A juicy new book explores the cultural history of the backside
In the introduction to her book Butts: A Backstory, journalist Heather Radke recalls a moment when, at 10 years old, she and a friend were catcalled by two teenage boys while out riding their bikes.
"'Nice butts!' we heard them say," Radke writes. "The fact that they said something unprompted about our butts felt uncomfortable and bizarre... I was aware that there were body parts that were considered beautiful and sexy and were coveted by others, but it had not occurred to me that the butt was one of them." That episode was just one a series that led Radke to realise how big of a role backsides play not just in our relationships with our bodies, but in cultural, social and genderspecific experiences.
"Butts are tremendously complex symbols, fraught with significance and nuance, laden with humour and sex, shame and history," she writes. "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."
It's from these observations that Butts — a thoroughly researched cultural history of the female butt — stems. Weaving together memoir, science, history and cultural criticism, the book addresses the physiological origins of our behinds and takes readers from the cinched waists of the Victorian era all the way to Kim Kardashian's internet-breaking backside and the popularisation of the Brazilian butt lift. In between, Radke examines the role of eugenics, fashion, fitness fads and pop culture in defining the racial and misogynistic standards surrounding the butt.
"Since the rise of the transatlantic slave trade, there's always been a kind of racial under meaning in any conversation around the butt, as well as gendered approaches to questions like 'What is a feminine body? What is a beautiful body? And how feminine can a beautiful body be?'" she continued. "The answers to those questions have oscillated through time, but our deep preoccupation with this specific body part reveals how the butt has long been used as a means to impart control, prescribe desire, and install racial hierarchies."
Radke later points to the bustle — an undergarment popularised in the late 19th century designed to make a woman's backside look enormous.
Alongside addressing the visual culture of Black music videos, plastic surgery and the recent belfie (a portmanteau of butt and selfie) craze in the same vein, Radke also highlights periods in contemporary history where trends skewed in different, oppositional directions. She highlights the rise of "buttless women" in the 1910s — a look best represented by the sleek look of the flapper — through the invention of sizing and the 90s brand of "heroin chic" captured by the supermodel Kate Moss. Such an aesthetic is "something that's never gone away," Radke noted.
"I didn't aspire to write an encyclopedia of the butt, but rather give a historical context to the way it has been perceived and portrayed, and how women's feelings around it have shifted alongside it," Radke explained. "Whether consciously or not, we, and society at large, have always been paying attention to our butts — hiding them, accentuating them, fetishising them. Which is kind of funny, when you think it's actually a body part we cannot see ourselves unless we're in front of a mirror." As she writes in her book, "the butt belongs to the viewer more than the viewed."
Reclaiming the butt
While many of the stories exposed in Butts are steeped in physical suffering — diets, restricting shapewear, surgical scalpels — there's also joy.
To counter the extreme workout regimes of the 80s, like the "Buns of Steel" fitness craze that equated a sculpted butt to self-control and selfrespect, Radke profiled the fat fitness movement that emerged during the same decade, which reimagined "what was possible for people who often felt excluded from mainstream fitness culture" to offer a form of resistance.
Ultimately, Radke said, what's perhaps most compelling about the butt is that it doesn't have to mean anything.
"Butts have the power to make us feel so miserable or angry, especially when we're in a dressing room trying on a pair of jeans that just won't fit," she noted. "But that angst is the result of centuries of history, culture and politics. It doesn't come from our bodies, it has been placed on them. If we take a step back, we'll see that butts are just a body part. They could mean nothing at all."