Back to the Butt

A mostly scientific look at why the female posterior is the body part of the moment.

It was all about the butt for early man. There was, however, a distinct biological, evolutionary reason for this, which I’ll get to in a bit. However, as the evolution of man progressed, the butt, as an object of lust, became less important and the mantle of lust was instead largely placed on female frontal parts like the breast, mouth, and hoo-hah.

That’s not to say the butt lost all its luster. No way.

Even back in Ancient Greece women would actually perform a dance where they literally kicked themselves in the rear with the hopes of giving themselves a callipygian butt, which is a term sometime used by art historians and ass scholars to describe an ample but shapely butt. In fact, the term comes from the Greek word kallipygos, which means “having a beautiful butt.”

While this questionable butt-growing method didn't survive the ancient Greeks, women in more recent cultures accentuated the size of their rear by wearing bustles, hoop skirts, and dresses designed to grossly exaggerate the hips.

It wasn't until the 1950's that doctors got involved. That's when surgeons from Brazil and Mexico started taking fat cutfrom the abdomen and transferring it to the gluteal area, but it wasn’t perfect because much of it was reabsorbed.

After the silicone breast implant was invented in the 70's, a few doctors started cutting the implants in half and implanting them in the buttocks, but the result was too close to some weird, four-breasted, hemispherically symmetrical creature from anyone of several nuclear fallout movies.

The 1980's saw the advent of the contact-lens shaped silicone implants specifically designed for the derriere, but there just weren't that many women interested in having the procedure because rehab involved lying on one’s stomach as much as possible for a few weeks. The surgery was especially unpopular in America where breasts have been king of the hill, or hills, for a long, long time.

The thing is, paying all this attention to butt love was somewhat of an evolutionary anachronism because, as I alluded to in the opening paragraph, having an alluring butt wasn’t as important to modern mating as it was to our cave-dwelling ancestors.

I’ll work my way to an explanation, but first a bit more history.

A Tiny Latina with a Piñata-sized Butt Launches a Movement

Despite being an evolutionary anachronism, the big female butt, as an object of male lust, has come back with a vengeance and you might even trace the current trend to the 1990's when a certain Latina singer used her ample butt to come crashing through the pop culture door with all the energy of the Kool-Aid man who, coincidentally, had a tuchusthat was pretty much the same size.

Women wanted one of those things, and the quickest way, of course, was to turn to the plastic surgeons again. My late friend, plastic surgeon Bruce Nadler, one of the ass-implant pioneers, said, "J-Lo did for the butt implant what Pamela Anderson did for the breast implant."

But sole credit for this current preference for mega-sized rear ends can’t be given to one moderately talented Latina with a piñata-sized butt. No, things got super-sized when Kim Kardashian’s butt breached the ocean of the media world, causing plastic surgeons to insist, like Brody in “Jaws,” that they go back and get a bigger boat.

Soon, other ass-influencers followed the lead of these aforementioned butt icons, so much so that we are now clearly living in the Age of the Big Bootie, represented by the aforementioned celebrities and others like Jen Selter, Veronica Bielek, and the thousands of Instagram models who are famous simply for having a lovely rear end.

Perhaps surprisingly, many of these behinds are so preternaturally large that one suspects their origins lie in the bite of a big-assed radioactive spider, or perhaps being born on a planet with an enormous, butt-shaped, red sun.

Not too surprisingly, the shape of the butt, or more accurately, the ideal shape of a butt, became a topic for doctors and butt scholars.

Plastic Surgeons Define Perfection

Two Mexican doctors, Dr. Ramon Cuenca-Guerra and Dr. Jorge Quenzada, by request of The New York Times, studied 132 patients and more than 1100 photos and determined that a beautiful ass has the following characteristics:

• Slight hollows on each side.

• A curved fold where the butt meets the thighs.

• A V-shaped crease that looks like cleavage.

• Two dimples in the lower back.

Another expert, plastic surgeon Constantino Mendieta, was similarly tasked but he came up with a different conclusion. Dr. Mendieta believes that overall butt shape is more important. He concluded that they come in 4 different shapes:

1. Square

2. Round

3. V-shape

4. A-shape

“The prettiest buttocks,” he explains, “look like A’s, like upside down hearts with a wider bottom than top.”

Clearly, Dr. Mendieta never worked at a grocery store. Otherwise, he’d place more value on the square butt because of its stackability on shelves. Anyhow, much of this discussion is just scientific/artistic musings and women, regardless of the opinions of some scalpel-wielding men, were taking things into their own hands as to what kind of ass they wanted.

Stay Out of the Trees

While J-Lo’s and Ms. Kardashian’s posteriors are more likely a product of genetics rather than plastic surgery, most modern plus-sized butts have been nurtured and grown in the gym. In fact, many of these modern gym-goers seem to base their entire workout on shaping and toning the upper thighs and butt to the exclusion of all other body parts, save perhaps the abs.

And, much to their collective delight, they found the glutes to be particularly responsive to weight training, much more than any other female muscle. A few hundred glute thrusts here and a few hundred kickbacks there and their ass cheeks would billow out like bowls of dough placed by a fireplace.

But this butt mania can't be all because of a few influencers. Instead, I think, and bear with me here, that this butt renaissance has to do with some complex anthropological, evolutionary, and sociological underpinnings that have been partly overridden by alienation and depersonalization.

