Butts, silly as they may often seem, are tremendously complex symbols, fraught with significance and nuance, laden with humor and sex, shame and history. Women’s butts have been used as a means to create and reinforce racial hierarchies, as a barometer for the virtues of hard work, and as a measure of sexual desire and availability. Despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that there is little a person can do to dramatically change the way their butt looks without surgical intervention, the shape and size of a woman’s butt has long been a perceived indicator of her very nature — her morality, her femininity, and even her humanity.
Early in Butts: A Backstory, author Heather Radke dismantles the “adaptationism” theories of evolutionary psychology — the notion that perceived sexual markers, like a peacock’s tail or a woman’s rear end, signal reproductive health to prospective mates (which is what I know I had been taught) instead of being merely physical artefacts of some minor modification that happened along the way — and offers instead the idea that, when it comes to women’s butts, the attractiveness and meaning of these incidental mounds of muscle and fat is entirely culturally imposed. In the West, the idea of what attractive backsides look like has varied greatly over the years — from extravagant Victorian bustles to narrow-hipped flappers; from hardened Buns of Steel to bulbous Kardashian belfies — and while these standards have generally been determined by straight, white men, women from all walks of life have endured the incessant evaluation of a body part they can’t even properly see. More social commentary than straight-up science, Radke looks at the cultural meaning of the female butt from many fascinating angles, and with writing that is equal parts informal and journalistic, she presents an eye-opening overview of something I had never given much thought to at all. Engaging and provoking, I’m rounding up to five stars. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Because of the power long held in science, politics, media, and the realms of culture and politics, white people, men, and straight people have always maintained an inordinate amount of influence and control over what meanings are applied to bodies. They have invented and enforced ideas of what is normal and what is deviant, what is “mainstream” and what is marginal. By looking closely at how people in power have constructed those meanings, my hope is that I will make visible something that often feels invisible: the deep historical roots of why women seem to have so many — and so many contradictory — feelings about their butts. I wanted to understand why butts have come to mean so much, when they could very well mean nothing at all.
Throughout, Radke makes the case that there is a pernicious racial dimension to the evaluation of the female butt (and particularly with the belief that Black women have the largest butts — which white men take as an invitation to sexual advances and which white women envy and feel threatened by.) She tells the story of Sarah Baartman — the so-called “Hottentot Venus”, an enslaved South African of the Khoe tribe — whose butt was so tremendous that she was brought to England in 1810, where she was put on display in a nude body stocking for Brits to pinch and poke with their umbrellas. (More egregiously, Baartman’s various body parts were put on permanent display in Paris’ National Museum of Natural History after her death.) Radke draws a line between this “scientific” fascination with large behinds and the eventual fashion for bustles (with the added bonus for white women that they could present this alluring racialised silhouette in public and remove it in private.) This chimes with one of the last stories in the book: After Miley Cyrus infamously “twerked” onstage at the MTV VMAs (a dance, appropriated from the Black community, that goes back to New Orleans’ antebellum Congo Square) Cyrus apparently made twerking a part of her concert tour, strapping on a huge padded butt for her performances (a racialised act, which could then be undone in private.)
In between, Radke covers ‘20s flappers and the eugenicists of the 1940s (who were trying to determine what a “normal” [read: “white”] shape looked like); fashion, “ready to wear” clothing, and drag queens; exercise trends, surgical fixes, and the music industry. As for the last: I was intrigued to learn that Sir Mix-a-Lot didn’t think of “Baby Got Back” as a novelty song; it was meant as a political statement, a push back against the time’s media preference for skinny white women. And while that song and its video might serve more to objectify than extol Black women and their butts (they are presented by and for the male gaze), Nicki Minaj takes ownership of her own body and its meaning by sampling “Baby Got Back” in “Anaconda” (and I would have never considered the cultural importance of either song without this book, and I now feel like I should have been paying attention.)
In so many ways, butts ask us to turn away, to giggle with hot-faced shame and roll our eyes. When I started writing this book, I wondered what would happen if I instead turned my full attention toward the butt, if I investigated its history and asked butt experts and enthusiasts of all stripes — scientists, drag queens, dance instructors, historians, and archivists — serious questions about what butts are and what butts mean. In doing so, I found stories of tragedy, anger, oppression, lust, and joy. And I found that in our bodies, we carry histories.
I don’t know if I was entirely convinced that attraction to the female butt is primarily generated by popular culture (evolutionary psychology is a hard theory for me to shake off based on a couple of quotes), but as an examination of how cultural trends pressure women to conform to shifting, impossible beauty ideals (even the eugenicists couldn’t find a woman to represent the “norm”), and how those pressures are felt differently to women of different (primarily different racial) groups over time, this work is scholarly, wide-ranging, and surprising; exactly the kind of thing I like.
ETA on April 20: Lizzo hosted SNL last weekend and she mentioned her TED Talk on twerking and what she has to say (about the cultural roots of twerking and the appropriation of Black culture and Black women's bodies) dovetails perfectly with this material.
