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Tipping The Scales: Tales Of The Super-Sized

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Anonymous

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Fat girls and feeders

Did anyone else see this programme ?

The attitudes of the feeders - especially the one man who despite almost killing his wife harboured dreams of her gaining weight again (and was building an extra-large house for her) - and the depths of low self-esteem of the women, beggared belief. The final shot of the woman who almost died due to her massive weight, sitting and looking into the camera while her husband/feeder slept with his head resting on one of her rolls of fat was truly haunting.

She looked utterly miserable and I couldn't help wondering why the hell she hadn't left him...
 
Even though she's miserable she feels that she doesn't deserve anything better. I didn't see the show but I can empathise with her. When you completely lack any self-confidence or esteem you believe that you are the lowest form of life and you deserve to be treated badly.
 
I'm really sorry I missed this. But hell, I can throw in my ill informed opinion and you can't stop me :D
This is just one end of a spectrum of human behavior I believe. It's a well known phenomenon that some men don't want their women to slim down, and try to thwart their diets, because they think they'll leave them when they get down to "dating weight". Feeding the women up to gross and dangerous proportions is presumably an extreme method of control. In effect they're chaining her to a metaphorical radiator. Nothing to do with them finding large women more attractive.
But this was all possibly said on the programme, and I'm being unutterably dull.
 
beakboo said:
But this was all possibly said on the programme, and I'm being unutterably dull.

You're too bright to be dull beak! :cool:
 
I agree Beak, it's all to do with control. In a way it's more of a 'socially acceptable' way of abusing another human being. He's probably got her thinking that she couldn't possibly be loved by anyone else.
 
History's Mistrees by Paula Weideger ( an exploration of a 19th century book on ethnographics by Hermann Ploss gives the following examples.

The wives and concubines of African chieftans were fattened with curdled milk or broth and soup of cornmeal while in southern Nubia young girls were forced to follow a revolting diet of meal, a little meat and goats milk for 40 days prior to marriage, the female relatives beating them if they refused to eat, so highly was fat valued.

In some Islamic and African cultures there were reports of girls so gouged that they had lost the use of their limbs and were treated as a family heir-loom and an object of pride, their diet being completely milk based with no water and salted meat broth allowed once a week.

A people called the Trarsa based in the Sahara desert fed their women almost exclusively on milk and butter, the men by contrast were gaunt and bony.

Ploss states further examples of preferences for obese women among the tunisian jewesses, hindus (who were recommended to seek brides with the gait of young elephants),and Hawaiians. So once again plus ca change.......

But I agree that these poor women in the programme are victims of abuse, and like all abuse victims it's extremely hard to break free.
 
Regarding fat women being valued. This is largely in societies where food is scarce and therefore being fat = access to food = high status. Being thin = no access to food, possible disease = low status.
The reverse is now true in societies where access to highg calorie food is is all too easy, e.g. western cultures. Fat people are seen as not being in control of themselves and their food intake = low status. Those who can afford it mostly strive to stay thin by reducing intake of high calorie/fatty/sugary/junk food= high status. This is perhaps best demonstrated by the current crop of lollipop like women who populate our tv, movies and magazines. Even in western society this wasn't always the case. In Victorian society, thinness was associated with "wasting disease" and therefore plump women were very valued, and therefore clothes were cut to emphasise and exagerate large bums/breasts.
 
Gimauche: so far so good, but in the last 25 years, at least in developed countries, too thin == suspicion of AIDS. Particularly in gay male society, there's some concern for having some meat on your bones.


As far as survival-level mode, I would think that "fat up to a point" would be what would become desireable. If you're too fat to move or to have children, obviously things have gone to far. I would think this was a matter of being in a certain range, not just being as far off the scale as possible.


I always viewed the American (Western?) obesity issue as killing ourselves with success. Science and Technology has given us the means to cheapy produce high-calorie food, and society / genes haven't adjusted yet. Now, having the time to maintain a fit, athletic form is the luxury.
 
Philo - re the survival level mode. I think you can see this in evolutionary terms (psychologists believe behaviours just like physical characteristics evolve). So initially, meat on bones = healthy specimen which will help me attain reproductive success. Therefore women are fed to make them fat to become more attractive to men.
Eventually, however, the fatness becomes exagerated, until eventually it's original meaning is lost and fatness becomes valued for itself. For instance, take a comparative psychology example :
some male baloon flies present possible mates with a hollow silk ball, it has no intrinsic value in itself but is still a potent turn on for the ladies. Initially this hollow ball started off as an insect wrapped in silk, indicating that the male would have the ability to feed and look after the female and the brood that was to follow.
Your point about AIDS is interesting, but to be quite honest I have not noticed the same in heterosexuals. For instance, hiv/aids is on the rise especially in the under 30's heterosexual population because they don't really think of it as an issue, therefore they probably don't draw those conclusions either.
 
