It’s All About Butts These Days

So I did not want to get into the discussion of Kim Kardarshian breaking the internet and the audacity or bravery thereof. But I can’t help myself. I am simultaneously amused and disgusted that the butt is having a pop culture moment. As the owner of a plump posterior and the wide hips and sturdy thighs to support it, I can’t help but feel objectified. I wonder if it would have better to have grown into puberty in this era of the butt being in versus back when I did where I was self-conscious of my womanly fatness. That skinny, hip-less, butt-less, and thigh-less women were bearing children left and right only made me more disappointed as a teen that I had to look like a fertility doll in order to become a woman.

I see Kim Kardashian and I think Saartje Baartman. I see mockery of the racism, oppression, and misogyny suffered by black women at the hands of white men over the course of the past several centuries. I wonder if Kim knows that history and if she cares at all.

In my head, I’m screaming, “I am not my butt”. Enough with the exoticism and the exploitation. Enough of reducing women, all women, to body parts. I am reminded of Nicki Minaj, the recent uproar over her Anaconda cover and her response. That there are acceptable and non-acceptable ways to objectify a woman’s body is not the issue. The last thing I want to do is to be the women’s body police. “Do you”, I want to say. But, the truth is the objectification of any woman’s body, self-promoted or not, is the objectification of all of us including our pre-pubescent selves.

A woman is more than breasts, hips, and butt.