Molly and Dollop: Conversations with the Master

Don't You Wish Your Girlfriend Was Fat Like Me?

MOLLY:

I am travelling to Mauritania and I hear that a girl must be fat to fit in.  Do you think I need to go to fat camp?

DOLLOP:

I agree that you are at a disadvantage.  Here in America, you only have regular supersized fast food to fatten you up, whereas in Mauritania they have cows that can provide rich creamy milk – up to 5 gallons a day.   To speed up the fattening process in modern times, they discovered steroid hormones which can cause rapid weight gain. Also, women will take drugs that make them lethargic so they won’t burn calories.  In this country, of course, no one would take steroids because they might give you whiskers and hair on your chest.  I think.

A “Mauritanian make-over” can take 40 days.  The goal is to get up to more than 300 pounds or a BMI of at least 40.  You want to look ready for a wheel barrow.  The symbol for success is a “golden goose” plaque on the front door, bringing honor to the family.  It is no joke filling out a billowing sheet called a mulafas.  Men really love the look of “the blob.”  They don’t want to marry a girl who still needs to be fed 10,000 calories a day because who knows, she may not be motivated and need a trainer and so on.  Also, you know that if a girl resisted having her feet squeezed, her ears pulled, pinching on her inner thigh (out of sight), and bending her fingers backward, she is probably willful anyway.  Who needs that in a bride?

The current success rate for “looking good” is only one in five, unfortunately.  The younger generation – you can expect this from rebellious teenagers – is secretly doing isometric exercises under their flowing robes, or sneaking out to run in place in the back of the garden.  A few ragged teen magazines left by American tourists taught them the techniques of bulimia and anoxeria.

However, thanks to a national pride movement, news of Mauritania has reached the world.  The Mauritanians have introduced an exchange program with America.  They will send their daughters to America for at least 40 days to live with a middle-class family and enjoy fried chicken, pizza, donuts, French fries, jumbo sodas, and double-hamburgers with cheese, bacon, and mayo.  This will be cheaper than giving the girls all the camel’s milk to drink.  Plus, the program guarantees results.

In exchange, Mauritania welcomes fat American girls as tourists to Mauritania, where the girls can parade the beach with pride (as long as they wear a mulafa).  Guys will hit on them, lust for them, and offer to “play” at carting them around in a wheelbarrow.  They will call them “my little goose,” and teach them the French word “gavage” for gorging and force-feeding.  They will help them climb up stairs and get onto camels, gleefully pushing their palms on scrumptious bottoms, thighs, and gigantic arms.  This is sure to be a relief from being surrounded by fitness freaks in America who wear skimpy shorts and eat salad with dressing on the side. And insults from dating services who want to know your size.  Plus there is the temptation and indulgence of binging on a couple of gallons of camel’s milk.

Mauritania is one country that has managed to reduce the longevity gap between women and men.  A short life in the name of beauty – corpulent and sexy – is worth it.   

Read My Niqab

MOLLY:

The British are saying that a Muslim woman wearing a full veil cannot teach little children.  Why is that?

DOLLOP:

Little children in the West have grown up thinking that a big black covered face is Darth Vader.  Although Ms. Azmi said, “I am not an alien,” the children secretly suspected it.

The little children whom she was teaching were learning English as a second language, which means they were immigrants, learning how to get along in British tea shops, the playground, buses, and eventually job placement centers.  Strangely, they were holding their hands up in front of their faces and mumbling because they thought a disembodied voice was the way you speak English.  Plus, the deaf children kept trying to read the blinks of eyes and seemed to have gained a very limited vocabulary.  British people noticed that the children tended to stare at their faces, totally bewildered by the novel association of expressions and emotion with English words.

Ms. Azmi said she would reveal her face in front of children and other females, but the British were not willing to throw all the men off the school grounds.  Nor post Purity Guards throughout the school, holding back men who are fighting to get jobs as school teachers.

There are possible compromises.  She could carry around a computer with the animation of a real human face – an Avatar.  It would be androgynous of course, or, it could use the face of a man such as Arnold Schwarzenegger.  “Hasta la vista, baby.”  Or, she could use a paper face like a fan, but the lack of lip movement is a problem. There are many kinds of American Halloween masks, many of which leave the lips free for chunking candy, or teaching ESL.  Another idea: she could teach courses online, using the face of Madonna or the Queen.

Let’s remember that Orthodox Jewish women, who must cover their real hair, have learned to do that by wearing very attractive long blond wigs.  We are talking about a surrogate face here.

