Cruelty or Culture? | Beauty Standards | Female Objectification | Child Abuse
Force Feeding : The practice of feeding humans or animals against their will.
Leblouh : The practice of force-feeding girls from as young as five to nineteen, in countries where obesity is traditionally regarded as desirable.
INTRODUCTION
Beauty has and always will be an objective phenomenon. Of course at least to many this objectivity is in relation to a scale of individuality hence the phrase " beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder [singular] ". However to some communities in Africa and elsewhere in the world, the idea of beauty has been capped collectively. There are certain beauty standards set out for people, specifically girls and women, to attain not for their own benefit but for the outrageous idea of alluding to the likes and interests of men. Force Feeding is just one out a couple known methods adopted by such communities to ensure that girls and women are able to secure these pre-established beauty attributes. The term 'force feeding' is synonymous to 'gavage' which comes from the French word for the force feeding of geese to produce foie gras.
WHEN AND WHERE
The practice of force feeding traces its roots back to the 11th century. It derives itself from the Arabic nomads who associated obesity with wealth. These nomads were lighter skin and when the women got married to rich men they were expected to do nothing and let the black/ darker skin slaves or workers do all the work. Thus, to get the wives to not do any work they were made to become big which was rationalized to restrict their mobility or eagerness to move and work.
Continuing on, it was adapted during the slave trade. Slaves were force fed to keep them from starving themselves as a suicide method, as well as (in women) to ensure they looked good and could rack up high bids as and when they were being sold off. It was and is currently being practiced in Mauritania, parts of Mali, rural Niger, Nigeria's Calabar state and the northern part of Cameroon. Of course these are just the known places with very high concentrations of this practice. There are definitely other smaller unaccounted for communities who are faced with and are practicing the act all over Africa and around the world.
THE DETAILS
Force feeding is almost like a ritual. It has a number of overlapping attributes with rituals such as the fact that it occurs during specific seasons usually at dedicated camp sites, it has people who actually preside over the practice-- yes, it is actually someone's full time job to force girls to eat-- it has traces of torture especially when the girls reject the food and it is not exactly free (families have to sometimes forgo one of their meals a day to provide enough food for their girls to meet the daily feeding goal).
During the school holidays (when the girls are free) and the rainy season (when milk is abundant), girls are taken for Leblouh at fattening farms where older women will administer the food-- a breakfast of two kilos of pounded millet, two cups of butter, and 20 liters of camel's milk (sample meal plan for a 6 year old girl). The average goal is to get the girls to consume 9000 to 12,000 calories a day as compared to the average 2000 to 3000 and 1600 to 2400 calories a day prescribed for male adults and female adults respectively by the U.S department of Health. In addition to this the elder women roll sticks on the thighs of the girls to break down tissue in an effort to quicken the process.
Of course to get in 9000 calories a day the number of times one eats is going to have to increase from the average three times daily to an average of 6 to 8 times daily. In addition to that, the quantity per each meal is going to have to increase. This practice is so torturous that the girls are forced to swallow huge amounts of food even after they have clearly passed their limit. It goes to the extent of the matrons forcing the girls to drink their own vomit, should they reject the food, or pushing them to force-vomit a bit to create more space because they have to hit the calories bound and resources are scarce in these communities so there is no room nor acceptance for wastage.
RATIONALE: FED-to-WED
The idea, simply put, is to prepare the girls for marriage.
To these families, who are relatively poor, a married daughter means one less mouth to feed. In an interview, when a Mauritanian mother was asked what her best wishes for her daughter were she replied and said "to be fat, to get married and to have a family". When the daughter of this mother was interviewed, separately, she said becoming fat was the only way to become beautiful and that she didn't regard herself as beautiful the way she was before force feeding.
The whole situation is a vicious cycle of a girl being force fed to become "beautiful" and worthy of a suitor and that girl becoming a mother and raising her child with the same doctrines. It is said that in Mauritania, in particular, "a woman's size indicates the amount of space she occupies in her husbands heart".
A man was interviewed in Mauritania, again, and was asked what he thought about force feeding and he opined that it was very important and showed men that a woman was potent and would be enjoyable during sex. A father was asked why he was putting his 6 year old daughter through the practice, he replied and said that because size constitutes to wealth he wanted his daughter to blend in with the other girls, as in, he didn't want it to be noticeable that she was coming from a poor family so as to open her chances of finding marriage.
In essence, the rationals are:
- Fatness or excess weight is equatable to wealth.
- Fatness or excess weight is equatable to beauty.
- Fatness or excess weight makes the girls look older as if they have reached puberty which attracts men for marriage.
- Fatness or excess weight directly speaks to a woman's potency in bed.
THE EFFECTS
There are clearly many effects of this act. Not only is it simply detrimental to the health of these girls, it has numerous psychological effects which many do not wish to address.
Health-wise, force feeding makes these girls 30 to 70 percent more susceptible to sicknesses including but not limited to diabetes, heart diseases including heart failure, other organ failures including kidney failure, hypertension, high cholesterol, obesity (which is not even regarded as a sickness by them), dyslipidemia, poor respiratory system, some cancers, stroke, immobility, blindness and infertility. Of course they fail to regard this although one woman in particular attested to the fact that they had been educated on the effects.
Eza, a Mauritanian woman who felt pressure from the society to gain more weight to find a husband, took to a bizarre route and ingested a steroid meant for animals to facilitate and hasten her fattening process. This action caused her skin to turn black from the inside. She bloated up like a ball and passed away the next day. Turns out Eza had not responded as quickly to the fattening process as other girls which is to be expected since we all have different bodies and metabolisms. Leblouh causes lack of self confidence, eating disorders, drug abuse, female objectification, suicide, among others.
CRUELTY OR CULTURE?
Deciphering between whether or not force feeding girls is cruelty or culture can be hard when we are trying to respect the sovereignty of communities and cultures. However anything that obstructs the personal development of people, negatively impacts their health, inflicts torture, rids them of experiencing their growth process, camps them in insane conditions among others is cruel. Boundaries must be set and all humans should be able to access and experience basic human rights instead of having their lives cooked up for them. We respect cultures and indigenous systems and practices but not when it impedes on the positive progression of its people.
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