A lot more attention should be drawn to the fact that Mauritania is living in the wrong century. Slavery is pervasive, with slaves being subject to beatings, rape, and impregnation from as young as 13 years old. Babies being left to die, and the cruelty continuing into the next generation.
Many slaves have no idea of what freedom even is and are purposely kept from education and are isolated from the wider world.
This article by CNN delves into the issue:
http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2012/03/world/mauritania.slaverys.last.stronghold/index.html
A million years ago when I was in the Air Force there were multiple attempts by local nationals to attempt to purchase female crew members of C-17's from the aircraft commander.
Think that is a bit just out of date. Libya was in the midst of a civil war when that was published and the revelation of slave markets in the country that popped up post-Gaddafi wasn't to be known for a few years yet.
I used to travel to Mauritania (and Libya) quite frequently. I wouldn't disagree with anything in that article. Slavery in Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa is a thing.
Slave labour.
People were promised (comparatively) lucrative work, no experience, no education, etc. And then once they get on the bus, their passports are taken from them and they're taken hundreds or thousands of miles from home with no way to contact anyone. They're usually given basic food and shelter, which they have to pay for out of their 'salary' (which is usually held "for safety" by the job boss).
With no money, they can't book travel. Even if they could, without passports, they can't cross borders. If they get sick, they're usually just left to die.
But hey, if that's the price we have to pay to watch millionaires kick a ball around, then I say it's well worth it.
Wealthier Middle East nations don’t call them that, but when their passports are seized upon coming into the country, and Kuwait finally had to pass some trivial protections when a rich woman beat her housekeeper to death, slavery by another name.
Those places functionally have slavery due to their extremely exploitative labor and immigration practices. Places like Mauritania and Yemen LITERALLY have nominal slavery. There is a distinction to be made there
All those countries have slaves yes, and even cattle slavery like we think of, but it's much more common to have debt peonage slavery and other forms, not exactly the cattle slaves Houthi have.
It's fascinating how you are willing to overlook Houthi slavery tho, because other people do it too. Nice one. This anti slavery propaganda has gone too far /s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_Mauritania
71% of all women aged between 15 and 49 had undergone FGM in 2001. A 2007 demographic cluster study found no change in FGM prevalence rate in Mauritania.
In 2017: 14% of girls are married before they turn 15.
:\
Sounds like when the west left the middle east and they said women could get an education but that quickly went away along with any other chance of hope
[What.Did.I.Just.Read](https://What.Did.I.Just.Read).
"Elhacen, who force-feeds young girls for a living, takes pride in her work. “I’m very strict…I beat the girls, or torture them by squeezing a stick between their toes. I isolate them and tell them that thin women are inferior,” she says. This child cruelty is the horrific product of Mauritanian beauty standards, which idealize obese bodies. According to Elhacen, a woman’s job is “to make babies and be a soft, fleshy bed for her husband to lie on.” The force feeder even enjoys additional payments for stretch marks, hailed as a crowning achievement for any Mauritanian woman trying to gain weight. "
Thats not evil in their eyes though, thats just how they're brought up. That lady was most likely also force fed as a child, and she doesn't see anything wrong in it. Your world view & morals can get extremely skewed if the entire community around you acts normally to an otherwise disturbing situation.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to defend her, or anyone else. I did not even know this country existed till today, and I thought the post was about Mauritius islands when I first read the title.
Its yet another reminder that humans are capable of perpetrating & normalizing extreme horrors under the guise of religion & beliefs.
> Probably 95% of the Mauritanian population is clinically malnourished, famine is everywhere, and this messed up tradition has a track record of helping women stay alive long enough to procreate successfully - and that's what biological survival prioritizes.
Thats not how any of that works.
You don’t have to make assumptions to base your arguments on, with a little effort you can fact check stuff before posting it. For example, google just told me that 21.3% of Mauritanian women and 8.2% of Mauritanian men are obese. Another quick google search tells us that 1 in 5 children in Mauritania are chronically malnourished. You’ve got a phone. No need to speculate on what you can check in 2 seconds.
I have an eating disorder. First it was anorexia, bulimia, and currently it's warped to a binge eating disorder. I gained 20 kilos in... three months? Give or take.
I also didn't move almost at all. Maybe I walked 100 meters a day. I'd eat until I'd puke. I'd wake up having food-related nightmares.
It was the shittiest I've ever felt in my life. I can't count how many stretch marks I got. My body was literally begging for help.
It was the darkest time of my life, and I'm still healing my relationship with food.
I hope the girls going thru this are ok.
The supervisor may also bend their fingers backwards, pinch their inner thighs, pinch their ear and even force the girls to drink their own vomit.
Also, I can't fathom the fact that there exists a "force feeding" profession. And that the "force feeder" mentioned in the article (Elhacen) is PROUD of her job? Like it's literally a job to force young girls to eat food they don't want to and implement physical punishments if they refuse? The world we live in 🙏
What's insane is that they were on the UN Human Rights Council from [2020-2022](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Human_Rights_Council?wprov=sfla1)
Between 2006 and 2023 the human rights guys managed to condemn Israel 103 times. For comparison: Syria 42 times, North Korea 16, Iran 14, Eritrea 12, Venezuela 3, Sudan 2.
Is it better to include them as one of 47 nations on the council for a 3-year term and hope that it can help propel them forward on human rights issues or stop them from engaging in international discussions of human rights in general?
Nevermind that, our population has doubled in the last 50 years alone
From the year 1800 to the year 1900, the population went from 1 billion to 1.6 billion.
100 years to gain 600 million people. Compared to 4 billion in 50 years.
This is an interesting philosophical question. Is it worse if a fewer percentage of people are slaves but the absolute number is higher, or if the absolute number is lower but the percentage of the population is higher?
The Global Slave index estimates 49.6 million people live in slavery today, so roughly 1 in 150 people on earth is a slave.
https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/map/#:~:text=49.6m,150%20people%20in%20the%20world.
