January 14, 2009
cultural baggage
The ass as socio-economic definer:
In mainstream U.S. culture, “bubble butts” have typically been associated with “lowly” subject positions or “vulgar” sexuality. Calling too much attention to one’s behind is considered uncouth in polite society, a nasty reminder of forbidden or distasteful acts. A big butt is associated with “unnatural” sex, excrement, or the excess and physicality identified with “darker” races. This body metaphor helps us constitute social identities and subject positions. Like most females growing up in America, I learned early on that bodily attributes such as butt size, hair texture, skin color, and body shape could convey a woman’s status and desirability. During my teens, achieving the “all American girl” look that graced the covers of fashion magazines meant dieting the butt into submission. A woman’s failure to reign in an unruly butt connoted her lack of discipline and self-control, and by association, her inferior moral character. It also marked her place in the social order: “high class” women did not carry excess baggage in the trunk. A skinny ass identified you with the elegant and never too rich, never too thin social elite, big butts with the mammies and maids.
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I like big butts….
At a high school I worked at, some of the kids called one of the (male) coaches “Bubble Butt” because he had, well, a bubble butt.
I once heard a paper read at a conference that mentioned in that “oh-everybody-knows-this” sort of way that, as a response to Europeans’ growing familiarity with the physiques of African women, bustles for European women’s dresses were invented to create the illusion that these women had “bubble butts.”
Does everyone know this?
…reign in an unruly butt…
I love that.