Most of my problems with clothes not fitting are a result of my height rather than waist, hips, or weight. All my life I have had thin privilege, have never had to contend with being called or understood to be fat. Never that the clothes are wrong, but rather her body is wrong. For, you see, that’s how Radke reports her mother framing the situation, language that she then inherited: my butt is too big. Changing room try-ons and the betrayals of clothes-or bodies.

She would tag along, as a young girl, on her mother’s shopping mall trips. Radke echoes this in some of her personal anecdotes throughout the book. A sign of how well you meet your generation’s ideal of femininity. The message, however, is the same: for women, your butt is a synecdoche. Sometimes big butts are in, sometimes out. Some of it, too, is rooted in celebrity and media, from the starlets of the early twentieth century to the models and music videos of the nineties. Much of our journey centres upon fashion: the bustle, changing hemlines, the flappers, etc. Therefore it is no coincidence that big butts became associated with Black people while the ideal-embodied, of course, by white people-was a flat, more demure behind.įrom this inauspicious beginning, Radke moves through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For centuries now, white Europeans have sought to hypersexualize and dehumanize people of African descent. She begins the story in South Africa and London, tracing the life as best she can of Sarah Baartman, a Khoe woman who became better known as the “Venus Hottentot.” Is it any surprise that our obsession with butts is wrapped up in Europe’s history of white supremacy? Of course not. So Radke investigates how, in Western society at least, we started to care so much about what was behind us. While we have plenty of possible theories for the adaptive value of the butt, its role in sexual selection might forever be occluded by that pesky thing called culture. She thoroughly explains why evolutionary psychology, unlike evolutionary biology, is unreliable and pseudoscientific. Radke quickly rejects evolutionary psychological explanations for our obsession with butts. Thanks to NetGalley and Avid Reader Press for the eARC in exchange for a review. Heather Radke-a curvy, queer white woman-wanted to know why we’re so hooked on butts, and because she’s a journalist, naturally she wants all of us to know why too. Let’s just get this out of the way: yes, that title is brilliant.īutts: A Backstory is a deep dive into our cultural fascination in the West with butts, and specifically women’s butts.

Butts backstory