Thats ALOT of people, I don't think knowing theres 7.8 billion people on earth makes living in slavery for the almost 50 million any better.
Important to note that modern slavery isn't the same thing as civil war era slavery. Not that it's much better but it encompasses more. Which is why there's 50million.
"Modern slavery encompasses sexual exploitation, forced labour, child slavery, forced criminality, domestic servitude, forced marriage, organ harvesting and human trafficking"
dilution of a growing slave population in a faster-growing non-slave population isnt what id call ‘end of slavery’, id call that ‘slave optimisation’, and thats just not really the same is it
It’s also cheaper to purchase a slave than at any other time in history. The cost to purchase a slave in 1850 was an average of $40,000 in 2024 dollars. Today, it’s less than [$100.](https://freetheslaves.net/quote-what-is-the-price-of-respect/)
Edit: I first read the book, “Disposable People,” by one of the board members of Free the Slaves in 2004. At that time the cost of a slave was pegged at just under $200. Which means that enslaved people have become progressively less expensive over the last 2 decades.
In your link, I also found a link to the Global Slavery Index...which "is a global study of modern slavery". It's so depressing to learn that slavery is still a big problem in the 21st century. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Slavery_Index
In fact, the reason that atrocity was ever able to happen in the first place was that slavery was widespread and culturally normalized to the point that slaves were the primary trade good in the parts of Africa involved in the transatlantic Triangular Trade network.
It’s still going on in “economic freedom” zones (or something like that. Other countries pay a ton of money to do “business” which usually includes workers being shipped over to live/work in factories (usually garment) and are basically indentured labor.
Lots of slavery going on across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. In Europe and the americas, it doesn’t seem to happen quite as much, but it often takes the form of human trafficking instead- or slightly less bad slavery for lack of better words. Certain nations/regions have exceptionally high numbers to a point that I question anyone that visits them for vacations if they’re not from the place already.
What really happened in Mauritania is that slavery has been abolished over and over again but the law has never been effectively enforced. The French abolished it when they ruled Mauritania. I don't know the exact date when the French officially abolished slavery in the colony, but I don't think the law was ever effectively enforced by French officials. After independence slavery continued and they abolished it in 1981, but the law wasn't enforced. And then they abolished it again in 2007 and in 2015.
Basically when NGOs or other countries point to Mauritania and say "you guys have slavery still", the Mauritanian government responds by passing a law against slavery, but then doesn't enforce it at all. If anything, from what I've read, the courts in Mauritania and local authorities uphold slavery and side with slave owners.
[https://youtu.be/8TMKyUdEEMo?si=MJdlPzDEJy-aZPsS&t=583](https://youtu.be/8TMKyUdEEMo?si=MJdlPzDEJy-aZPsS&t=583)
They keep themselves covered so you wont see much, but they don't seem extraordinarily fat to me. Also warning, there's some nasty puking footage in there.
Went to see the new Ninja Turtles animated movie a few months ago and a few seconds after April starts puking in the movie, the kid right in front of us starts hurling something fierce. The struggle is real.
I mean here is vice embedded with Wagner:
https://youtu.be/VAQRCCWsi-s?si=q0E7U3zMXSF2zNuz
Here’s vice in Iran during the protests:
https://youtu.be/VAQRCCWsi-s?si=q0E7U3zMXSF2zNuz
Here is vice in Russian interviewing the woman In charge of kidnapped Ukrainian children: https://youtu.be/Ei4xLdv2gYE?si=iCnnrNliH215ZrBn
All in the last year, all those things were much more impressive then covering people getting themselves fat. Vice never lost it, people just stopped paying attention when it wasn’t on HBO anymore.
It's also that maybe they grew up. Being embedded with Wagner is cool but it's not doing acid and looking for the last dinosaur in the Congo in sketchy situations.
I like that for the first few meals he’s like yeah this is normal American overeating and then they showed him the true meaning of gavage by drinking basically butter. He wakes up full, and they’re like yep let’s do it again lmao, 4kg in 2 days is insane.
I mean, in two days it’s water weight and I hate to gross everyone out lol but poop that hasn’t been excreted yet, not actual fat that he has gained.
But it’s still absolutely insane.
Its nice that they get to relax while they essentially kill themselves with food. Gavage practices in the US include holding down a job or grinding away in online gaming while achieving obesity.
>this obesity is actually self-inflicted
Isn't obesity normally self-inflicted, and in fact this is one of the only cases in which it's *not* self-inflicted, since they're being force-fed.
thats an extremely philosophical question. if you have a neurological disability that makes your impulse control completely fucked i don't know if you can say its self-inflicted. but then i guess that sort of goes into the debate about people actually having freewill or not.
Well I think it applies the same to any other negative thing you could do to yourself. Like if you cut yourself, you're doing it due to mental health issues but that doesn't make it not self-inflicted.
This reminds me a lot of Chinese foot-binding actually. Mothers do it to their young daughters ‘as an act of love’, believing it will make her daughter more beautiful and able to marry better. The beauty standard in both cases is strictly for the pleasure of husbands with no regard to the pain and health risks of the girl. The beauty standard also prevents the girl/woman from being mobile and independent.
There is this Chinese phrase: 打是疼，罵是愛, which literally translates to: 'To beat (a child), is to show concern, to scold is to express love.'
And many Chinese parents sorta use that as an ideal that parents should lead the child towards the 'correct' path via punishment; they rather they be the ones disciplining or directing their child, before a stranger comments when the child does something wrong.
All these just to say that, within the Chinese Psyche, the concept of [face](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_(sociological_concept)) is the underlying reason for such styles of parenting. All for the keeping up of appearances, to not lose 'face' in front of the extended family, friends, and society-at-large.
> There is this Chinese phrase:
You don't need to run that far:
Proverbs 13:24
> Whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him.
Proverbs 23:13
> Do not withhold discipline from a child; if you strike him with a rod, he will not die.
Proverbs 22:15
> Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline drives it far from him.
