The "bad women" marker: why the ass is the symbol that defines female morality

Few women know it, but their favorite jeans were designed to fit Natasha Wagner's behind.

An unknown, slim and attractive model from Los Angeles, an aspirational surfer-haired blonde college girl, she has set the standard for women's denim for the past decade.

Her behind, specifically, worked for Levi's, Gap, Old Navy or Wagner.

The American edition of

called her “the ass that is shaping our nation” and

, another women's magazine, ruled that she had “the best butt on the market”.

Her job, basically, was to embody a supposed norm, the basis on which designers worked to shape the rear sloping of her pants.

The ideal ass in which the rest of the women had to fit.

Wagner's shyly upturned little butt was in vogue until 2014. That was “the year of the ass,” as journalist Heather Radke puts it in her essay Butts: a backstory, published in English by

&

in 2022).

in Destiny's Child

published an eponymous visual album on that date in which, in addition to vindicating Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's feminism, she was seen dogging in viral video clips such as

.

Nicki Minaj added to this liberation singing "Oh my god, look at her ass" in

, an ode to the ass that sampled part of that "I like big asses and I can't hide" from

.

And if Miley Cyrus had discovered

to the more demure whites a few months earlier, Meghan Trainor would bring up the rear for her in

with a lyric declaring war on the Natasha Wagners of life.

Hers "I won't be a 34, but I can move it / I won't be a toothpick, nor a silicone Barbie / I have that

that all guys are looking for" was a global bombshell.

What happened to get to this stage?

Did this sacralization of big asses in mass consumption pop really mean a change in the social paradigm?

Nicki Minaj performing at the 2015 MTV Video Music AwardsKevin Winter/MTV1415

Fetish and social stripper

In

, Radke is reluctant to claim victory in this cultural assimilation of the prominent behind.

A contributor to

, the American debuts with a cultural analysis of why we should take asses more seriously (and since long before 2014).

His is an investigation into how in the last two centuries this attribute has been fetishized to become an indicator of class, gender and race biases.

In the moral banner that prevails in society.

'Flapper', the ideal of beauty without curves that prevailed in the 20s of the last century. Culture Club (Getty Images)

"The butt has been used to reinforce racial hierarchies, it is a barometer of hard work and a gauge of sexual desire and availability," the journalist writes on its pages;

where she points out that "the shape and size of women's behinds has been perceived as an indicator of their nature and their morals, their femininity and even their humanity."

Reading Radke helps to discover the root of the prejudices that we have projected on a simple bodily attribute.

“200 years ago the idea was established that women with big butts were less innocent, more amoral than women with small butts.

This, of course, also correlated with racial categories.

It was a way of making it clear that they considered African women hypersexual and white women sexually innocent”, the author points out in an email exchange.

From Hottentot Venus to Kardashian

In a fine-tuned 320-page analysis, the essayist travels to colonialism and the popularization of the eugenic and racist discourse that dominated science in the 19th and early 20th centuries to point out the origins of these stereotypes.

A devastating pairing that was merciless with a woman in particular: Saartjie Baartman, known as "the Venus of Hotentote".

A Khoe aborigine born in the 1770s in South Africa who was captured by Dutch colonists to be exploited and enslaved as a fairground monster.

The woman's “big butt” was first displayed to Cape Town whites—who were allowed to poke her bottom with an umbrella to see “if it was real”;

and then in London, with enormous public and press success.

“Baartman codified a stereotype of the big-bottomed black woman as hypersexual and not fully human, something that has been with us for at least the last two centuries,” Radke points out.

In his pages, he tells how the anthropologist Abele de Blasio would reinforce that association of female hypersexuality in a series of studies on sex workers in which he typified "the Hottentots."

Women whom he accused of having "an excessive sexual appetite" which, supposedly, was directly related to the diameter of their buttocks.

Saartjie 'Sarah' Baartman (1790 -1815) was a Khoi woman captured by settlers and exploited in shows for her curves under the name "the Venus of Hotentot".Pictures from History (Pictures From History/Universal )

How was this ideal of beauty and sexual mysticism sanitized among the white population?

As has been done with almost everything in this field for two centuries: with the fashion trends among privileged white women.

Radke slyly connects the popularization of a type of crinoline pronounced on the rear (

in English) among the aristocrats of the time.

That rigid petticoat that would become popular among high society at the end of the 19th century as an extension of the corset was, as the author explains, "a prosthetic ass, a cage that a woman could put on and take off to transform herself from the Greek Venus to the Venus of the Hottentots.

Yet another evidence, she adds, "that white women's culture and fashion has found a way to steal parts of other people's culture, histories and bodies that suit them and leave the rest behind."

One of the fads of 1875: the prosthetic butt in the form of a 'bustle' dress, a popular crinoline at the time. Hulton Archive (Getty Images)

It happened with rich white women in the 1850s and it happened in 2014, when Kim Kardashian—who has been accused of appropriating and monetizing beauty symbols from black culture and the social margins and then abandoning them—would popularize that exaggerated butt on the cover of

magazine

.

The cover photos, taken by Jean-Paul Gode—the same man who had worked with Jamaican Grace Jones in the 1970s and has been accused of objectifying and reinforcing stereotypes of black women's bodies—promised to “break Internet".

That's how it went.

By the next day, clicks on that story had accumulated 1% of all digital traffic in the United States.

“Kardashian's prominent butt reminded me of Baartman's, but her circumstances couldn't be more different,” says Radke.

"That distance is what makes these images of hers so uncomfortable: there she was, a privileged non-black woman using her ass to play black, breaking the internet (and her bank account) during the process," she adds. she.

Kim Kardashian on her 2014 cover of 'Paper' magazine.Paper Magazine

Kardashian's influence is undeniable: the operation known as the Brazilian Butt Lift (BBL) was one of the most in-demand (and most dangerous) of the past decade.

Now that the

has lost weight and reduced her curves to adapt to the ideals of white feminine thinness of the 2000s, this aesthetic intervention has lost interest in web searches in the face of cheek reduction or bichectomy, the new star operation that emulates the bony faces of models like Amelia Gray or Bella Hadid.

A story of suffering and control

More than an encyclopedia about behinds,

is also an essay on the "female martyrdom" that involves fitting in and adapting to beauty canons.

Even the author's own.

Through the personal story of her living with a "big butt in the eyes of others", Radke recounts the journey through the desert that has meant having to adapt to the schizophrenic pendulum of the bodily canon of women.

From the flat and rectangular figure stipulated by the

of fashion illustrations in the 1920s;

the “buttocks of steel” promised by the aerobics culture of the 1980s;

the arrival of the “heroin addict chic” with a flat ass in the early 2000s, or the (false) vindication of those big behinds in 2014 to return, once again, to an ideal of extreme thinness.

Jane Fonda teaching a fitness class in 1982, the decade that "buttocks of steel" became popular: Jim Preston (Denver Post via Getty Images)

“A lot of the butt story is a control story.

Fashion, science and

have a history of being complicit in the project of trying to organize bodies, turn them into metaphors and create hierarchies.

But one of the best things about human bodies is that we inherently resist this control.

There are so many examples of this, from

activists and

women to the fact that it's basically impossible to create standard sizes for women's clothing.

The real effect of the social change advocated by the

it generates distrust.

“Even when brands try to offer clothing in a variety of shapes and sizes, they often can't fit every body.

As an academic told me: bodies are made to measure, but clothing is an industrial product.

There will always be a mismatch, ”he says.

One that will persist, and will continue to rebel, against all the Natasha Wagners that want to impose on us.

Cover of the essay 'Butts'.Simon and Schuster