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I read somewhere else that that's why they do this, because in a place with extreme poverty and where everyone has the red eye thing that you always see, having white eyes and white teeth is a much more often thought about standard.
Spot on:
Wodaabe beauty standards highly value bright eyes and gleaming white teeth. While dancing, the men constantly roll their eyes, widen their gaze, and bare their teeth to emphasize these features. Some dancers will even hold one eye perfectly still while rolling the other to show irresistible skill.
Yup, beauty standards for men there are tallness, white teeth, and white eyes. This dance they’re doing, which is judged by the ladies in the tribe (and I believe a “winner” is chosen? Not 100% sure on that part) is something that shows off all 3 attributes
It's actually a way for the women in society pick the man that they would like to marry there's not one winner but instead women pick the man that they want to win using this dances as a way to judge the mens value m
Idk about this tribe in particular, but yeah calling tribespeople impoverished that live traditionally is really not telling the whole story. Usually when a tribe is integrated into modern society, it's extremely harmful to the actual people. Their health and wellbeing suffer in almost every metric despite having access to modern amenities and luxuries, and technically being less "impoverished".
Who would have guessed that having your traditions, identity, and very way of life stripped away would lead to negative outcomes? They may not have internet, modern foods, or plumbing but that doesn't mean they are necessarilly worse off.
Reminds me of the land of fire, where the bottom tip of Argentina is today. Instead of thick clothing to keep themselves warm, they covered themselves in whale blubber and carried a personal fire with them at all times. Their boats were set up with hearths. Missionaries and colonizers taught them Christianity and put them in fabric clothing. The fabric clothing actually was really bad for them because it absorbs moisture and you can't stay warm when you're that damp. The whale blubber with no clothes was actually better for them than modern clothing. Oh and ofc we gave them smallpox too.
Argentina has almost 0% natives left, they did their best to completely eradicate the natives AND the black people who were brought in as slaves. The country is almost entirely European, and consider themselves The Europe of South America.
Yep...and don't forget it's also "very European" due to the cowardly Nazis they eagerly allowed to seek refuge there when the rest of the world wanted their bigot heads on spires.
I'm diabetic and have been on a keto diet for over a decade. When I was first researching the diet, there were a lot of studies being pushed showing remote tribes without agriculture have better teeth from the lack of sugar. The Massai and the !Kung people eat mostly keto and had much better dental health than people in wealthy western countries. I have not looked up any of this shit in over a decade, so no idea if this has been disproved. Another big thing when I was looking this stuff up was how bad seed oils are, and recent studies have shown this to be not true.
One detail I remember from a documentary on the Tudor era is how they compared the skull of a peasant (whose diet did not include the then novel and therefore expensive white sugar) and that of a wealthier person (who would eat plenty of sugar as a status symbol and of course had no access to modern-day dental hygiene tools and concepts).
The peasant’s teeth were in very good condition all things considered, while the other’s teeth were beyond fucked.
What really stuck with me was them going through a document and seeing one guy’s cause of death listed simply as “teeth”. No other descriptor included.
What’s weird is that Tudor noble society even started blacking their teeth out if they couldn’t afford sugar. It was considered a sign of wealth to have rotting teeth! Kind of a beauty trend
Dentist here. You need carbohydrates (especially refined ones) or acids for decay. Tribal societies and preindustrial societies tend to have a lot fewer refined carbohydrates. Ketogenic diets are another way to limit carbohydrates.
They do tend to have much higher incidence of gum disease (as do diabetics but for different reasons).
"recent studies have shown this not to be true"
there was never any evidence that seed oils were bad for you in the first place. It's not a "recent study" think, it's just an "ignoring fads" thing. At least with low carbohydrate diets the benefits for dental health are obvious, where bacteria feed on sugar and you're not giving it to them.
Good posture (no phone/computer), hard food (fiber + tear appart meat) and proper way to rest their tongue and swallow. And probably color contrast with their skin too.
All the conveniency of the civilised world is fighting against us and our animalistic nature. We stopped moving, we look for health in a bottle, we are removing things from food. Then we drop dead and be surprised
The Guérewol (var. Guerewol, Gerewol) is an annual courtship ritual competition among the Wodaabe Fula people of Niger. Young men dressed in elaborate ornamentation and made up in traditional face painting gather in lines to dance and sing, vying for the attentions of marriageable young women. The Guérewol occurs each year as the traditionally nomadic Wodaabe cattle herders gather at the southern edge of the Sahara before dispersing south on their dry season pastures.
The most famous gathering point is In-Gall in northwest Niger, where a large festival, market and series of clan meetings take place for both the Wodaabe and the pastoral Tuareg people. The actual dance event is called the Yaake, while other less famous elements—bartering over dowry, competitions or camel races among suitors—make up the week-long Guérewol.[1] The Guérewol is found wherever Wodaabe gather: from Niamey, to other places the Wodaabe travel in their transhumance cycle, as far afield as northern Cameroon and Nigeria.
Annual gathering
At the end of the rainy season in September, the Wodaabe travel to In-Gall to gather salt and participate at the Cure Salée festival, a meeting of several nomadic groups. Here the young Wodaabe men, with elaborate make-up, feathers and other adornments, perform dances and songs to impress women. The male beauty ideal of the Wodaabe stresses tallness, white eyes and teeth; the men will often roll their eyes and show their teeth to emphasize these characteristics. The Wodaabe clans will then join for their week-long Guérewol celebration, a contest where the young men's beauty is judged by young women.
Music and dance
The music and line dancing is typical of Fula traditions, which have largely disappeared among the vast diaspora of Fula people, many of whom are educated, Muslim, urbanites. This is characterized by group singing, accompanied by clapping, stomping and bells. The Wodaabe Guérewol festival is one of the more famous examples of this style of repeating, hypnotic, and percussive choral traditions, accompanied by swaying line dancing, where the men interlink arms and rise and fall on their toes.
The Guérewol competitions involve the ornamented young men dancing the Yaake in a line, facing a young marriageable woman, sometimes repeatedly over a seven-day period, and for hours on end in the desert sun. Suitors come to the encampment of the woman to prove their interest, stamina, and attractiveness. The participants often drink a fermented bark concoction to enable them to dance for long periods, which reputedly has a hallucinogenic effect.
Ok the dancing and stamina parts make it make more sense. I was thinking the woman was attracted to whoever could clack their teeth the loudest and was wondering how that would be the thing they’re attracted to.
lol "recording" I never thought of using that term for parrots, I don't have a parrot so I don't think of them that much, but that funny if or that parrot people use that term.
Hmm... I think those are actually Aquamarine Lorikeets that are incredibly rare, living on a Polynesian Island - as far from Norway as possible. But certain individuals have been known to sleep on their backs and get terribly homesick for the Norwegian fjords if you take them out of their native habitat and cage them in small cages and keep them in cramped British homes. They then fly away and join the choir in Brigadoon. Beautiful voices!
As a woman I agree. I’ve never been attracted to beefy muscly body builder types, with necks so huge they can’t turn them normally. I’ve always been attracted to long-lean swimmers-divers bodies.
She was a participant playing Bruno Mars in the same competition, so she was blown away not only by his performance, but also by how soundly he defeated her. I genuinely think LipSynch battles struggled to maintain itself because Tom Holland raised the standards so high no one else coming after could match it, lol.
Playing cyber punk and the straight romance option when you’re playing as a woman is river, and I thought. Why couldn’t they give women a sexy romance npc like they gave men? All the female romanceable npcs are considered very sexy by the male player base. But the women got…river. Nice guy but the overly muscle man thing is just not it in terms of sexiness to most women.
So it got me thinking, the whole game is pretty much built around the male gaze. So this is what men think women want, and that’s just not it. Of course some women do find it attractive, but most in my experience aren’t attracted to men who look like they can’t wipe their own ass.
I think you’re exactly right about your theory, and it applies to so many more productions than Cyberpunk. lol like it’s actually offensive. So glad you pointed this out bc you put into words what I’ve been struggling to say for a very long time. Bless
To be fair, the people of Wodaabe might be curious to study you and your courtship ritual of paying for dinner on a first date.
Most humans follow societal norms because we know intrinsically that being an outcast is dangerous. This even goes for something like finding a mate/dating, so there's a real possibility that some of the Wodaabe men find their ritual stupid or embarrassing, but go along with it because the alternative is to be ostracized or left without a partner.
I only say this because I was born antisocial and it took a lot of years of imitation combined with trial and error to figure out how to blend into society. Deep down, I still question a lot of what humans do and find most of it weird or disgusting.
I absolutely love this kind of stuff! Anything to do with how different cultures evolve is infinitely interesting to me, especially how it shapes behavior and values. Our environments change so much about how we think and go about the world. I could talk about it forever.
I can actually see that work. A confident partner that makes you laugh is just amazing. I love that my husband dares to dance in public (not so common anymore in the Western world!) and that he jokes around.
These facial expressions are so crazy to us that it may be a turn-off but if you are used to the practice, it's a great way for them to showcase their humor.
It's interesting! Very strange to my unitiated eyes, of course, but I can see the appeal in the "look." They're awfully pretty like that...and I love a pretty man.
I'm not sure what the appeal of the vocalization is, precisely, but it certainly draws the attention! It's odd, but not obnoxious or anything. It was almost like...birdsong.
Apparently the ideal male form to be tall and have white teeth, white eyes. And this is emphasised with fancy and original makeup and costume. They are then judged by the unmarried women present at the festival... that goes on for like a week. And they perform and dance from sunrise to sunset.
Basically it's a courtship of "I am healthy person and I'm very creative, and I can afford fancy make up and ornaments".
When you set it to that context it is way less weird.
Like being able to be tall, and have white teeth and eyes, in a very arid environment is rather demanding tbh.
Man that first dude is really goin for it. 😂 This is really amazing, like evert part. I love the outfits and all the decorations, it's cute they have their muscle shirts on underneath it. You can find other performances, I think they might have themes? The one I found didn't have the hats but featured a lot of feathers.
They're Also really interesting people phenotypically, like with their combination of features, very tall and slim. Beautiful people really.
Edit: so was others have said white eyes and teeth are the standards of beauty in the culture, sounds like a good orthodontist could do gangbusters there.
I agree. I find their faces have very elegant features, combined with high foreheads. I guess this makes them look androgynous. Very handsome group, if you ask me.
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