Kim Kardashian with Kanye West in 2019 © Ray Tamarra/GC Images
The back year was 2014. Meghan Trainor mocked “bringing the loot back,” while Nicki Minaj reclaimed Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Baby Got Back.” Instagram was full of “belfies” (a tricky angle that leads, inevitably, to belfie sticks). It was the year that Miley Cyrus took a prosthetic butt on tour to twerk on stage, and Kim Kardashian “broke the internet” with a photo of a glass of champagne balanced on her butt.
What may seem like a light-hearted celebration of body positivity, however, is loaded with racial and gender significance, writes Heather Radke in her rigorously researched debut Butts. Radke, a contributing editor for the Radiolab podcast, set out to investigate the “history and symbolism of women’s buttocks.” Endowed with a “big butt” herself, she witnessed how beauty standards had suddenly shifted to make her shape more fashionable, piqued her curiosity about “how female identity is constructed, reconstructed, and reinforced over time.”
The book is not intended to be “an encyclopedia of ass,” Radke qualifies; it is a story, not the story. Attend a man-versus-horse race to see the role of the glutes in human evolution. He knows the denim model who sets the standard for jean sizes, the creator of the “Buns of Steel” workout, drag queens who provide padding, “fat fitness” activists, and a twerk instructor.
Long before Kim and Miley emulated black bottoms, Victorian women may have unconsciously done so with the bustle, which took on exaggerated proportions in the early 1880s.
Despite the giggles caused by the book’s title, it’s a heartbreaking story at its core. Sarah Baartman (known as the “Venus Hottentot”) was a Khoe woman born in South Africa in the 1780s. Baartman was enslaved and exported to London and Paris to perform before white audiences, who were encouraged to touch the prominent rear of she. Her body continued to be exploited posthumously, and her remains were put on display in 1994. Kim Kardashian’s 2014 photo of Jean-Paul Goude, which replicated his controversial 1976 photo of black model Carolina Beaumont (known as “The Champagne Incident” ), echoed caricatures of Baartman’s silhouette.
Long before Kim and Miley emulated black bottoms, Victorian women may have been unconsciously emulating the bustle, which took on exaggerated proportions in the early 1880s. Fashion transcended class: women who couldn’t afford the underwear stuffed their dresses with newspapers. There are various conjectures as to the reasons behind the popularity of the bustle: cosmetic (a raised bottom makes the waist appear smaller); practical (allowing bulky skirts to fit through doorways); commercial (dressmakers who justify their prices against mass production); or simply the whims of fashion.
But one theory links the trend to Baartman. By wearing a bustle, white Victorian women could imitate a trait associated with the fantasy/stereotype of the “hypersexualized” black woman, but with the luxury of removing it. “It is a story we will see again and again,” Radke writes.
Like hemlines and the stock market, society’s coveted buttocks go up and down. Curves were all the rage in the 19th century before flappers and Coco Chanel brought a more youthful body into fashion. The hourglass figure of Marilyn Monroe gave way to Twiggy; The bulbous Buns of Steel in the 1980s were followed by Kate Moss’s “heroine chic” in the 1990s.
While some eras have seen women’s bodies controlled with shapewear, others have encouraged fad diets, extreme exercise, or plastic surgery. It’s a myth that women shed their corsets and found freedom in the 1920s, fashion historian Valerie Steele tells Radke: The rail-thin, “buttless” look “demanded masochistic self-control, or even self harm.”
The #slimthick body type popular today is based on a round rear attached to a small waist. The trend has led to an increase in Brazilian butt lifts, an expensive and dangerous procedure. Kardashian denies surgical enhancement, though speculation abounds. The newly shrunken buttocks of the Kardashian-Jenner clan may suggest that they’ve had the padding removed, a harbinger of the pendulum swinging back.
Whatever her size, Kim Kardashian’s butt is big business. His Skims line of shapewear, launched in 2019, was valued at more than $3.2 billion last year. Despite being marketed as body-inclusive, one of the brand’s flagship products is a waist trainer, which is reported to cause hives, nausea, and incontinence; doctors warn that it could cause organ damage. As Butts makes abundantly clear, a century after suffrage, women have yet to ditch their corsets for freedom.
Butts: A background story by Heather Radke Simon & Schuster £20 / Avid Reader Press $28.99, 320 pages
Source: news.google.com