Ms. Azmi said she was extremely humiliated by the ruling and went home where she could show her face without shame.

The Feet of a Concubine

MOLLY:

Do you think I am too young to start binding my feet? I just got some Lotus Shoes and I am about to outgrow them.

DOLLOP:

Molly, there will be other shoes in your future that are designed to make your feet look very small. The shoes will probably be longer than 3 inches, but they will be so pointy that your toes will be deformed in no time. In fact, in the modern aesthetic, a 3-inch HEEL has replaced the desired length, so the “rule of 3” is still in effect. This will cause you to balance on the balls of your feet, as if on tippy-toes, and not only corrupt your feet but cause some pelvic and spinal curvature, an added bonus.

The 3-inch foot in tiny Lotus shoes was a status symbol for Chinese women until the 20th Century. The practice took hold in the Tang Dynasty (618-907) when one of the Emperor’s 999 concubines said: “Hey, big guy, my feet are smaller than * hers. *” This play for attention did not work because the 998 others took up binding their feet, rapido prestissimo.

Women with 3-inch feet were high class because they could not do much, for example, work. They could not get up without help, stand up straight, or even support themselves. They had trouble squatting, which an ancient Chinese person needed to do several times a day. They had to be carried around. They looked down on those with * normal feet.* The only job they could do, of course, was to sit around and look pretty, in case the Emperor found his way to their bed, getting past 998 other competing beauties.

Mean people have pointed out that those with bound feet could also not * run away. * I should mention that all concubines were not extremely happy. Our very own Mormon men, who had a rule about not having more than 999 wives or concubines, also had to grant bunches of divorces. You can imagine what this does to our divorce statistics when a man has 55 wives and 10 want to divorce him. Of course, the Mormons avoided some divorces by having wives who are “sealed” to the man after death. These deceased “wives” can never divorce him or run away whether they have bound feet or not. Unless they do that in heaven, which might be possible if you are Mormon. Maybe they should have tried some kind of posthumous binding.

The number “9” is lucky for Chinese and Mormon men.

I don’t imagine the Tang concubines and others were seen skipping in the courtyard, hip-hop dancing, or jogging on the Great Wall. Maybe they had special secret prosthetic feet, like little skis, they could wear when they really wanted to move around, for example to make it easier to do some squatting.

They might have passed the time discussing who was a “real wife” and who was a “concubine.” The wife had higher status. On the other hand, a concubine could be a later precious acquisition of the Emperor. “Last in, first noticed,” hey?

Concubines are really like wives in that they “cohabit” with the extended family. It is sort of like the “live-in” and the “live-out” nanny. In America, there are a lot of people cohabiting but we do not call them concubines. Yet. I am sure there are people in America who would like to do more than bind the feet of a few “live-out” concubines.

The practice of binding feet was banned in China as late as 1911. Apparently, banning something so much fun and precious is hard. Like banning polygamy. A study of women in Beijing in 1997 found that 38 percent of the women in their 80’s and 18 percent in their 70’s had bound-foot deformities. You don’t see them on the street much, obviously, because who has time to carry granny around? As late as 1991, the Zhiqiang Shoe Factory stopped making Lotus Shoes, although they sold about 2000 pairs a year for a few years after that.

Remember the rule of “3:” starting at age 3, keep those toes tucked for the 3-inch Lotus Shoe. If you miss crunch time, go for pointy stilettos. Hope for the joys of the 999th concubine.

The Race to Obesity, and Skinny Models

MOLLY:

Dollop, I read that they are going to ban models who are too skinny.  What is too skinny?

DOLLOP:

Skinny is size 0.  What is behind the attempt to push skinny girls off the fashion runways is America’s Race to Obesity.  This is not a well-known movement.  There are people who have a lot invested in futures of the oil market.  That is, Corn Oil.  And sugar, salt, and Crispy Crème donuts.   They have infiltrated the government.  You will see that school lunches were designed to plant those hungry little fat cells in the bodies of little children so that when they are faced with a choice between a donut and some baby spinach, you know what they’ll scarf.

How do you think E coli bacteria got into spinach?  Spinach was getting too popular.  People were eating spinach every day.  They started to crave cute little baby spinach, pre-washed, in fun arrangements with baby carrots and snow peas.  The DIP Industry really thrived by producing flowery exotic pink dressings in beautiful bottles that you could dab on your baby spinach.  How did the Race to Obesity foil that?  They put “caca” in it.  (Not the same as George Allen’s “macaca” but we’ll never know for sure…)   There is no faster way to put off fastidious Princesses than to tell them they are eating shit.

