The Unknowability of the Female Butt
Our endlessly fascinating, upsetting, and horrifying relationship to the backside
Quick housekeeping. I have some book event dates in the coming weeks with some amazing writers, and I’d love to see you. New York, L.A., Baltimore, New Jersey, Philly, Brooklyn, Rhinebeck…and possibly Toronto. You can find more info and links to rsvp here.
Now, onto the butt. The first time I laid eyes on my book cover I was in Paris, having drinks with my former editor (now best-selling author!) Christine Pride who was teaching at a writer’s retreat. My go-round with the cover for No One Tells You This had been fraught and my anxiety over a re-do of this experience was acute enough that I had a call about it with my now editor, Amy Sun, before we committed to selling the book to Penguin. As I’ve written before, when the cover for I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself came through I was beyond thrilled. Which is all just to say, whatever challenges this cover has faced have, to me, been entirely worth it.
And there have been, and continue to be, challenges.
Which, when the entire marketing plan of a major publishing house boils down to, we’re going to post your book cover on Instagram, is a real problem.
On the upside, Amazon appears to have come around (I’m currently an Editor’s Pick for Best Biographies & Memoirs) but Instagram is still dogging me (I did a little reel about it here).
When I posted a graphic advertising the Strand book event I’m doing with Katy Tur on Tuesday, June 11, I immediately got another warning that I was risking restricting my reach. When I shared a photo of the Boucher painting in my stories that had originally been posted by an art account with nearly 400,000 followers I was immediately shadow-banned (thank-you to all the people who dm’d me to confirm this).
Writer Heather Radke saw my post and messaged me to say she believes butts are more subversive than breasts. They are more “triggering.” And she should know.
Heather wrote the book on butts. Literally. In 2022, she published Butts: A Backstory. To rave reviews. I loved this book. I also loved the cover, even though it does not necessarily convey the seriousness of the subject matter. I asked Heather if she’d talk butts with me in an effort to get to the, er, bottom of what has Instagram so butt hurt, up in algorithm arms about my cover. Our conversation, which has been edited for clarity and length, is below. What she had to say was fascinating, upsetting, and at times horrifying
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Glynnis: Why does Instagram hate the derrière? Any ideas?
Heather: Nobody really knows. The rules Instagram has for their community guidelines are famously secret and they change a lot. There's a theory that part of the way Kim Kardashian got so popular on Instagram was that she figured out how to show basically the “dirtiest” part of the body (“dirty” is very in quotes here), that Instagram allowed, which was her butt. But it was always mostly covered. The crack was covered basically. And that this worked really well for the early algorithm of Instagram. But since then, there's been times where Instagram kind of locked down the butt. Where they say it's too graphic or whatever. Where people start to get their butt pics flagged. And so we might just be in that cycle for whatever reason.
Glynnis: Is the butt more controversial than breasts?
Heather: I don't think the butt is “dirtier” than breasts, but there's a way that breasts have more meanings.
Not long ago, there was a big ‘free the nipple’ campaign that was about — it was about a bunch of things — but one of the things it was about was breastfeeding. And there's a lot of activism that was done to allow for breastfeeding photos on social media because breasts are used for this very maternal purpose. I have a little kid, I’m very pro all of that. But I think that there's these ways that breasts, although they're highly sexualized, are also kind of wholesome and butts are not like that.
Butts are also not genitals. It's not like you're showing a penis on your Instagram either. There's a reason why the painting you have is, no pun intended, it's cheeky. It is like there's nudity for sure, but you're not showing genitalia. I don't think anyone who's reasonable would see that image and think you're selling sex in some gratuitous way. But there's a way that the butt kind of has these multiple coded meanings: it's funny, it’s sexual, it's very related to the female form. There's an interesting conversation to be had about what extent any of this is about anal sex. I think some of the pushback is an interesting, almost homophobic response to the butt.
Glynnis: It's interesting you say that. I sometimes think the reason talking about enjoying sex in your late forties or early fifties is so subversive, and we so rarely see it represented in culture for cishet women (among others), is fertility is no longer a possibility. Same with anal sex; there's no fertility. It really allows you to think of sex as simply for pleasure. And I think in America in particular, certainly not in France, but in America, that idea is still dangerous to some extent.
Heather: I think that's true. I think also there's an interesting thing about the butt, which is that even with kids, we let them say it. It might be like a joke, but isn't not a swear word. These kind of multiple views of the butt allow it to exist in almost a liminal sexual space. It's nodding at sex, but it's not the only way you could read it.
We don't even have a correct name for the butt. It's unknowable and we don't quite want to look at it fully, and deeply, and seriously, which is why I wrote a whole book about it. I think that's very interesting. And it also resists a singular meaning because unlike breasts…at the very least, breasts have a function. But butts, and here we're actually talking about butt cheeks, the functions are very minimal. We have fat. There's muscle. It's not anatomically very interesting, but it carries all of this robust metaphorical meaning that's about race and gender and sex.
