This stereotype has never really gone away. Using very flawed science, they created the stereotype of the big butted, African woman, linking big-butted-ness not only with Blackness but with hypersexuality. In their project to, essentially, create the idea of race, scientists like George Cuvier and Frances Galton not only used skin color but physical features like the shape of a person’s head or the size of a woman’s butt. In the introduction, you write that “conversations about butts are almost always conversations about race.” What do you mean by that?įor several hundred years, Western scientists, explorers, writers, and thinkers used butts as part of a system of creating racial categories and hierarchies. The journey of writing the book for me was a journey to unwind those metaphors, to see what is behind them-pun intended!-in order to make visible some of the unspoken histories that are with us whenever we think about our bodies or the bodies of other people. We see this with all kinds of things - breasts, butts, hearts, noses.

I think it is, for whatever reason, very tempting for humans to turn body parts into metaphors, to make our anatomy take on greater meaning than it innately holds. I feel like the journey of the book was answering the question of how butts have come to mean so much, but the question of why still eludes me. It’s a good question, if I do say so myself! And one I’m not sure I really have an answer to. You posed this rhetorical question on RadioLab, so now I'm going to ask you in earnest: 'Why have butts come to mean so much when they could just mean nothing?'

Here, the author breaks down some of what she’s learned. The result, Butts: A Backstory(Simon & Schuster) is out now and examines how American culture’s complicated feelings about “the butt” are the product of science, eugenics, fashion design, and Big Fitness (even before such an industry existed). Early inquiries into the butt’s cultural history proved substantial, and Radke soon realized that it might take a book to untangle the derriere’s thorny symbolism. Many of her peers felt strongly about this body part, and so Radke grew curious about how it became so charged. “Some wished their butts were bigger, some had mothers who told them to cover their butts because they were too sexy, some loved their butts,” Radke, 39, told me.

Part of her research entailed interviewing women who had very different experiences with - and relationships to - their butts. In 2019, the writer and WNYC RadioLab reporter published an essay in the Paris Review about the shame attached to having a large backside while she was in high school. Over the past few years, perhaps no one has spent more time thinking about butts than Heather Radke.

Butts backstory