Now they’ll have to go back to potato chips.  You need dips with those too, so the DIP Industry happy.  They are adding sour cream to improve the flavor combo.

Many of our other industries, in happy capitalist America, are secretly (what do we know?) supportive of the Race to Obesity.    People need bigger clothes.  They tend to start with “skinny” clothes and then graduate to “fat” clothes, and keep buying the “skinny” clothes dreaming of their tinier selves.  This requires more cloth and bigger closets.  Big chairs and sofas.  Cars.  People buy more food, eat lots.   Medical services have TONS more work.  They built extra-wide wheel chairs and stretchers, and stopped making everybody wear a little wash cloth on their private parts for modesty.  They are making bigger paper robes.  America has always been known for Expansion.

The personal training industry is shifting to new seminar programs, for example, “Fat: What’s Wrong With It?”  or, “Big and Beautiful, Got a Problem With That?,”  and “Re-building Your Life Around Fat.”   My personal favorite is “Love Me, Love My Super Size.”  (I would like a seminar on feathers, too.)

The fashion industry was trending toward super skinny because they would really rather have walking robot-manikins, but nobody’s invented good ones yet.  They already trained the girls and boys to stop smiling so that they don’t distract from the clothes.   You get people to sit up and pay attention when the model looks like she is going to faint and maybe die any minute.  Then there is the magic of watching self-starvation.

Well, all this was making the majority of America look bad.  We don’t want the collective esteem to suffer.  People are flopped on their over-size couches watching over-size TV screens, eating over-size portions of buffalo wings and giant Ho-Hoes brought home in industrial cartons from Costco.  The last thing they want to see is a skinny, gorgeous girl flipping her hair and nearly dancing when she walks.  The word got out.

The Godmother of the Race to Obesity, who had already killed off baby spinach, was now going to see that these skinny girls end up in unemployment lines, eating cheap fast food.  In fact, some mean fatties were seeking them out when they were in line, and giving them free milkshakes with the legend “Just Say No To Lettuce and Diet Soda!”  When the skinnies went for job interviews, the interviewer would test their ability to be “team players” by offering them giant chocolate chip cookies in front of all of the (fat) employed people.  They would hold open houses for skinny ex-models and serve chocolate cake with double whipped frosting and caramel frappacinos.

TV stations introduced new shows.  Instead of “The Biggest Loser” they showed “Stuffing for America,” a secret fund-raiser for the Race.   There are new physical training videos that show, for example, how to put your shoes on when you can’t reach your feet, how to get your arms into the sleeves of a shirt when you cannot reach behind you, how to get up out of bed by rolling to the edge, and how to avoid breaking furniture.   There is a service that will train monkeys and dogs to help the Fat navigate everyday motion. There is a reality show “Swap Diets” between fatties and skinnies, and everybody cries a LOT. 

The industry knows that setting a clothing size standard won’t work.  Remember that “size 8” is the old size 12, and who helped that along??   They talked about using the body mass index, with 18 as the allowable thin.  But most models are between 14 and 18.  Their union proposed 14.9987654321.  But Godmother a.k.a. BIG Momma, nixed it.  She was thinking 35. 

In fact, BIG Momma personally issued a new fashion line that she claimed was “refreshing, new, original” and “a knockout” but a few people have figured out that it is derivative of two major, little appreciated  designers that are very popular in some parts of the world, the unrecognized teams who gave us the Hawaiian muumuu and the Muslim burka.  It just isn’t fair.  She is, however, having trouble finding fat models who can walk all the way down the runway without crying.

As I was saying to Trollop and Chickie, “it’s the oil, stupid.”

Bjork Burqa Burka

MOLLY:

There are people in the mall wearing black sheets, and it isn’t even Halloween.  Don’t people wear white sheets on Halloween?  Somebody said they were ladies, under the sheets.  How did they know?

DOLLOP:

Well Muslims invented a black robe called the burqa to save the men from their urges.  Muslim men get urges when they smell alcohol, perfume, food, oil, or gold.  And especially when they see the skin of a woman.  The kind-hearted women decided to help with the urges so they created a little tent, and they wear the tent when they go out.

As luck would have it, Americans thought it might be fun to try controlling a few urges too.  Also, Americans like to express empathy and understanding for the peoples of the world, and so they adopt their national costumes, occasionally.  That is why you see white guys wearing bling, and people wearing African kinta cloth.  It is an expression of kinship.

