Butts — the changing shape of beauty standards

The year of the rear was 2014. Meghan Trainor doo-wopped about “bringing booty back” while Nicki Minaj reclaimed Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Baby Got Back”. Instagram teemed with “belfies” (a tricky angle leading, inevitably, to belfie sticks). It was the year that Miley Cyrus took a prosthetic bum on tour to twerk on stage, and Kim Kardashian “broke the internet” with a photo of a champagne glass balanced on her backside.

What may seem like a joyful celebration of body positivity, however, is loaded with gendered and racialised meaning, writes Heather Radke in her rigorously researched debut Butts. A contributing editor at the podcast Radiolab, Radke set out to investigate the “history and symbolism of women’s butts”. Endowed with a “generous butt” herself, she witnessed how beauty standards had suddenly shifted to make its shape more fashionable, sparking her curiosity in “how feminine identity is constructed, reconstructed, and reinforced over time”.

The book is not intended to be “an encyclopedia of butts”, Radke qualifies; it’s a history, not the history. She attends a Man Against Horse race to observe the role of glutes in human evolution. She meets the denim model who sets the standard for jean sizes, the creator of the “Buns of Steel” workout, drag queens who supply 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 elicited by the book’s title, at its core is a heart-wrenching story. Sarah Baartman (known as the “Hottentot Venus”) was a Khoe woman born in South Africa in the 1780s. Baartman was enslaved and exported to London and Paris to perform for white audiences, who were encouraged to prod her prominent posterior. Her body continued to be exploited posthumously, with her remains exhibited as recently as 1994. Jean-Paul Goude’s 2014 photo of Kim Kardashian, which replicated his controversial 1976 photo of the 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 unconsciously done so with the bustle, which took on exaggerated proportions in the early 1880s. The fad transcended class: women who could not afford the undergarment stuffed their dresses with newspaper. There are various conjectures about the reasons behind the bustle’s popularity: aesthetic (an enhanced bottom makes the waist seem smaller); practical (allowing voluminous skirts to fit through doors); commercial (dressmakers justifying their prices in the face of mass production); or simply the whims of fashion.

But one theory links the trend with Baartman. By wearing a bustle, white Victorian women could mimic a feature associated with the fantasy/stereotype of “hypersexualised” black women, but with the luxury of taking it off. “It is a story we will see again and again,” writes Radke.

Like hemlines and the stock market, societally-coveted butt sizes go up and down. Curves were all the rage in the 19th century before flappers and Coco Chanel made a more boyish body fashionable. Marilyn Monroe’s hourglass figure gave way to Twiggy; bulbous Buns of Steel in the 1980s were followed by Kate Moss’s “heroin chic” of 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 cast off their corsets and found freedom in the 1920s, the 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 relies on a round rear being attached to a small waist. The trend has led to a spike in Brazilian butt-lifts — an expensive and dangerous procedure. Kardashian denies surgical enhancement, although speculation abounds. The Kardashian-Jenner clan’s recently shrinking posteriors may suggest that they have had filler removed, a harbinger of the pendulum swinging back.

Whatever its size, Kim Kardashian’s backside is big business. Her shapewear line Skims, launched in 2019, was valued at over $3.2bn last year. Despite being marketed as body-inclusive, one of the brand’s flagship products is a waist trainer, reported to cause welts, nausea and incontinence; doctors warn it could lead to organ damage. As Butts makes all too clear, a century after suffrage, women have yet to cast off corsets for freedom.

Butts: A Backstory by Heather Radke Simon & Schuster £20/Avid Reader Press $28.99, 320 pages