Glynnis: You write that 1997 marked a turning point in modern culture for the butt. Why?
Heather: It's a very interesting thing. We don't deal with the butt until about 1997. I never found the butt referenced in a fashion magazine before 1997 that used any word that wasn't almost cringey in its euphemism. Vogue would always say derrière or they'd say backside; they just did not want to acknowledge butts exist and people have them, and some people like them and some people don't like them.
There's this kind of breaking point in 1997. Scholars talk about it as the crossover butt. It was when Jennifer Lopez was in the Steven Soderbergh movie Out of Sight.
Glynnis: Yes! I have a clear memory of some sort of ad or trailer for that movie featuring Jennifer Lopez leaning over a car in tight jeans? And finding that somehow, if not shocking than surprising.
Heather: I think what happened in 1997 was hip hop had become more of a part of white culture and was very prevalent on MTV. And there is this crazy thing that happens in 1997 where you see all these interviews with JLo where all of these white media professionals are kind of overcome by the fact of her butt. They say things like, you have a butt. And it's just like, what is she supposed to say? It's these very weird interviews. Or there's this thing, I think it was in Entertainment Weekly, where it's like JLo's Butt is taking over from Sharon Stone's Crotch.
Glynnis: When you think about the Victorian bustle or you think about the wiggle dress of the fifties and Marilyn Monroe, wouldn't those also be moments?
Heather: So the bustle is so interesting. That was how I started the whole book. Do you know who Sarah Baartman is? It's a horrific story. It’s also a very fundamental, foundational story to understand when you're thinking about the butt.
In about 1810, Sarah Baartman, a black woman from South Africa, was brought to London. Baartman had a large butt, and she was displayed on stage in Piccadilly in a sort of freak show, and people paid to see her. They paid more to poke her butt. When she died in Paris, this very famous French scientist dissected her body and displayed her remains in the Museum of Natural History. And they were there until 1972. Her remains were only repatriated to South Africa in the early Aughts. This French scientist used the autopsy he did on her as supposed evidence for why black women were more sexual than white women, and to justify the racial hierarchy.
There’s a historical rumor that the bustle was based on Baartman’s body. Even if you look at the images of her body and the drawings that people did of her, and then you look at the bustle, you sort of see the way that there's something happening there. This is in a time when in America minstrelsy was very popular. It was foundational popular music. And so cultural appropriation in this way is very present. So I think that's one thing that was true about the bustle and what was going on with that.
Black women's butts were used very explicitly as part of the creation of racial hierarchies and eugenics. There were eugenicists in the early 20th century who would measure the butts of white sex workers in London, and they would say, oh, these women also have big butts and that there's some kind of relationship between the big butt and hypersexuality. But the idea of that hypersexuality comes from this stereotype of black women that they had created, basically, to justify sexually assaulting enslaved women.
The butt still has these hypersexual connotations. And part of what feels subversive or dangerous or upsetting, I suppose, to some people about it are these connotations that come from this very racial history.
And with Marilyn Monroe, it's interesting. I don't know if I'm right about this, but I always feel like the Marilyn Monroe thing, it's really as much about the breast as the butt. It's about an hourglass shape. There was this body type that came into fashion in the Twenties that's very Coco Chanel: Very flapper, no curve, straight up and down. They call it a rectangle body. And to some extent, it never really changed. Sometimes they'll stick on some boobs, you know what I mean? But it's still this very thin ideal.
Glynnis: I love your book cover. Were you sensitive to all this when they were coming up with it. Did you go through many variations?
Heather: Most of the book is what I'm telling you about: the bustle, or eugenics, or why your pants don't fit, the history of the garment industry. So if you want a book about Kim Kardashian, this is not the book for you. I was trying to write a history of more than just myself. And so to represent any single woman's butt seemed very complicated to me. Would it be a white butt or black butt? Would it be mine? So I think in the end, part of what was great about the peach emoji was that it is sort of representative of butts “the concept.”
Glynnis: I think the cover is so striking and perfect, and it has a sense of humor. I do think there is something — and to differentiate it again from breasts — there is something a little humorous about the butt.
Heather: That's the other kind of amazing thing about the butt: it's funny. And, I mean, sex is funny a lot of the time, in all kinds of ways. But the butt is the only time we kind of let it be funny. And I actually love that. I mean, I'm always trying to insist that my book is serious, but I sometimes worry I've hit that note too hard. But it's also funny. It can't not be funny.
Glynnis: I've fallen into that, too. I'll say, I'm having a serious exploration about what pleasure means in this book. But then I think, am I though? Or am I just taking off my clothes in this book?
Heather: I think what it speaks to is the way that, not to be even more serious about it, but it’s another mode of oppression almost. It's like you have to insist that female pleasure is serious because there's been many centuries of it not being taken seriously. We don't think about butts as seriously as we should because we kind of can't bear it. And I think that's true about female pleasure, too. It's both. It's fun and also important. And we let a lot of things be both, but the things that we only allow to be one thing, I think those are really interesting things to explore.
You can order Heather’s book here.