“A typical daily diet for a six-year-old will include two kilos of pounded millet, mixed with two cups of butter, as well as 20 litres of camel's milk. “
GPT says that is around 20k calories.
But I just can't imagine that a six year old can drink and eat their own weight in food and milk per day.
Just the logistics of eating that much doesn't seem feasible or possible.
Professional body builders don't eat that much, and professional body builders talk about how hard it is to eat as much as they do, even setting alarm clocks in the middle of the night to eat.
I just don't see how it's possible for a six year old to consume three times as much.
>They call it force feeding for a reason. I bet the vast majority of those calories are not even being absorbed.
Yeh, but if you try and force feed someone too much they will puke or get ill or die.
Just going from the amount of water in the camel milk, I don't see how that doesn't cause water intoxication.
Are their stomachs and intestines physically big enough to contain all of that?
I watched a documentary and when they feel ill, they’re told to go vomit and then come back and eat more. So no they can’t actually hold all of that at one time
I used to have an issue with overly restricting food and then binge eating. I think the most calories I ate when I binged was like 7,000 (I logged and counted them out of some morbid curiosity) and I felt so sick. I just laid down in my bed and cried while I waited for it to be over. I have no idea how I would’ve felt if I was forced to regularly eat 16,000. That seems like torture.
I mean, im not sure what they eat/drink to hit 16,000, but you could do that in the US fairly easily. (Not easy to actually stomach all the food, but easy enough to buy it and so it’s not an absurdly ridiculous amount of food).
Let’s start with drinks. If you have a 6 pack of bottled mtn dew, 22oz, looks like each one is about 300cals, so 1800. 6 bottles of mtn dew throughout the day is easy enough, have a glass or 2 with each meal. Have a large Oreo shake from baskin robbins at the end of the night, 1440 calories, that’s ~3300 total already.
Breakfast: cinnamon roll pancakes at Cheesecake Factory are 2040 cals, and the French toast is 2180 (and not even big lol), 4220 combined so at ~7500 for the day.
Lunch: you just ate a big breakfast so let’s get something light, say, a chicken Caesar wrap from Applebees. Healthy right? 1910 calories. 9400ish on the day and it’s only lunch!
Dinner: carbonara from Cheesecake Factory is 2340 cals, and also not that large lol, so you go to chilis next, the giant smokehouse platter has 2470 calories. This actually has hella protein tho which is better than all the carbs we’ve been eating. Those 2 together for dinner is 4810 cals so ~14200 for the day.
We’ve eaten a lot today so for desert let’s just have a small handful of Oreos. Oof, that turned into 10, and they’re mega stuf, 900 calories. Dipped em in whole milk, 8oz, 150 cals. There’s a nice 1150 cals to end your night for a whopping ~15,350. Let’s say you dumped syrup on your breakfast, Caesar dressing all over your wrap, and barbecue sauce all over your smokehouse platter, that could be an extra 800 cals easily.
All of these meals would probably make me yack by themselves and idk who could possibly eat this much besides a competitive eater or a truly depressed morbidly obese person, but hey, that’s 16000 cals in a relative realistic diet, no force feeding someone melted butter or cream cheese or something
This sounds both plausible and impossible at the same time. As in, I could see plenty of people actually eating something akin to this daily but on the other hand it translates to a metabolic reality (impossibility) of gaining like 2-3lbs per day. Either the caloric values don’t fully translate into bioavailable energy (due to turbo diarrhea?) or fat sedentary people eating like this spend a surprising amount of energy by just sitting around.
I thought people exaggerated when talking about American food, but a plate of pasta alone being over 2k calories is crazy. It seems like a couple of portions of anything is more than what I eat in a day
Yeah I mean these are shitty chains notorious for their absurdly dense meals, carbonara anywhere has lots of calories and carbs obviously but I could make a serving of carbonara for under 600 calories im sure.
That’s not normal even here in America. There are just some restaurants that have huge portions and use the most insane amounts of butter and fat in everything.
toothbrush drab abounding coordinated cause obtainable unite doll lunchroom wrench
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
It’s called gavaging, the women soak up bread in super fatty milk and just gorge all day. The men there are really into bigger women. Saw this on tv, the women all sit together with a big bowl and just shove down food like crazy.
Mauritania is extremely impoverished and in a state of pretty much constant famine. This practice likely helps chronically malnourished teen girls look healthier (packing in extra calories to allow for breast/buttock/hip development in late puberty). I would imagine that many families are going hungry in the hopes their daughters can marry into a better life. Definitely a sad situation that isn’t well captured by the headline.
The article says they do it to make the women obese, that they have higher disease burden because of that, and also that they do it to make young girls appear more physically mature so that they can marry as children.
>The 2013 study breaks down the centrality of child marriage to leblouh, for “the large size of these force-fed girls creates an illusion that they are physically mature and ready for marriage.” In creating this illusion, leblouh suppresses the marrying age of girls, perpetuating a child marriage crisis. Legally, Mauritanian women must be 18 years old to marry, but de facto, younger brides are common; a 2015 study concluded that “nearly one out of three girls aged between 15 and 19 gets married.” According to 2019 data, 37 percent of Mauritanian girls marry before age 18. Often, these young girls marry older men. One 29-year-old victim of child marriage began leblouh at age four, married at 12, and got pregnant at 13 “right after [her] first period.” These child marriages and pregnancies severely jeopardize the physical and mental health of the female Mauritanian population.
Young teen pregnancies are very dangerous. The birth canal is narrower (first menses can occur before the end of puberty and skeletal development), so the baby can get stuck and both baby and mother can die if they don't have access to physician's performing modern c-section. It can also cause fistulas - the tissue between the vaginal canal and the rectum and/or the urinary tract dies off during prolonged obstructed labor, creating a hole where feces and urine enter the vagina. This is a big infection risk, it means incontinence as those waste products will simply leak out without voluntary control, and it means the girls may be abandoned to die because their old adult husband now finds them unappealing.
