to stay fit and desirable for the opposite sex.
The sum of all the money we spend throughout our entire lives will be enough to buy a ticket to Mauritania and live there happy ever after without spending a cent on gyms and plastic surgeries. Why?
In the unique Mauritanian culture the beauty standards are a little bit different from the ones we’re used to. If you are fat, you’d be adored by the Mauritanian men. You’d be equal to a goddess. According to them, obesity is a symbol of fertility. Basically, the bigger, the better. You can eat whatever you want to–even more, you are encouraged to eat a lot.
In some Mauritanian families husbands force their wives and daughters to eat, because having fat women in the house means that he is wealthy enough to feed them. If the desired result cannot be reached by constantly eating, then weight-adding drugs are always an option.
Although the government recently started to encourage women not to torture themselves as the feeding process, which is called “gavage,” may cause a number of health problems like bad blood circulation, high cholesterol, heart and liver diseases. When it’s time for gavage, parents send their daughters to special “force-feeders” that “work” in the desert. There the girls get 1500 calories a day by eating food containing a lot of fat and drink camel milk all day long.
The women in urban areas have already started to get used to exercise, but there are many others outside big cities that are still forced to eat to appear beautiful. In contrast, men have to be thin, as Mauritanians consider the union of a thin man and a fat women ideal.
Beside this interesting fact, there’s another peculiarity in the Mauritanian culture that many Western women will like. Divorced women are considered highly attractive, due to the fact that they are considered more seductive.
So if you are a slim and slender global traveler who wants to travel to Mauritania, be prepared to lose your beauty title there. The Mauritanian men will not be attracted to you and women will think you have health problems.
However, it’s a culture and we should all respect it, even if we don’t completely understand it.
Photo courtesy of the Muslim Woman
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