Now the Muslim burqa took off like an iPod in America.  Everyone had to have one.  They now come in every color.  You have people with bad hair wearing them.  “Clothing optional” people who need to run to the drug store for more sun screen can throw one on.  Impeached Presidents can mingle with the crowd and get to know the inside of a grocery store.  People in need of liposuction can, instead of wearing low pants with their fat mid-drift or their fat love handles hanging out, can keep eating French fries in public without concern.  Parents of teenage boys who never wash and have anti-social facial expressions can insist that junior “cover up” completely, to make him tolerable in the presence of friends and neighbors.  You can’t even tell that the boys have raging hormones.

Charities are passing them out to homeless people so they can “cover up” and save the cost of clean clothes.  People with low self esteem, or who feel that the color of their skin will get them into trouble, will throw one on to spare themselves the scrutiny and scorn of society.  In fact, African American men who are vulnerable to getting pulled over for “driving while black” are resorting to wearing sheets especially with floral patterns on white when they drive, to foil our vigilant police.  Studies are showing that this practice is significantly improving their ability to travel in their cars without harassment.

Needless to say, illegal immigrants and terrorists are all pretending to be Muslim women.  It does make it hard to work on construction sites, because the long robes get caught on nails and can make you trip.  Or, heavy construction equipment will come by and catch on a robe, and pull the person under huge tractor wheels.  You’ll see people wearing a burqa pushing lawn mowers and running weed whackers trying to keep a good distance from their robes.

Our nation’s judges, who have been wearing black robes for a long time, have taken to adding a little hood, so they can enjoy the anonymity of the burqa too.  Besides, they can pretend to be Darth Vader while they do judging, and that has made their jobs much more fun.  Some cities have banned the use of a black metal face plate as an accessory, especially in divorce court, where feelings are very hurt already.

In fact, the Chinese, South Americans, Philipino – oh heck, any poor country – are worried about this trend because our need for fitted clothes is drastically reduced.  The sweat shops are in a panic because instead of cutting and sewing cloth into sixteen different sizes, you just take the cloth and cut a few times, and then put eye-holes in one spot.  Many people in India already just wear a piece of cloth, but they really don’t put the whole thing over their head unless they are sleeping in the street.  Of course the sweat shops are finding that the skills needed for making these loose tents are lower than before, which allows them to hire younger children, at least after they have learned to manipulate scissors.

They have had to learn the various options for a good burqa.  For example, buttery soft, closed or not closed, an internal headband to keep it in place, velcro versus button versus zipper closures, serious coverage versus not-so-serious coverage.

A fashion preference for mauve ice and peach colors was particularly perplexing after the American rage for neon apple green and shocking pink.  There is of course “Saudi black” as an option – the one preferred by our judges and lawyers, and of course people engaged in torture.  “Sinister blue” is also popular with people who normally like uniforms.

The “ultimate burqa” is a Saudi style triple layer for extra confinementImeanprivacy.  It is possible to wear a little flap over the eyes both to keep out prying eyes and to surprise your colleagues at work when you flip it open for dramatic effect in the middle of a presentation.  Alternatively, you can cover your chin with a half-face niqab, and use that to hide the donuts you are eating through the presentation, and then mop the crumbs.   Some burqa cloth has the quality of “breathable” but this is not a good thing when tenting the homeless or hygenically-challenged.

Which reminds me – airports are letting you rent a burqa so you can snooze in the waiting rooms.  A “walking tent” provides a lot of privacy, so you can change into your pajamas if you want.  They do have a rule about sharing – only one per person.  That isn’t to say that some of our teenagers haven’t found a way to “zip them together” for a few minutes.

Speaking of teenagers they are particularly obnoxious by using the burqa to go to school naked.  They defy their teachers to guess if they are wearing – not only underwear, but anything at all.  This was discovered when a boy accidentally tripped in the halls of school and bruised parts of himself that we don’t like to think about.   Of course, changing clothes for football practice is greatly simplified.

In the workplace, they have had to make policies about allowing them.  People started coming to work wearing, for example, a plaid sheet, or one with action figures on it, and sit at their desks and pretend they are not there.  I know one business has required that they wear a name tag with a red or green light on it, showing whether they are available for conversation.  It does offer a solution to the business wardrobe.  You can have burqas for casual Fridays too; they are sheets that need washing or they are the actual sheets you slept in the night before, hence the word “casual.”

So, Molly, don’t assume the wearers are only ladies. 

I show you the difference between Burqa attire, and the usual attire of women in the West: