When people try to make a woman feel better about her body, they say things like, "Well, your shape is perfect for your height," or "Your body parts are in proportion to one another." Which is usually just a polite way of saying, "Honey, you've got a big fat ass, and big fat titties." In my case, my big fat ass and titties have been an issue since I hit puberty; I have little complaint about the titties, but the ass? What's an ass like this doing on a nice girl like me?
You see, titties are commerce in our society. The ass, though, is pretty much worthless. Sure, we live in an age that ostensibly embraces big booties, but only in hip-hop videos, in a pair of Apple Bottom jeans, and on a certain thrice-wed Latina of questionable talents. A big fat ass on a white girl, however, is about as valuable as a pair of manboobs. I've turned my head to see people's reactions when I walk down the street, and they fall into one of three categories: horror, awe, and disgust. What the fuck is that and how did it get there? Genetics is the easy answer; growing up, I lived in the soft embrace of being one of four big-assed sisters spawned by a big-assed mother.
Culturally, however, our plump butts were more than a little out of place. Growing up in Oakland, big fat asses were everywhere, and in the '70s and '80s, more often than not they were spectacularly encased in the new stretch fabrics that were like miracles for the gluteally over-endowed. Girls in grade school started expanding, and by junior high, the stretch stirrup pants we all look back on in horror revealed not only what kind of panties you were wearing (and this was before thongs), but also your social security number and most of your DNA. Asses were splendid, bouncy, firm, gelatinous… they were everywhere around me, making me feel a lot better about what was starting to get out of control at the base of my spine.
But there was a problem, and it had to do with a question one of my eighth grade suitors asked me one day at lunch. Vaguely, I had previously realized that as one of ten-odd white kids in school, I was exotic, but when he reached over his cheese fries to finger my exposed forearm and ask, "Do you glow in the dark?", my gut reaction was shame. In fact, I am phosphorescent; if we ever go camping together and get lost on the way back from the pit toilet, just ask me to take off my pants, and my thighs will light the way.
Being a white girl attending schools with mostly black and latino students meant that my ass should have leant me some cache, but this was not the case. Starting in the mid-'80s, hip-hop music began crossing into the mainstream, and along with hip hop came the televised phrnomenon of "video girls." Video girls fell into two categories: small-assed white girls in metal videos, and big-booty black girls in hip-hop/soul videos. If you were black or latina, it was easy to put on some spandex bike shorts and be proud; if you were white, however, you could rat your bangs like a metal chick and cover your ass, or else you could not rat your bangs and cover your ass. The big white ass had to be hidden, and it stayed hidden for a long, long time.
Hilary Clinton and her nemesis, Monica Lewinsky, changed some of that. Hilary's got issues for sure, but one thing about her that's always cast her in a favorable light for a lot of women is the undeniable fact that she's packing more than dinner rolls in those D.C. pantsuits. Likewise, she's got big thighs, which are par for the course with the ass. Lewinsky, also proved that even the smartest good old boys are powerless when it comes to a big booty. The very fact that she seduced the president by flashing her ass in a thong says a lot about the white ass' ability to stun. You want shock and awe? Get behind me on the rare days when I put on yoga pants.
Nonetheless, the ascension of J-Lo in the '90s, in the wake of ass-gate, reminded most Americans that big asses are a "cultural" thing. Jennifer's butt was treated with the same kind of fetishistic awe that Londoners gave the Venus Hottentot, an 18th century African woman whose gluteal proportions were so stunning that she was displayed in a cage. In Lopez' case, she initially seemed not to mind the papparazi's keen focus on her buttocks; in fact, she flaunted her ass' ability to seduce multi-millionaire white boys and black boys like, but soon enough, she dieted and arobicized approximately 70% of her ass away, so that we're left with the barest suggestion of something that might cast a shadow in the afternoon.
In the wake of Lopez' vanishing ass, however, came the ass magazines. Catering to the same hip-hop community that put booty in the living rooms of Middle America, journals like King and Smooth extol the virtues of women like Melyssa Ford, the 34DD", 24", 40" mixed-race starlet of the "Thong Song" remix video, whose website refers to her as "every man's fantasy," which might not be too far from the truth, except for one small… or large problem. While Melyssa's upper-body measurements are not so far off from those of the women in Playboy and Penthouse, it's the 40" part of her anatomy that diferentiates her from Pamela Anderson and Pam's ilk. It's perfectly fine for white girls to pump up their breasts with silicone and slenderize their waistlines with lipo and crunches, but when it comes to doing something about 40" hips and the ass that comes with them, the typical white girl choice is to exercise or surgicaly remove her flotation device.
Personally, I've come to accept the anomaly of my ass. This, however, came at a cost: the inability, for many years, to find a guy who also accepted it; the inability to fit into most pairs of jeans; the inability to fit through most narrow spaces. Despite the contemporary rise to prominence of the big ass, media in America continue to extol the results of insanely restrictive diets and exercise bulimia, vaunting the boyish figures of celebrities whose DNA for some reason or another granted them the slender hips that are going to make childbirth a serious problem. Teenage white girls all over the country log onto Livejournal communities giving praise to the goddesses "ana" (for anorexia) and "mia" (for bulimia). In contrast, a 2003 study in the Journal of Eating and Weight Disorders revealed that black adolescent girls are less likely to perceive themselves as overweight. In other words, the dominant cultural paradigm in white society is that your body, and your ass, is never good enough unless it's thin.
This idea is disturbing enough on its own, but when you complicate the issue with the undeniable fact that youth culture in America long ago embraced many facets of hip-hop culture, it's easy to imagine a slumber party full of skinny white girls shaking next-to-nothing-butts in front of some Nelly video and then running off to the bathroom to puke up pizza. Whether or not this actually happens is beyond the scope of my own experience; however, the dichotomy between people like Melyssa Ford and Mary-Kate Olsen should, in some ways, speak for itself. It's clear that we should all exercise at least a little, cut down on fried foods, and avoid beer bongs, but it's also clear when you go to a rock show that the girls getting all the attention are not the big-assed ones, but the ones who hurt themselves when they sit down. Some guys, and these are obviously the ones I've never dated, actually seem to prefer assless women. I did once ask out an indie-rock boy only to have him tell me that he "only like[d] Asian girls," and when I asked why, he replied that he thought it was "really cute" how some of them wore teeny-tiny little pants. After I vomited and complained about this to my big-assed Korean girlfriend, we came to the consensus that nobody gets a fair shake when it comes to the judgemental perspective of insecure males.
Fortunately, my husband's tastes in female body types run firmly along the lines of your average rapper. This has been of great consolation to me as I've aged and found that the big fat white ass does not shrink at all when you move through your 30s, but like your ability to patiently wait in lines, navigate the job market, and calmly discuss things with a parent, your ass grows greater each year. As my hips expand from their previous 38" incarnation into the 40s, I can calmly put down the cookie and remember that my grandmothers, great-grandmothers, and great-great grandmothers all had big butts, and they never complained about it. And then I can calmly pick up the cookie, and eat it.
While writing this essay, Kaya Oakes developed a severe case of erosive esophagitis and lost fifteen pounds along with 30 per cent of her ass. She is now on a strict diet of butter, burgers, and Krispy Kremes. The ass will return.