I was looking forward to that, and then I missed it. Damn.
 
The image of the naked woman shaking herself in front of the mirror will stay with me for a while... unfortunately.

I really felt sorry for the woman whose husband had been feeding her. The very fact that he stopped finding her attractive, and had to have marriage counselling, suggests it's not her that he loves, but the image, much the same as a man marrying a "model" type for her looks and then losing interest if she gains weight.
How could anyone make someone they love gain weight at the risk of their health?
 
Hubcap bought me a bag of Thornton's truffles today, even though he wants me to lose weight for my health sake. It's a complicated business for sure, love and food.
 
I comfort eat due to depression, I've gained two stone in the last year and am now classed as obese, which is depressing, so etc etc ...
 
SpookyAngel: The answer to your question lies indeed in your post: this isn't love, it is indeed abuse. This wasn't aired in the states but I have seen similar programs on this type of thing. Surely it's a very small % of the population at large, exploited to satisfy our craving for the long gone freak show.
All abuse stems from hate, self-hate, and this phenomena is, to me, physically assaultive in nature not to mention psychologicaly devestating to those involved, yet displayed with an attitude of "gee how sick but to each his own". I highly doubt that televised domestic battery would be seen in the same light, but doesn't it amount to the same thing?

Also, in the US, a common talk show topic seems to involve parents defending their right to feed their toddlers to the point of disabling them, ie "my 2 year old is 180 pounds". Again, I doubt more overt abuse would be seen as debateable.
 
Too true 2blue, it is freak show TV. Interesting though.

Spooky- you seriously think there's any truffles left? :rolleyes: I'm 1 and a half stones (21lbs) overweight and counting.
 
holy mother of god Beak that's nothing I'm 4 stone overweight! I probably put on another pound reading about those truffles!
 
Yes but you're about a foot taller than me Lobelia, it makes all the difference.
 
400-pound man rescued after he plunges through floor of mobile home

Sun-Sentinel
Posted October 16 2003, 7:10 AM EDT


NEW PORT RICHEY -- A Pasco County man who became trapped in his mobile home when the floor gave way under him was rescued by emergency workers.

The manager of the mobile home park found the man, who reportedly weighed 400 pounds, on Wednesday.

``There he was in that little bedroom sitting in a little hole,'' said Gene Morton, of Orangewood Lakes Mobile Home Community.

Morton identified the man as George Daniels, 61, and said he found Daniels conscious but disoriented, sitting with his head bowed. Morton said Daniels told him he had been stuck for two days, though emergency responders weren't so sure.

``They would ask him one time and he'd say a day,'' said James Higgins, a Pasco County Fire Rescue battalion chief. ``They'd ask him another time and he'd say he had been there for an hour.''

It took about eight rescue workers to get Daniels out of the home in a stretcher, Morton said. ``He's one big man,'' he said.

The floor boards in Daniels' home may have rotted underneath the carpet, Morton said.

Morton called 911 after getting a call from one of the man's neighbors, who had known Daniels was stuck for some time but waited to call for help, he said.

One neighbor, 80-year-old Warren Conklin, said he checked on Daniels earlier Wednesday.

``I didn't know he was stuck in there,'' the neighbor said. ``It looked like he was just sitting there.''

Conklin said he asked Daniels if he wanted him to call someone.

``He said, `No, no, I'll get up myself,''' Conklin said.

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/lo...fall,0,5436375.story?coll=sfla-home-headlines

What gets me is that he didn't seem in any great hurry to be rescued. I suppose it must have been awfully embarassing but.....

I saw the Guiness World Records record holder for the world's biggest waist on TV last night and at well over 9 feet long this guy seems like Twiggy (the 70s supermodel not Jim Royle's mate) by comparison.

Emps
 
Mauritanian Fat Farms and Chubby Chasers

Obesity is so revered among Mauritania's white Moor Arab population that the young girls are sometimes force-fed to obtain a weight the government has described as "life-threatening".

