Muslim Women Presenting Themselves on a Dating Sites

An interesting discussion about Burqas in Sociological Images (a blog, which I have already mentioned in each and every post in the short life of this blog...) brought me into wondering, how do young Muslimahs (Muslim women) prefer to present themselves online, especially in online dating sites?

For many in the West, the headscarf (and more than that, full face covering, as in the case of Burqa or Niqab) epitomise the way Muslims look like. However, this is not always the case. Muslims come in all shapes and sizes, and accordingly, while some would think that the Burqini is an ingenious idea, others will abhor the idea of women going to swim in public, mixed sex places and other yet will abhor the idea that this might set a standard for Muslim women to dress while swimming.

Muslim women present themselves online, too, in all "shapes and sizes". I went through the pictures of some 1000 women on the online dating site Muslima.com to examine this. Even if you dismiss few of the pictures or the descriptions as false or as bad jokes planted there by non-Muslims (or critics of Islamism, like this one), most pictures and descriptions seem genuine enough. The women on the site come from all over the world, and in fact, few are not single, but continue their membership after being married, searching "friendship" with fellow Muslims. Each profile includes a variety of answers to questions about personal appearance, personal status, the level of religiosity, occupation, whether the member would want to have children, and similar questions that may be found in dating sites. Few are quintessentially "Muslims-only" questions - which Muslim denomination the member belongs to (Sunni, Shi'ite. etc.), whether they eat Helal only food, whether they pray daily, and for women - whether or not they wear hijab (head/neck scarf) and/or niqab (covering also the face or larger parts of the face). Only a few chose to answer that last question.

However, pictures speak louder than words. The pictures we choose to put on our online profiles say something about us, especially in dating sites, where it is almost a "must" to have a picture. Not having a picture on social networks or dating sites is, in itself, a statement about our personality. What we wear, where we are, how we look - these all are expressions of the image we try to reflect with our online persona. In the case of Muslim women on a dating site, the choice whether or not to upload a certain picture, and how to be dressed in the picture, is a choice of the way one is going to present herself to prospective husbands, as well as to the general public browsing through the site.

Muslima.com :
the two models advertising the site, and one of the featured profiles are veiled;
most profiles aren't

On Muslima.com, a little more than 30% of the thousand photos included some sort of head or face covering, with almost all of those (28% of the pictures altogether) presenting a woman in headscarf only (who wouldn't cover her face). A vast majority of the pictures, 68%, were in fact of women without any head, neck or face covering that would identify them as Muslim women. One or two have in fact uploaded quite "revealing" pictures of themselves (in this site's standards): with tank tops, on a trip.

This seems to be similar, as much as I could see, in other Muslim dating sites. Many women have no head covering and most of those who did, had a headscarf.

One can of course claim that the 1000 photos reveal that the type of Muslim women registering in online dating sites would be also the type of women who would not wear a headscarf.

Obesity and Capitalism

I was sitting in a typical bakery in East Berlin, drooling at all those great looking cakes and pastries. Since I am ridden by guilt by even looking at those things, not mentioning but succumbing to my desires. And I wondered (perhaps in order to put myself off those pastries, which did not work): are there more obese East Germans since 1989?

Obesity is in a way a capitalist disease. We gain weight because we eat fast food that we shouldn't, because we eat less salads and more precooked frozen food. Because we work a lot and have less time. In the former GDR, for example, there were bakeries, of course, and cafes, and confectionaries and even hot dogs stands, but there haven't been so many fast food restaurants, there haven't been so many frozen meals. People ate what they cooked, people took with them a sandwich or an apple, and did not count on the fact that if they're hungry, they can always buy themselves something at the nearest McSomething.

A study done in 2000 revealed my suspicion to be correct: in the years 1985 to 1995, every schoolchild in the former-GDR has gained 2 kilograms in average; and every enlisted young man was 5 kilo heavier. Babies are also heavier and larger (more in German, from the Berliner Zeitung: here)

A study done in 2008 in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt (which is part of the former GDR) has found that in the years between 1990 and 2007, the percentage of obese children and of asthma cases has doubled. Most of the cases are in poorer families. At least one illness is less prevalent since the fall of the Berlin Wall: the cases of bronchitis are reduced from 56,9% to 30,7% (more than half of the communists coughed all the time, and apparently, it wasn't an attempt to encode messages to avoid the Stasi). Saxony-Anhalt was notorious, even in the GDR, as being a polluted state - with the city of Bitterfeld leading the grey lung chart. There is also a huge reduction in smoking in the past 17 years (more in German, from Spiegel in 2008, here)

In the meanwhile, it seems that the poorest German states- the former GDR states - have quickly covered that gap in obesity rates:

Obesity by Bundesland: dark blue in the bottom map: BMI of more than 30 kg/m. Worst states:

• Saxony Anhalt 28,3% (former GDR)
• Brandenburg 26,1% (former GDR)
• Mecklenburg Vorpommerania 25,2% (former GDR)
• Lower Saxony 24,3% (former BRD, the only one in the top-five list)
• Thuringia 23,9% (former GDR)

However, it could be worse - from the 50 US states, only 10 measure as "leaner" than Germany's 5 worse states:

• Colorado 18.5%
• Massachusetts 20.9 %
• Connecticut21.0 %
• Rhode Island 21.5 %
• Washington DC 21.8%
• Utah 22.5%
• Hawaii 22.6 %
• Vermont 22.7%
• California 23.7 %
• New Jersey 22.9%

The "worst" US state, is Mississippi, with 32.8% of the population defined as obese, that is, with BMI higher than 30.

More interesting sociological studies on the social aspects of obesity (not in Germany)
* From the US: Discrimination against the obese (as a way to combat obesity) is on the rise. Because many obese people are also poor, it also raises questions on new forms of exclusion against poor people. And I am also wondering: some people are obese because they have e.g. metabolic problems - are discriminating places going to perfom medical tests on people, to know whether they are obese because they eat junk food or because they have e.g. Cushing's Syndrome?
* From the UK: Obesity is "contagious" , that is - people are more likely to be obese if people around them are.