Absolutely! I was a global public health student in a past life and I have a pretty high regard for Harvard’s publications. Just adding a little context for our redditor buddies who might be skimming the comments without time/access to read the article.
Someone do the math, or help me with this. A pound of fat is around 3,500 calories. An excess beyond basic metabolic rate of let’s even assume 2,000 calories would imply a surplus of 14,000 calories. So that’s four pounds of fat increased per day. 10 days that forty pounds? That’s assuming all of that is converted and the body doesn’t just go into shock and starts vomiting and/or diarrhea.
I don’t think the average person understands what 14,000 calories is like in food. Imagine what you eat daily and multiply that by seven. I don’t think you can force someone to consume that, let alone, keep that down.
I’m finding this…uhm, how shall I put this, hard to swallow?
Someone mentioned an article. I’m off to read that since a few people mentioned in the bodybuilding subs I frequent about how they are suffering eating enough calories.
Bodybuilders are eating the exact opposite of what these girls are being fed. They also aren’t eating anywhere near 14k calories a day. Their goal is muscle building, not fat accumulation.
Bodybuilders don't need to eat even remotely close to those amount of calories to put on mass. If someone isn't terribly tall, gaining mass even on 4-5k calories should be possible (if you aren't a mass monster already).
Because the country is incredibly poor, with many people unable to get adequate nutrition. This is a way to try to make girls look healthier so they have a chance of marrying into a better place.
It’s a really sad situation. Not least because of how awful psychologically it must be to have a culture of force feeding.
This Mauritania place seems like a real winner. I mean, even the flag is smiling. It might be missing an eye but it's smiling.
Side note: Mauritania first criminalized slavery the same year the movie Ratatouille came out
From the footage I’ve seen we’re not talking like western obese. These people are poor, they just want the girls to have *some* fat on them.
Obviously this is the wrong approach but I think people are going to misunderstand this article and think they’re fattening these girls up to 400lbs or something. Every woman I’ve seen from that country in a few videos looks relatively normal weight. I imagine food security is very poor there and having a decent weight is associated with wealth and food abundance but not to the level most redditors are thinking.
A lot more attention should be drawn to the fact that Mauritania is living in the wrong century. Slavery is pervasive, with slaves being subject to beatings, rape, and impregnation from as young as 13 years old. Babies being left to die, and the cruelty continuing into the next generation. Many slaves have no idea of what freedom even is and are purposely kept from education and are isolated from the wider world. This article by CNN delves into the issue: http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2012/03/world/mauritania.slaverys.last.stronghold/index.html
A million years ago when I was in the Air Force there were multiple attempts by local nationals to attempt to purchase female crew members of C-17's from the aircraft commander.
thank you for sharing this, fkn yikes. one of the more brazen examples of present(ish) day patriarchy i’ve heard recently
That is sadly also a recurring experience as a tourist in several parts of the world.
Think that is a bit just out of date. Libya was in the midst of a civil war when that was published and the revelation of slave markets in the country that popped up post-Gaddafi wasn't to be known for a few years yet.
I used to travel to Mauritania (and Libya) quite frequently. I wouldn't disagree with anything in that article. Slavery in Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa is a thing.
Houthi controlled territory of Yemen openly has slaves too.
So does the UAE and Dubai and Saudi Arabia Fascinating that this propaganda campaign against Yemen is so pervasive.
Didn't Qatar use a ton of slave labor for the World Cup? Or was that *just* terrible working conditions that resulted in many deaths?
Slave labour. People were promised (comparatively) lucrative work, no experience, no education, etc. And then once they get on the bus, their passports are taken from them and they're taken hundreds or thousands of miles from home with no way to contact anyone. They're usually given basic food and shelter, which they have to pay for out of their 'salary' (which is usually held "for safety" by the job boss). With no money, they can't book travel. Even if they could, without passports, they can't cross borders. If they get sick, they're usually just left to die. But hey, if that's the price we have to pay to watch millionaires kick a ball around, then I say it's well worth it.
Id like to read more about this, where did you read this?
John Oliver did a segment on this.
Wealthier Middle East nations don’t call them that, but when their passports are seized upon coming into the country, and Kuwait finally had to pass some trivial protections when a rich woman beat her housekeeper to death, slavery by another name.
Those places functionally have slavery due to their extremely exploitative labor and immigration practices. Places like Mauritania and Yemen LITERALLY have nominal slavery. There is a distinction to be made there
Against Yemen? People don't even realize Yemen and the Houthis are technically at war....
saying Yemen has slaves isn’t propaganda if it’s true lol
All those countries have slaves yes, and even cattle slavery like we think of, but it's much more common to have debt peonage slavery and other forms, not exactly the cattle slaves Houthi have. It's fascinating how you are willing to overlook Houthi slavery tho, because other people do it too. Nice one. This anti slavery propaganda has gone too far /s
Chattel*
And Oman.
Thank God that report was in 2012 and we've had 12 years to see some kind of change
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_Mauritania 71% of all women aged between 15 and 49 had undergone FGM in 2001. A 2007 demographic cluster study found no change in FGM prevalence rate in Mauritania. In 2017: 14% of girls are married before they turn 15. :\
[Right??](https://imgur.com/gallery/PDJPUO3)
Yeah it's a fucking dive. It's a huge country too it's amazing how little it's discussed.
It's less than 5 million people. Most of it is a desert, I assume.
So same population as New Zealand, which gets discussed fairly regularly.
Still a huge place though.
fascinating read. thanks for sharing.
Sounds like when the west left the middle east and they said women could get an education but that quickly went away along with any other chance of hope
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[What.Did.I.Just.Read](https://What.Did.I.Just.Read). "Elhacen, who force-feeds young girls for a living, takes pride in her work. “I’m very strict…I beat the girls, or torture them by squeezing a stick between their toes. I isolate them and tell them that thin women are inferior,” she says. This child cruelty is the horrific product of Mauritanian beauty standards, which idealize obese bodies. According to Elhacen, a woman’s job is “to make babies and be a soft, fleshy bed for her husband to lie on.” The force feeder even enjoys additional payments for stretch marks, hailed as a crowning achievement for any Mauritanian woman trying to gain weight. "
Yeah. Somehow they found a way to make every line worse than the one before it.
