"seem to be brought up for no other purpose than that of
ministering to the sensual pleasures of their imperious
masters. Voluptuousness is therefore considered as their
chief accomplishment.... The Moors have singular ideas of
feminine perfection. The gracefulness of figure and motion,
and a countenance enlivened by expression, are by no means
essential points in their standard: With them _corpulence
and beauty seem to be terms nearly synonymous_: A woman of
even moderate pretensions must be one who cannot walk
without a slave under each arm, to support her; and a
perfect beauty is a load for a camel.... Many of the young
girls are compelled, by their mothers, to devour a great
quantity of kouskous, and drink a large bowl of camel's milk
every morning.... I have seen a poor girl sit crying, with
the bowl at her lips, for more than an hour; and her mother,
with a stick in her hand watching her all the while, and
using the stick without mercy, whenever she observed that
her daughter was not swallowing."
A Somali love-song says: "You are beautiful and your limbs are fat;
but if you would drink camel's milk you would be still more
beautiful." Nubian girls are especially fattened for their marriage by
rubbing grease over them and stuffing them with polenta and goat milk.
When the process is completed they are poetically likened to a
hippopotamus. In Egypt and India, where the climate naturally tends to
make women thin, the fat ones are, as in Australia, the ideals of
beauty, as their poets would make plain to us if it were not known
otherwise. A Sanscrit poet declares proudly that his beloved is so
borne down by the weight of her thighs and breasts that she cannot
walk fast; and in the songs of Halâ there are numerous "sentiments"
like that. The Arabian poet Amru declares rapturously that his
favorite beauty has thighs so delightfully exuberant that she can
scarcely enter the tent door. Another Arabian poet apostrophizes "the
maid of Okaib, who has haunches like sand-hills, whence her body rises
like a palm-tree." And regarding the references to personal appearance
in the writings of the ancient Hebrews, Rossbach remarks:
"In all these descriptions human beauty is recognized in the
luxurious fulness of parts, not in their harmony and
proportion. Spiritual expression in the sensual form is not
adverted to" (238).
Thus, from the Australian and the Indian to the Hebrew, the Arab, and
the Hindoo, what pleases the men in women is not their beauty, but
their voluptuous rotundity; they care only for those sensual aspects
which emphasize the difference between the sexes. The object of the
modern wasp waist (in the minds of the class of females who, strange
to say, are allowed by respectable women to set the fashion for them)
is to grossly exaggerate the bust and the hips, and it is for the same
reason that barbarian and Oriental girls are fattened for the marriage
market. The appeal is to the appetite, not to the esthetic sense.