BOTTOMS UP!
After pouting head shots and extreme thigh gaps, now it’s the bottom selfie that is filling out celebrity Instagram feeds.
KYLIE’S in those gold shorts. Christine Keeler’s perched on an Arne Jacobsen chair. Kim Kardashian’s practically has its own news cycle. The shapely posterior is a well-documented fascination. Only these days, the shots are being taken by the women they’re attached to.
Rihanna posts them. So does Beyoncé. Lady Gaga even used one on the cover of a 2013 single.
They’re Kardashian’s lifeblood — a belfie (“bum selfie”) was her chosen medium to announce to the
world that she’d shed the weight gained during her first pregnancy. The shot got more than a million likes on Instagram. Heidi Klum’s has been appreciated 49 000 times, Kelly Brook’s 10 000. Such is the focus on the bottom that the site has become known as “bumstagram”.
Bent over, bikini-clad or benchpressing, these bottoms have the same high, rounded, look-at-me aspect. They’re “bootylicious”; there’s “junk in the trunk”. To simplify, ask not “Does my bum look big in this?” but “Does my bum look big enough in this?”
Jen Selter has more than 10 million Instagram followers devoted to her feed of bum-tastic shots — on the beach, at the gym, in profile — and has earned a shoot in Vanity Fair, a fitness column in a New York newspaper and, reportedly, a net worth of $1million (about R13-million) from her tush. Model Yovanna Ventura (4.8 million followers) and Irish personal trainer Lilly Sabri (73 000) all plough their own furrow of derrière-led saucy workout snaps.
From Kardashian’s famous “break the internet” naked shoot for Paper magazine, in which she balanced a champagne glass on her bottom, to the rappers Nicki Minaj and Iggy Azalea, whose sizable rears are the constant subject of implant rumours, bums are big and they mean business.
“The bum is back and belfies have contributed,” said Victoria Hill, spokeswoman for lingerie chain Rigby & Peller. “Customers tell us they’ve started weight training to achieve this, but a higher-cut brief will help things look more perky.” M&S recently launched the belfie-friendly Brazilian pants, a low-rise, high-leg style with a slight cutaway at the back to give that Ipanema-esque underhang. Victoria’s Secret’s bestselling style is called the Cheeky. Lingerie brands are developing ever more elaborate undergarments to achieve the picture-perfect derrière. The “butt lifter” may look like the usual Spanx shorts from the front, but turn around and there’s a cutout for each cheek, which is cupped and hoisted as if in a bra. Last year, Levi’s launched its Wedgie jeans, designed to make the wearer’s bottom look higher and rounder (the clue is in the name). Then there’s another Kardashian staple, the waist-trainer: a restrictive elastic girdle that promises to slim the waist over time, to give that ideal waist-tohip ratio prized by belfie-takers above all else — even digestion. “A round, perky bottom has always been mainstream in Latin and Afro-Caribbean cultures,” said Elissa El Hadj, the Londonbased trainer responsible for the model Alessandra Ambrosio’s textbook example. “Caucasian cultures are jumping on the booty bandwagon rather late, but it’s introducing women to weighted squats, lunges, dead lifts and leg presses which will get you the bottom you’re seeking.” There are quick fixes, too. Buttock implants are the fastest-growing cosmetic procedure in the US, where one takes place every half hour. Again, Kardashian’s behind is fuelling the increase — her patronage of Dr Simon Ourian has
made the Beverly Hills “cosmetic dermatologist” famous for his bottom-sculpting fillers.
In 1992, the second-bestselling song of the year in the US was Sir Mix-A-Lot’s Baby Got Back, a celebration of fuller bums that started in the 1970s with titles such as Shake Your Groove Thing.
“Black men like big butts. That’s the bottom line,” he told Vibe magazine.
“In the ’90s and Noughties, you couldn’t watch a few minutes of MTV and not see a female bum,” said music journalist Eve Barlow, citing Sisqo, Dr Dre and 50 Cent. In the video to Nelly’s 2000 hit
Tip Drill, bottoms arguably get more airtime than he does — it seems unreconstructed now, but the video to Rihanna’s No 1 single
Work last year featured just as much authentic Jamaican twerking, if not as much bare flesh.
In fact, the bottom’s place in pop culture owes as much to commerce and censorship as it does to proclivity. As Athena’s tennis-girl poster proved, bottoms are easier to show and market than breasts — even now, despite internet porn, Instagram has a no-nipple policy (with exceptions for breastfeeding and sculpture), but no such rules on the view from the back. That not only makes bottoms ubiquitous, but a quietly insidious form of porn culture — a back door into it, as it were.
In the heyday of music videos, bums were seen as unthreatening titillation, barely even nudity, which is why they were as good a subject matter as any for female artists, too.
In 1999, Jennifer Lopez’s first album cover featured the star in a jumper and hot pants; she was FHM’s sexiest woman for the next two years and was rumoured to have insured her bottom for $20million. In 2014, she released the song Booty, featuring the similarly broad-beamed Iggy Azalea. Destiny’s Child released Bootylicious in 2001 (“I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly”). Lead singer Beyoncé continues with her signature grinding dance routines and aversion to trousers — although arguments about objectification can be quashed with reference to her strongman-worthy thighs, as much a part of the feminist canon now as the “We Can Do It” propaganda poster.
In her 2014 hit Anaconda, Minaj sings: “Oh my gosh, look at her butt/ Where my fat-ass bitches in the club?” Her often cartoonish, mostly naked appearance in the video belies her reputation as one of the most acclaimed MCs, male or female.
“You could say these artists are products of a culture they’ve been born into,” said Barlow. “It’s hard for women in hip-hop. Arguably, it’s a strategy to reclaim their womanhood and the respect they wouldn’t otherwise get.”
That’s why Miley Cyrus’s Minaj-baiting, prosthetic-bottomtwerking stunt and Lily Allen’s ironic bare-cheeked dancers in her video struck such a bum note: they weren’t qualified to pass judgment. The issues facing black women are different from those concerning white women, just as their bottoms are.
To hail the rise of the bigger bum as a victory for body image — a welcome respite from the skinny ectomorph — is similarly to miss the point.
“The black or lush bottom — it’s just an appropriation,” said feminist author Susie Orbach. “It isn’t expanding the idea that there are big bottoms, little bottoms, high or low ones. I don’t think it’s a particular advance.”
To her mind, the rise of the bum is simply the same old pressure to conform. That the body part most women obsess over is one they can’t even see most of the time is no irony — nor is the fact that most belfies don’t tend to show the subject’s face, which depersonalises the images.
The belfie already shows signs of becoming the new way to keep up on Instagram among adolescents who previously obsessed over the thigh gap. Of the 250 000 shots already on the hashtag, most are of women under 25, including Kate Moss’s sister, 18year-old sister Lottie.
“It’s effacing the individual and it’s fetishisation,” Orbach said. “First it was breasts, then the bum — these are ways of reducing women to a body part.”
So much is clear from just how formulaic are the bikini shots that have emerged from the A-list’s tropical holidays: bikini bottoms artfully ruched high on the cheeks and rolled at the hips to give fullness; legs tensed and torso angled slightly forward for the all-important thigh gap; hourglass waist and what can only be described as just enough parting to ensure the focus of the shot is sufficiently stuck out. Anybody with real booty knows that these bottoms are only really “big” in celebrity terms — that is not even remotely trouser-filling.
❛ Ask not ’Does my bum look big in this?’ but ’Does my bum look big enough in this?’