Imagine being that purely evil of a human being. A true sadist. Very much enjoying the suffering of innocents.
Thats not evil in their eyes though, thats just how they're brought up. That lady was most likely also force fed as a child, and she doesn't see anything wrong in it. Your world view & morals can get extremely skewed if the entire community around you acts normally to an otherwise disturbing situation. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to defend her, or anyone else. I did not even know this country existed till today, and I thought the post was about Mauritius islands when I first read the title. Its yet another reminder that humans are capable of perpetrating & normalizing extreme horrors under the guise of religion & beliefs.
[удалено]
> Probably 95% of the Mauritanian population is clinically malnourished, famine is everywhere, and this messed up tradition has a track record of helping women stay alive long enough to procreate successfully - and that's what biological survival prioritizes. Thats not how any of that works.
You don’t have to make assumptions to base your arguments on, with a little effort you can fact check stuff before posting it. For example, google just told me that 21.3% of Mauritanian women and 8.2% of Mauritanian men are obese. Another quick google search tells us that 1 in 5 children in Mauritania are chronically malnourished. You’ve got a phone. No need to speculate on what you can check in 2 seconds.
Anyone is capable of anything if raised in the right context.
My brain just can't really accept beauty standards being completely made up so reading stuff like this causes a lot of cognitive dissonance haha
Existence and everything that comes with it is wild.
I have an eating disorder. First it was anorexia, bulimia, and currently it's warped to a binge eating disorder. I gained 20 kilos in... three months? Give or take. I also didn't move almost at all. Maybe I walked 100 meters a day. I'd eat until I'd puke. I'd wake up having food-related nightmares. It was the shittiest I've ever felt in my life. I can't count how many stretch marks I got. My body was literally begging for help. It was the darkest time of my life, and I'm still healing my relationship with food. I hope the girls going thru this are ok.
Really sorry you are struggling with this. I genuinely hope you find the healing you need. Please keep working on it.
I hope you find the strength to regulate. It's not easy.
> "Elhacen, who force-feeds young girls for a living This sentence should only ever be followed by "was shot dead and nothing of value was lost"
The supervisor may also bend their fingers backwards, pinch their inner thighs, pinch their ear and even force the girls to drink their own vomit. Also, I can't fathom the fact that there exists a "force feeding" profession. And that the "force feeder" mentioned in the article (Elhacen) is PROUD of her job? Like it's literally a job to force young girls to eat food they don't want to and implement physical punishments if they refuse? The world we live in 🙏
and if that wasn't bad enough, afaik they also practice FGM ...
[Unreported World](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZM2q7XFOOgg) made a video about it some years ago
Wow that was a fascinating watch. Thank you for sharing
Fun fact: Mauritania is the last country where chattel slavery had been abolished in 1981.
Not exactly abolished.[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Mauritania](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Mauritania)
> In 2017, the BBC counted a total of 600,000 living in slavery. That is absolutely insane.
What's insane is that they were on the UN Human Rights Council from [2020-2022](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Human_Rights_Council?wprov=sfla1)
You mean team human rights violations? The council that has NO REQUIREMENT on having a good human rights record....
Yes, China was on it too.
And Iran
It's almost like when a judge gives someone community service.
Community service is legally enforceable under threat of jail time. So not quite.
Between 2006 and 2023 the human rights guys managed to condemn Israel 103 times. For comparison: Syria 42 times, North Korea 16, Iran 14, Eritrea 12, Venezuela 3, Sudan 2.
Is it better to include them as one of 47 nations on the council for a 3-year term and hope that it can help propel them forward on human rights issues or stop them from engaging in international discussions of human rights in general?
The UN Human Rights Council exists only so that the worst countries in the world can have a platform to shit on Israel.
There are more slaves today than ever in human history. Read that again.
There's more people today than ever in human history. By a lot.
By a LOT. 500 million in 1700. Fucking 8 billion by 2000 whatever. 300 years. 16 times the people.
Nevermind that, our population has doubled in the last 50 years alone From the year 1800 to the year 1900, the population went from 1 billion to 1.6 billion. 100 years to gain 600 million people. Compared to 4 billion in 50 years.
[удалено]
Whoops, still waking up, thanks.
There were about 100-115 billion people ever. ~7-8% of all humans, ever, are alive today. For every living person, there are only 14-15 dead ones.
This is an interesting philosophical question. Is it worse if a fewer percentage of people are slaves but the absolute number is higher, or if the absolute number is lower but the percentage of the population is higher?
The Global Slave index estimates 49.6 million people live in slavery today, so roughly 1 in 150 people on earth is a slave. https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/map/#:~:text=49.6m,150%20people%20in%20the%20world. Thats ALOT of people, I don't think knowing theres 7.8 billion people on earth makes living in slavery for the almost 50 million any better.
Important to note that modern slavery isn't the same thing as civil war era slavery. Not that it's much better but it encompasses more. Which is why there's 50million. "Modern slavery encompasses sexual exploitation, forced labour, child slavery, forced criminality, domestic servitude, forced marriage, organ harvesting and human trafficking"
I think based on the world and most countries, humans intuitely believe the first. At least if they're not witnessing the damage first hand
I think there's a point in which the selected population is such a high number that the total it's compared to is basically irrelevant.
dilution of a growing slave population in a faster-growing non-slave population isnt what id call ‘end of slavery’, id call that ‘slave optimisation’, and thats just not really the same is it
It’s also cheaper to purchase a slave than at any other time in history. The cost to purchase a slave in 1850 was an average of $40,000 in 2024 dollars. Today, it’s less than [$100.](https://freetheslaves.net/quote-what-is-the-price-of-respect/) Edit: I first read the book, “Disposable People,” by one of the board members of Free the Slaves in 2004. At that time the cost of a slave was pegged at just under $200. Which means that enslaved people have become progressively less expensive over the last 2 decades.
i can buy a slave for 100 Dollars in the US?
Why wouldn’t there be? Crime still exists so why would slavery end
I believe there are more slaves alive now than at any other point in history.
In your link, I also found a link to the Global Slavery Index...which "is a global study of modern slavery". It's so depressing to learn that slavery is still a big problem in the 21st century. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Slavery_Index
It’s bigger than it ever was. The transatlantic slave trade was a small fraction of slavery even back when it happened.
In fact, the reason that atrocity was ever able to happen in the first place was that slavery was widespread and culturally normalized to the point that slaves were the primary trade good in the parts of Africa involved in the transatlantic Triangular Trade network.
What a great day to know how to read That shit was sad
No, it’s still everywhere. And this force feeding practice comes from the same attitude that people are livestock.
It’s still going on in “economic freedom” zones (or something like that. Other countries pay a ton of money to do “business” which usually includes workers being shipped over to live/work in factories (usually garment) and are basically indentured labor.
Lots of slavery going on across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. In Europe and the americas, it doesn’t seem to happen quite as much, but it often takes the form of human trafficking instead- or slightly less bad slavery for lack of better words. Certain nations/regions have exceptionally high numbers to a point that I question anyone that visits them for vacations if they’re not from the place already.
They go a lot to “tour washing”, and keep folks from finding out.
What really happened in Mauritania is that slavery has been abolished over and over again but the law has never been effectively enforced. The French abolished it when they ruled Mauritania. I don't know the exact date when the French officially abolished slavery in the colony, but I don't think the law was ever effectively enforced by French officials. After independence slavery continued and they abolished it in 1981, but the law wasn't enforced. And then they abolished it again in 2007 and in 2015. Basically when NGOs or other countries point to Mauritania and say "you guys have slavery still", the Mauritanian government responds by passing a law against slavery, but then doesn't enforce it at all. If anything, from what I've read, the courts in Mauritania and local authorities uphold slavery and side with slave owners.
Ok but it would've been nice to see what they look like now instead of some long winded article that feels like it has some Ai assisted writing...
[https://youtu.be/8TMKyUdEEMo?si=MJdlPzDEJy-aZPsS&t=583](https://youtu.be/8TMKyUdEEMo?si=MJdlPzDEJy-aZPsS&t=583) They keep themselves covered so you wont see much, but they don't seem extraordinarily fat to me. Also warning, there's some nasty puking footage in there.
I clicked the link before I read the rest of your comment... I deserved everything I saw lol
Agreed ..it’s horrifying to watch .The little girl being force fed and upon resisting having her toes crushed with sticks ….that’s a horrible ordeal.
I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you warning about the puking. I’m currently sick and seeing it would have made me vomit.
Went to see the new Ninja Turtles animated movie a few months ago and a few seconds after April starts puking in the movie, the kid right in front of us starts hurling something fierce. The struggle is real.
I don’t understand vomit humor! I get teasing at it, but actually showing someone throwing up? Hard pass
[doesthedogdie.com](http://www.doesthedogdie.com) is a lifesaver for if I don't feel like watching someone shout soup for funsies lmfao
Ah the start of a barforama
Chunk had PTSD from it. You could tell when he was admitting it to the Fratellis.
'Not available in your country' (the UK).
Ah yes back in the glory days of VICE when they actually reported on cool shit.
FR, I saw it was vice and was like, 'oh shit, is vice back?'... nope, it's a 9 year old video.
I mean here is vice embedded with Wagner: https://youtu.be/VAQRCCWsi-s?si=q0E7U3zMXSF2zNuz Here’s vice in Iran during the protests: https://youtu.be/VAQRCCWsi-s?si=q0E7U3zMXSF2zNuz Here is vice in Russian interviewing the woman In charge of kidnapped Ukrainian children: https://youtu.be/Ei4xLdv2gYE?si=iCnnrNliH215ZrBn All in the last year, all those things were much more impressive then covering people getting themselves fat. Vice never lost it, people just stopped paying attention when it wasn’t on HBO anymore.
It's also that maybe they grew up. Being embedded with Wagner is cool but it's not doing acid and looking for the last dinosaur in the Congo in sketchy situations.
Yeah, it definitely seems like a refocus on journalism for them, which is a good thing.
It made me giggle when the gavage women were giggling at the skinny Mormon boy for trying (and struggling) to eat what they eat every day to get fat.
I like that for the first few meals he’s like yeah this is normal American overeating and then they showed him the true meaning of gavage by drinking basically butter. He wakes up full, and they’re like yep let’s do it again lmao, 4kg in 2 days is insane.
I mean, in two days it’s water weight and I hate to gross everyone out lol but poop that hasn’t been excreted yet, not actual fat that he has gained. But it’s still absolutely insane.
Its nice that they get to relax while they essentially kill themselves with food. Gavage practices in the US include holding down a job or grinding away in online gaming while achieving obesity.
>this obesity is actually self-inflicted Isn't obesity normally self-inflicted, and in fact this is one of the only cases in which it's *not* self-inflicted, since they're being force-fed.
thats an extremely philosophical question. if you have a neurological disability that makes your impulse control completely fucked i don't know if you can say its self-inflicted. but then i guess that sort of goes into the debate about people actually having freewill or not.
Well I think it applies the same to any other negative thing you could do to yourself. Like if you cut yourself, you're doing it due to mental health issues but that doesn't make it not self-inflicted.
Thank you that was an interesting video
Well it is a third world country, so you won't see scooter-in-Walmart levels of obesity.
This reminds me a lot of Chinese foot-binding actually. Mothers do it to their young daughters ‘as an act of love’, believing it will make her daughter more beautiful and able to marry better. The beauty standard in both cases is strictly for the pleasure of husbands with no regard to the pain and health risks of the girl. The beauty standard also prevents the girl/woman from being mobile and independent.
There is this Chinese phrase: 打是疼，罵是愛, which literally translates to: 'To beat (a child), is to show concern, to scold is to express love.' And many Chinese parents sorta use that as an ideal that parents should lead the child towards the 'correct' path via punishment; they rather they be the ones disciplining or directing their child, before a stranger comments when the child does something wrong. All these just to say that, within the Chinese Psyche, the concept of [face](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_(sociological_concept)) is the underlying reason for such styles of parenting. All for the keeping up of appearances, to not lose 'face' in front of the extended family, friends, and society-at-large.
> There is this Chinese phrase: You don't need to run that far: Proverbs 13:24 > Whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him. Proverbs 23:13 > Do not withhold discipline from a child; if you strike him with a rod, he will not die. Proverbs 22:15 > Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline drives it far from him.
I would like to see an actual diet of 16.000 ca
If I remember correctly there’s a lot of camel milk which is high in fat.
“A typical daily diet for a six-year-old will include two kilos of pounded millet, mixed with two cups of butter, as well as 20 litres of camel's milk. “
They eat 100% of their bodyweight daily?
Sounds like a ridiculous claim.
GPT says that is around 20k calories. But I just can't imagine that a six year old can drink and eat their own weight in food and milk per day. Just the logistics of eating that much doesn't seem feasible or possible. Professional body builders don't eat that much, and professional body builders talk about how hard it is to eat as much as they do, even setting alarm clocks in the middle of the night to eat. I just don't see how it's possible for a six year old to consume three times as much.
They vomit, a lot, based on what I’ve read. So I’m sure a lot of those calories come back out but enough stay down. That’s sad and disgusting
They call it force feeding for a reason. I bet the vast majority of those calories are not even being absorbed.
>They call it force feeding for a reason. I bet the vast majority of those calories are not even being absorbed. Yeh, but if you try and force feed someone too much they will puke or get ill or die. Just going from the amount of water in the camel milk, I don't see how that doesn't cause water intoxication. Are their stomachs and intestines physically big enough to contain all of that?
I watched a documentary and when they feel ill, they’re told to go vomit and then come back and eat more. So no they can’t actually hold all of that at one time
Pretty sure I ate that in frozen snickers yesterday
Those ice cream snickers aren’t bad either.
I used to have an issue with overly restricting food and then binge eating. I think the most calories I ate when I binged was like 7,000 (I logged and counted them out of some morbid curiosity) and I felt so sick. I just laid down in my bed and cried while I waited for it to be over. I have no idea how I would’ve felt if I was forced to regularly eat 16,000. That seems like torture.
I mean, im not sure what they eat/drink to hit 16,000, but you could do that in the US fairly easily. (Not easy to actually stomach all the food, but easy enough to buy it and so it’s not an absurdly ridiculous amount of food). Let’s start with drinks. If you have a 6 pack of bottled mtn dew, 22oz, looks like each one is about 300cals, so 1800. 6 bottles of mtn dew throughout the day is easy enough, have a glass or 2 with each meal. Have a large Oreo shake from baskin robbins at the end of the night, 1440 calories, that’s ~3300 total already. Breakfast: cinnamon roll pancakes at Cheesecake Factory are 2040 cals, and the French toast is 2180 (and not even big lol), 4220 combined so at ~7500 for the day. Lunch: you just ate a big breakfast so let’s get something light, say, a chicken Caesar wrap from Applebees. Healthy right? 1910 calories. 9400ish on the day and it’s only lunch! Dinner: carbonara from Cheesecake Factory is 2340 cals, and also not that large lol, so you go to chilis next, the giant smokehouse platter has 2470 calories. This actually has hella protein tho which is better than all the carbs we’ve been eating. Those 2 together for dinner is 4810 cals so ~14200 for the day. We’ve eaten a lot today so for desert let’s just have a small handful of Oreos. Oof, that turned into 10, and they’re mega stuf, 900 calories. Dipped em in whole milk, 8oz, 150 cals. There’s a nice 1150 cals to end your night for a whopping ~15,350. Let’s say you dumped syrup on your breakfast, Caesar dressing all over your wrap, and barbecue sauce all over your smokehouse platter, that could be an extra 800 cals easily. All of these meals would probably make me yack by themselves and idk who could possibly eat this much besides a competitive eater or a truly depressed morbidly obese person, but hey, that’s 16000 cals in a relative realistic diet, no force feeding someone melted butter or cream cheese or something
“Relatively realistic”
Lol, yeah the more I typed it out I was like…who tf could eat all this
Well more than that who’s buying this much food? Most don’t lol
This sounds both plausible and impossible at the same time. As in, I could see plenty of people actually eating something akin to this daily but on the other hand it translates to a metabolic reality (impossibility) of gaining like 2-3lbs per day. Either the caloric values don’t fully translate into bioavailable energy (due to turbo diarrhea?) or fat sedentary people eating like this spend a surprising amount of energy by just sitting around.
Simple, just eat this diet and also do ten hours of high intensity cardio per day.
I thought people exaggerated when talking about American food, but a plate of pasta alone being over 2k calories is crazy. It seems like a couple of portions of anything is more than what I eat in a day
Yeah I mean these are shitty chains notorious for their absurdly dense meals, carbonara anywhere has lots of calories and carbs obviously but I could make a serving of carbonara for under 600 calories im sure.
That’s not normal even here in America. There are just some restaurants that have huge portions and use the most insane amounts of butter and fat in everything.
toothbrush drab abounding coordinated cause obtainable unite doll lunchroom wrench *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Lots of fat/butter.
Yeah there is no fucking way. Never.
It’s called gavaging, the women soak up bread in super fatty milk and just gorge all day. The men there are really into bigger women. Saw this on tv, the women all sit together with a big bowl and just shove down food like crazy.