A generation ago, over a third of women in the country were force-fed as children - Mauritania is one of the few African countries where, on average, girls receive more food than boys.

Now only around one in 10 girls are treated this way. The treatment has its roots in fat being seen as a sign of wealth - if a girl was thin she was considered poor, and would not be respected.

But in rural Mauritania you still see the rotund women that the country is famous for. They walk slowly, dainty hands on the end of dimpled arms, pinching multicoloured swathes of fabric together to keep the biting sand from their faces.

"I make them eat lots of dates, lots and lots of couscous and other fattening food," Fatematou, a voluminous woman in her sixties who runs a kind of "fat farm" in the northern desert town of Atar, told BBC World Service's The World Today programme.

Although she had no clients when I met her, she said she was soon expecting to take charge of some seven-year-olds.

"I make them eat and eat and eat. And then drink lots and lots of water," she explained.

"I make them do this all morning. Then they have a rest. In the afternoon we start again. We do this three times a day - the morning, the afternoon and the evening."

Punishment

She said the girls could end up weighing between 60 to 100 kilograms, "with lots of layers of fat."

Fatematou said that it was rare for a girl to refuse to eat, and that if they did, she was helped by the child's parents.

"They punish the girls and in the end the girls eat," she said.

"If a girl refuses we start nicely, saying 'come on, come on' sweetly, until she agrees to eat."

Fatematou admitted that sometimes the girls cried at the treatment.

"Of course they cry - they scream," she said.

"We grab them and we force them to eat. If they cry a lot we leave them sometimes for a day or two and then we come back to start again.

"They get used to it in the end."

She argued that in the end the girls were grateful.

"When they are small they don't understand, but when they grow up they are fat and beautiful," she said.

"They are proud and show off their good size to make men dribble. Don't you think that's good?"

Change

However, the view that a fat girl is more desirable is now becoming seen as old-fashioned.

A study by the Mauritanian ministry of health has found that force-feeding is dying out. Now only 11% of young girls are force fed.

"That's not how people think now," Leila - a woman in the ancient desert town of Chinguetti, who herself was fattened as a child - told The World Today.

"Traditionally a fat wife was a symbol of wealth. Now we've got another vision, another criteria for beauty.

"Young people in Mauritania today, we're not interested in being fat as a symbol of beauty. Today to be beautiful is to be natural, just to eat normally."

Some men are also much less keen on having a fat wife - a reflection of changes in Mauritanian society.

"We're fed up of fat women here," said 19-year-old shop owner Yusuf.

"Always fat women! Now we want thin women.

"In Mauritania if a woman really wants to get married I think she should stay thin. If she gets fat it's not good.

"Some girls have asked me whether they should get fat or stay thin. I tell them if you want to find a man, a European or a Mauritanian, stay thin, it's better for you. But some blokes still like them fat."

And while there still men who like their women big, Fatematou is on hand to fatten them up with her years of experience.

I asked her if she ever felt cruel, beating and force feeding children?

"No! It's not cruel to make girls fat!" she said.

"Me, I've seen 10-year old girls give birth. I tell you, 10 years old!

"Once they are fat and beautiful they can serve their men well, once they are fat they can be married."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/3429903.stm

:(
 
When i was a child Turkish girls were fed with a strange compressed powder, truly vile stuff that was to, in the words of my grandmothers lodger 'to make my daughter fat and pretty', it was pure sugar.

Feeding women up seems to be a wide spread phenomeon even emerging here in the west in a few instances as seen in this thread.

http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=8538&highlight=fat+girls

How about merging the two, you handsome, sexy, gorgeous hunk, you?
 
Theory: Certain societies which have a high degree of specialization and status-consciousness based on material affluence also have a concept of "the lady," a woman who is, essentially, useless and expensive to maintain. This uselessness/expensiveness is directly tied to her status, as maintaining her is a form of conspicuous consumption that redounds to the credit of those maintaining her. The direct link between her status and her uselessness is tied to the assumption that she cannot generate status on her own, but exists only as an adjunct to her birth family or her husband.

This is not my theory, in that I did not originate it. I read a book based on this idea long before I started keeping track of books read, and I've found it to have wide applicability in that it supplies an interesting perspective on particular cases (which is all I ask of a theory).

I should mention as an aside that only the *perception* of uselessness is essential to the system; an actual lady may perform many important functions while persistently maintaining the illusion of helplessness. If I recall the argument and examples of the book correctly, the relatively short lifetime of the antebellum American Southern belle may be attributed to the stress of pretending to be flighty and helpless while ruthlessly managing a plantation of rebellious slaves, pumping out babies, running up debts, and pretending not to know that their husbands had concubines. But anyway.

