Heather RadkeBesprekingen

Road-trip audiobook!

Based on the cover, I came into this expecting a fun look at butts in pop culture, but instead it is a serious and heavy look at body image, sexism, racism, and cultural appropriation that stretches back to the dawn of mankind with the evolutionary reasons that butts exist. There's still plenty of modern pop culture, but it is all deeply analyzed for its usually negative impact on women and/or Black people.

Despite my misconception, I quickly found myself fascinated by the subject matter, and it kept me engaged for the entirety of my long drive. Good stuff.

FOR REFERENCE:

Contents:

Introduction

Origins
• Muscle
• Fat
• Feathers

Sarah
• Life
• Legacy

Shape
• Bigness
• Smallness

Norma
• Creation
• Proliferation
• Resistance

Fit
• Steel
• Joy

Bootylicious
• Kate
• Mix
• Jennifer
• Kim

Motion
• Twerk
• Miley
• The Year of the Butt
• Reclamation

Conclusion

Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

(2.5 Stars)

This book briefly (un)covers the possible evolutionary advantages and uniqueness of the human butt. Then quickly goes into the history, including racism, sexism, gender "norms" and stereotypes.

It was very interesting, but I feel like a lot of history was overlooked or left out to make sure it didn't go against the narrative the author wanted to push.

Engaging, informative, and wide-ranging. I love these types of microhistory, especially with the connections to recent culture.

The most interesting thing in this book was about the history of why women's clothes are so wonky½

This book immediately went onto The List after I ordered it for work: the combination of title, cover, and blurb being impossible to resist. And the book did not disappoint. In a series of essays, Heather Radke, explores the (feminine) butt. She starts with physiology and talks about how the butt is vital in being able to run (who knew?). She looks at the butt in fashion - exploring both the bustle in Victorian clothing and the pains of ready-made fashion which means no one's butt every truly fits well in a pair of pants. She also repeatedly engages with the intertwining of race and the perception of the female backside in multiple essays that are illuminating, enraging, and occasionally heartbreaking. There's also plenty of engagement with the butt in pop culture from J-Lo's butt to Baby's Got Back. I have been pushing this book at everyone I know since I finished it and if I'd borrowed it from my work library it would have gone back with a Staff Picks sticker. Highly recommended.

Like most nonfiction books, some chapters are interesting and some are boring. The Garment Industry’s sizing chapter was a bore for me, yet my brain decided to retain this chapter and not much else. Whoo knows?

This book wasn’t sure what it wanted to be. It certainly was not all about butts and it certainly wasn’t any sort of history of butts. It started good and on point, but a little less than halfway through it went off on personal stories that had nothing to do with butts, it took a turn to look at the exercise industry in general (she mentioned butts once in a whole section on Jane Fonda), and it seemed to focus a lot on modern stories like Miley Cyrus, Kim Kardashian, and Jennifer Lopez - which if you haven’t lived under a rock, you already knew about. I generally would call myself a feminist, but when she tried to assert that aerobics classes are trying to teach women to be submissive because you are supposed to do all the moves the instructor does, it went a little too far even for me. I think the author has a lot of self image issues and has dealt with a lot of difficulties due to her gender and identity, which I can empathize with, so a lot of that comes out in the book, which is fine if I’m reading a memoir, but it’s just not what I was expecting in a history of butts. I was expecting an entertaining history of butts, this was not that.½

I had heard this was good, but didn't have expectations beyond a funny and informative book. This reminded me of a much more digestible version of Fearing the Black Body. Its focus is definitely more on female bodies as a whole rather than butts specifically. And given everything that white cultures have ever enjoyed seems to be appropriated from Black culture, that plays heavily into the narrative of this book.

As the author states early in the book, the butt (especially that of a female) is one of the few parts of the anatomy that carries more meaning and weight beyond just it’s physicality.

Starting in the 1800s and moving to the present, this fun and interesting book looks at how western society has viewed and changed its views on the female butt.