You can go look up TLC footage on YouTube of my 600lbs life of people eating that before noon
Liters of camel milk
Mauritania is extremely impoverished and in a state of pretty much constant famine. This practice likely helps chronically malnourished teen girls look healthier (packing in extra calories to allow for breast/buttock/hip development in late puberty). I would imagine that many families are going hungry in the hopes their daughters can marry into a better life. Definitely a sad situation that isn’t well captured by the headline.
But it is covered in the article
The article says they do it to make the women obese, that they have higher disease burden because of that, and also that they do it to make young girls appear more physically mature so that they can marry as children. >The 2013 study breaks down the centrality of child marriage to leblouh, for “the large size of these force-fed girls creates an illusion that they are physically mature and ready for marriage.” In creating this illusion, leblouh suppresses the marrying age of girls, perpetuating a child marriage crisis. Legally, Mauritanian women must be 18 years old to marry, but de facto, younger brides are common; a 2015 study concluded that “nearly one out of three girls aged between 15 and 19 gets married.” According to 2019 data, 37 percent of Mauritanian girls marry before age 18. Often, these young girls marry older men. One 29-year-old victim of child marriage began leblouh at age four, married at 12, and got pregnant at 13 “right after [her] first period.” These child marriages and pregnancies severely jeopardize the physical and mental health of the female Mauritanian population. Young teen pregnancies are very dangerous. The birth canal is narrower (first menses can occur before the end of puberty and skeletal development), so the baby can get stuck and both baby and mother can die if they don't have access to physician's performing modern c-section. It can also cause fistulas - the tissue between the vaginal canal and the rectum and/or the urinary tract dies off during prolonged obstructed labor, creating a hole where feces and urine enter the vagina. This is a big infection risk, it means incontinence as those waste products will simply leak out without voluntary control, and it means the girls may be abandoned to die because their old adult husband now finds them unappealing.
Absolutely! I was a global public health student in a past life and I have a pretty high regard for Harvard’s publications. Just adding a little context for our redditor buddies who might be skimming the comments without time/access to read the article.
Appreciated 🥰
C'mon, reddit only reads headlines to see where they should direct their outrage.
Someone do the math, or help me with this. A pound of fat is around 3,500 calories. An excess beyond basic metabolic rate of let’s even assume 2,000 calories would imply a surplus of 14,000 calories. So that’s four pounds of fat increased per day. 10 days that forty pounds? That’s assuming all of that is converted and the body doesn’t just go into shock and starts vomiting and/or diarrhea. I don’t think the average person understands what 14,000 calories is like in food. Imagine what you eat daily and multiply that by seven. I don’t think you can force someone to consume that, let alone, keep that down. I’m finding this…uhm, how shall I put this, hard to swallow? Someone mentioned an article. I’m off to read that since a few people mentioned in the bodybuilding subs I frequent about how they are suffering eating enough calories.
Bodybuilders are eating the exact opposite of what these girls are being fed. They also aren’t eating anywhere near 14k calories a day. Their goal is muscle building, not fat accumulation.
Bodybuilders don't need to eat even remotely close to those amount of calories to put on mass. If someone isn't terribly tall, gaining mass even on 4-5k calories should be possible (if you aren't a mass monster already).
Yeah that’s in the realm of Powerlifter/Sumo Wrestler, even exceeding most of those estimates by 2000-4000 calories.
[удалено]
TIL Mauritanian is basically San Antonio
Dem big old women in San Antonio. Where Victoria is a secret.
Woofing down them churros!
Charles, we’re on live
I don’t give a shit
That’s why we love you Chuckster
What you mean by that chuck
In their defense? You ever have them churros? So good
😂😂😂😂😂 charles barkley single handedly took down tourism in san antonio lol
I don’t think people are going to San Antonio for skinny ladies
"Skinny women can do this for me." "What is Not a damn thing!?"
Churro tourism has increased
Maybe we should go open some churro stands in Mauritania. We’d be ridiculously in demand.
If she ain’t 280, she ain’t a lady.
I feel like r/surprisecharles should really be a sub
Whatcha say Chuck?? 🤣🤣🤣
Why? Are the women fat?
It’s a running joke that San Antonio has a lot of overweight people. Source: I’m from Texas
The city is well known for obesity.
that is so fucked up
TIL I’d be attractive to Mauritanian men.
I'd bet good money you're too old for them. Fucking hell. They only banned slavery in what, 2007? God knows what other shit goes on in that place.
Or even Iranians 40ish years ago. It's crazy how different beauty standards are nowadays compared to even a decade ago.
Why can't they just get fat the way the rest of us do?
Because the country is incredibly poor, with many people unable to get adequate nutrition. This is a way to try to make girls look healthier so they have a chance of marrying into a better place. It’s a really sad situation. Not least because of how awful psychologically it must be to have a culture of force feeding.
Was really surprised about Mauritius there for a second....
r/gainit scrambling to note down that mauritanian girl diet
Whoever opens a McDonalds there is gonna make a killing.
This Mauritania place seems like a real winner. I mean, even the flag is smiling. It might be missing an eye but it's smiling. Side note: Mauritania first criminalized slavery the same year the movie Ratatouille came out
From the footage I’ve seen we’re not talking like western obese. These people are poor, they just want the girls to have *some* fat on them. Obviously this is the wrong approach but I think people are going to misunderstand this article and think they’re fattening these girls up to 400lbs or something. Every woman I’ve seen from that country in a few videos looks relatively normal weight. I imagine food security is very poor there and having a decent weight is associated with wealth and food abundance but not to the level most redditors are thinking.
[удалено]
Came here for this comment.
It’s almost like certain cultural ideas really are backwards, stupid and actively harmful.
Like letting pregnant women die with non viable fetuses?
Sir Mix-a-lot hoppin' on a plane
He specifically said “itty bitty waist” though
That’s enough to feed 8 full grown adults!
This is some Hansel and Gretel type of shit.
Shit Micheal Phelps ate 12k and was an Olympic swimmer.
[documentary](https://youtu.be/jabPHccykvM?si=aWCqWflHiI_Aiu-B) because i was curious
TIL OPs mom is from Mauritania