The fat Mauritanian women, when viewed in this light, become explicable at a social level. So long as women were unable to produce their own status, loving parents were willing to overfeed them "for their own good" so that they could attract higher status mates. The more status is accorded to women as individuals rather than as appendages, the less desirable men who want women too fat to move will seem to parents, and the more likely they are to recognize that their daughter's best interests lie in training her to be independent. In a transitional period, the last hold-outs for the system will be overcontrolling parents and husbands, who between them create and perpetuate low self-esteem and helplessness in women.

Does that make sense to y'all? And does it lead us anywhere useful?
 
Interesting theory. I suppose it could also be seen in Victorian times with the whole Coventry Patmore's 'Angel in the Home' obcession (wildly popular series of poems celebrating gentle, helpless saintly,women). Victorian gentlemen liked the idea of pale, consumptive looking women probably tying in with the whole veneration of death thing going on at the same time (yet still taking their pleasure with more robust women)....I'm rambling...


How about merging the two, you handsome, sexy, gorgeous hunk, you?

Was I really that drunk last night ;)
 
I read an article in a magazine a few years ago about women in the Caribbean eating chicken fattening pills to get themselves fat. They also bleached their skin to make themselves whiter as this was also seen as more attractive to men.

This is exactly the same as women right there in this country going on endless diets to get thin and frying themselves in the sun or on sunbeds to get brown. Looks like we will be manipulated wherever we go girls. Course we could just try swapping round with these Carribean women and seeing if everyone then becomes happy with how they look?
 
'Fat Girls and Feeders' is currently showing on the Discovery Health channel. I did not catch it the first time around and I am just appalled. The man in Arizonia who has aided and abetted his wife to reach 59 stone is just...well... I can't find the right word. The woman cannot move, wash herself, her skin on her underside is blackened and an inch thick, he takes pornographic pictues of her, makes videos and sells them........what kind of sick sh*t does that to another person. As stated before there's so many issues involved here lack of self-esteem, control etc.......
 
Ah, the value of conforming!

I had a friend once who had problems with men, what I mean by that was she was obsessed with being what she perceved as attractive to the opposite sex

-You had to have fancy hair, didnt matter if long or short (though long `was` better than short) but it had to look as if you spent a lot of time in the hair salon (the fancy one...no matter if you were skint, always had to be the best in town)
-pretty similar attitudes to makeup
-same with clothing (I wont go into the details since I fail to comprehend them also clothing should be sufficiently revealing to get the attentions of the `wrong` sort of men, so you can dissaprove...sheeesh!)
-I wont talk about shoes save that they should impair walking and damage the feet.
-Idealy if you didnt make the grade in some area, plastic surgery was desirable, both as an aid and a status symbol.

I dont understand all this and had to ask her if it was what men `really` wanted, she said it was not important what men wanted in a woman, it was a womans duty to educate them in taste (you lot stop laughing!)

But all this was indeed the old notion of a purley decorative woamn as a status symbol, rather like the `interesting invalid` of victorian times that Lilith mentioned.

What `do` men really want? Im not sure, but Im pretty certain that it has little to do with feminine ideas, whatever the time or place.
 
Looks like we will be manipulated wherever we go girls.
and
Ah, the value of conforming!

obsessed with being what she perceved as attractive to the opposite sex

I don't really see it in these terms.

I think where you mention
she said it was not important what men wanted in a woman
my impression is that (at least that part of the sentence) is accurate, in that these things that had to be just so were more about how she wanted to be perceived, as a reflection of herself.

I'd suggest that there are plenty of guys out there who don't like women who look like they've just walked out of a marathon hair-dressing session, who don't like women with an inch of slap on their faces, who don't like women who won't go to the cornershop without putting a pair of stilettos on, and who don't have a weekly manicure and twice-weekly brazillian. My guess would be that this kind of woman wouldn't go for that kind of guy anyway.

If that makes sense.

Obviously I can't speak for your friend, but I think where you say she
had problems with men
I'm inclined to perceive this more as having problems with her self (-esteem)
 
In many ways you are quite right, but there are a hell of a lot like her, and lets face it, they can be a big influence on men.

Lets see, what car shall I put on today? the banger that looks like a sports car, or the sports car cunningly disguised as a banger??
 
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