Okay, that’s a meatball of a sentence. What I’m trying to say is that the current butt mania is more than just fashion.

Consider that all mammals -- with the exception of humans -- mate from the rear, and it wasn't all that long ago, evolutionarily speaking, that humans did, too.

Our primitive relatives (along with most current-day mammals) exhibited periods of estrus where the females would be sexually receptive to males. This estrus was advertised by various sexual signals — the rump and labial lips would angry-up and increase in size.

These brief periods of estrus would result in multiple couplings in a brief period of time — sort of a temporally determined frat party.

This all appears to have changed, though, about 500,000 years ago when homo erectus established permanent home bases with shelter and fire. It was no longer biologically necessary to mate based on factors like safety and availability of food.

Consequently, human females lost their estrus cycles and became sexually receptive all the time. To advertise this delightful fact, their breasts and butt became permanently enlarged.

Mating, however, still took place largely from behind.

But something else was happening, evolutionary-wise. Homo erectus' brain was getting bigger, at least compared to Australopithecus, his low-rent cousin. Bigger brains needed bigger skulls, so the female pelvis started getting bigger. The pelvic opening grew longer and rounder and this adaptation probably forced the female erectus' legs farther apart while forcing her knees closer together.

This adaptation caused her to grow a bigger butt and new muscles to accommodate these changes, along with causing her to sway and wiggle when she walked, as perhaps best illustrated by Marilyn Monroe wearing that wool skirt in Niagara.

Unfortunately, making that ass bigger was actually contrary to the other stuff that was going on in the female body.

Consider the female monkey. When she mates – from behind -- she can get up and do monkey things without losing any of the sperm she just collected. She's on all fours, so her vaginal tract stays horizontal. She can hang from a tree and that egg will still get fertilized!

The human female, however, with her newfound bipedal, upright locomotion, along with her newly modified pelvis, has a vaginal tract that's practically vertical to the ground.

As such, anything that could keep her horizontal during and right after mating to keep future generations from dribbling down her leg would be a pretty good idea. If you wanted her to bear offspring, you needed to do everything possible to keep her out of a tree, which still pretty much bears true today.

Rear entry sex, because of modifications to the female frame, was on the way out. Sex had to get frontal for successful mating; the missionary position took the place of doggie style.

Additionally, all the eye-to-eye contact during frontal sex was important for strong pair bonding. Sex had to be not only functional, but personal too. After all, it was important for the male to stick around to protect the mother and infant.

The trouble was, all that engineering had gone into making that ass so damn attractive.  If the female was going to make the male interested in frontal sex, she had to do something, evolutionarily speaking, to make the front of her body more attractive.

According to anthropologist Desmond Morris in his landmark book, The Naked Ape, the "protuberant, hemispherical breasts of the female" are copies "of the fleshy buttocks, and the sharply defined red lips around the mouth must be copies of the red labia."

"If the male of our species was already primed to respond sexually to these signals when they emanated posteriorly from the genital region, then he would have built-in susceptibility to them if they could be reproduced in that form on the front of the female's body. And this, it would seem, is precisely what has happened, with the females carrying a duplicate set of buttocks and labia on their chests and mouth respectively."

Desmond, you just blew...my...mind!

Eventually, women developed permanently swollen, hairless breasts, along with full, reddish lips to emulate all the stuff that ancestors of man had once encountered clear-round the other side of the female body.

Enter several thousand years of face-to-face frontal sex. Enter millions of children who begat millions more, who in turn begat millions more. As a result, it seems the female butt, at least the Caucasian female butt, atrophied. You could probably have watched a school of them, naked, swimming across Lake Winnibigoshish and you couldn’t have distinguished them from a group of slim-hipped Swedish boys, so compact were their butts.

But, as I mentioned, along came the big-butted women who caused society to slip into its big-butt default mode, to defy these evolutionary trends of the last couple of hundred thousand years and grow back the big butts that had slowly, because of loss of purpose, shrunk down.

Add to that the fact that sex is now more recreational than procreational. People don't date, they hook up. Getting intimate is asking your partner's name...afterwards.

Eye contact is no longer needed. In fact, many would prefer not to look into each other's eyes. That's too...personal. Besides, it's just sex, no need to get all gushy over it.

As such, there seems to be a return to the butt and coitus more ferarum, which is Latin for “sex in the manner of the beast.” The butt has reclaimed the sexual mantle from the breasts and lips and hoisted it back on its beckoning fleshy brow.

Consequently, many of today’s females have adopted fashions that call attention to the posterior proclivities like never before. Low slung jeans, colorful candy-colored thongs, and molecule-thick spandex yoga pants shorts that lift and separate the butt cheeks are the uniforms of the day.

Add to that the higher and higher heels that puff the modern female butt clear out — just like her ancestors in estrus — making it increasingly difficult to squeeze by her in the grocery store aisle without getting at least a little bit friendly.

And then there are all those butt-jobs at the plastic surgeon's office. And the hip-hop songs that glorify ass. And the ubiquitous ad campaigns based on photos of rear ends.

We're clearly in an ass culture, but we'd better watch it, lest the evolutionary pendulum swing the other way and women start evolving into creatures with giant asses and no breasts that look kind of like NFL linemen.

So do your part to preserve the evolutionary status quo -- look into her eyes. