Bottoms up!
Pippa-gate couldn’t happen now
I’m about to ask you a question – and I already know you’re going to lie when you answer. Ready? Here goes: what is your defining memory of Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding day? Which image flashes up first in your mind? Which one, standout, talk of the day (week/month!) moment? That one darling, grumpy flower girl, frowning on the balcony, you say? How handsome Wills looked, in his red uniform and blue sash? Kate’s exceptional hair, the sweetness of her smile; how thrillingly and dramatically the couple sped away from the Palace at the end of the day, in a dark blue Aston Martin, rear number plate: JU5T WED?
Utter codswallop. Your defining memory of Kate and Wills’ wedding day is my defining memory of Kate and Wills’ wedding day and, I’d wager, pretty much the defining memory of everyone on the planet. And it is of Pippa Middleton’s bottom.
As Pippa – sister of the bride and chief bridesmaid – performed her duties, walking slowly behind Kate up the aisle of Westminster Abbey, holding the bridal train aloft, an estimated global TV audience of two-billion could not help but notice she was in possession of a rather exceptional backside. It was encased, along with the rest of her, in a white Sarah Burton-designed Alexander Mcqueen dress, the cut on which – shape-skimming, side-darted, enhanced with a back-line of spinecaressing covered buttons – could well have been custom-designed to draw attention to the formerly unrecognised glory of Pippa’s bottom.
When Kate reached the far end of the aisle, and Pippa crouched down to rearrange her sister’s train, the watching public, having attempted to maintain a hint of decorum, gave up pretending they weren’t all thinking the same thing at the same time. Twitter erupted and #pippasbum was trending within moments. “Pippa Middleton’s backside could win BGT easily,” tweeted someone. Before the day had ended, two separate Twitter accounts – @pippasass and @Pippasbum, both of which purported to be the authentic voice of the Middleton bottom – had started posting.
A Youtube mash-up of the bum’s best wedding day moments, set to the song Shake Ya Ass by Mystikal, went viral. An academic called Gavin Wilkinson started contemplating a Marxian interpretation of the bottom, a line of thought that would culminate, in 2014, with the publication of his treatise “Fetishising Pippa Middleton: Celebrity Posteriors, Whiteness and Class Aspirationalism”. Pippa would eventually break her silence on the bottom furore, saying: “It’s a bit startling to achieve global recognition before the age of 30, on account of your sister, brother-in-law and your bottom.”
What’s that, you say? It’s all coming back to you now? The backside, the frock, the ensuing uproar. In retrospect, are you rather appalled at the unseemly display? What on earth were we thinking of, objectifying a young woman like that, reducing her – her identity, her being, her gender – to a single body part, one we proceeded in celebrating to the point of fetishisation?
As markers on how enormously political attitudes have changed over the last few years go, little is as dramatic as the attention Pippa’s bottom received on her sister’s wedding day. It would never happen now, would it? In fact, it’s probably the only thing we can confidently predict about the forthcoming royal wedding: there will be no discussion of a maid of
If anyone attempts to start any bottom chat, they shall be royally scolded
honour’s bottom – and that isn’t even because Meghan has announced there will be no maid of honour. We just don’t do that sort of thing any more! It’s shocking to imagine we ever did. And if anyone attempts to start any bottom chat… well! They shall be subject to a social media shutdown of epic proportions: royally* (*pun intended) scolded and lampooned by the online sisterhood.
On the one hand, hurrah! Huzzah! For clearly, it’s all terribly progressive. Easing women towards a point of true equality, towards a time when we are no longer valued according to the merits of individual body parts, but rather, for our minds, hearts and actions et cetera. The fact that this change has been effected so rapidly, that those two royal weddings – separated by only a very few years – also act as Before and After markers in an epic shift in gender politics; that’s a promising indication of things to come, no? A suggestion of an acceleration in sensibilities and sensitivities?
On the other hand – oh, don’t you miss it? The silliness and fun and gag-potential of a time when we weren’t perpetually monitoring each other for incursions against feminism? When we weren’t constantly poised on the verge of offence; or constantly checking ourselves out of the terror and horror and fear of saying (or tweeting or facebooking) the wrong thing at the wrong time to the wrong person?
On a macro level: the wedding + bottom = the most perfect collision of two, entirely separate yet equally definitive, British quantities! The pomp and ceremony and reverence of a royal wedding, featuring a (literal and figurative) walk-on cameo by the most Carry On notion imaginable: someone’s bottom! How could we not have honoured that? How could we have ignored it?
And Pippa didn’t really seem to mind… did she?
And yet, suddenly the idea that anyone’s derrière might inadvertently, accidentally, and with no greater commercial end-game in mind, become the focus of the world’s attention, now seems a quaint echo of a distant past. Not right for now. Certainly not right for a #Metoo era that has reframed the sexualising and objectifying of anyone, ever, as a borderline criminal act.
Now we are not to linger over bottoms. Never, ever, ever. And yet: how strange, how contrary, how ironic that when you think about it properly, when you recall the sweet giddy joy of that other, earlier royal wedding day, up to, and including, and precisely because of the worldwide heralding of Pippa Middleton’s bottom… In light of everything that has happened since it all seems so incredibly, deliciously innocent.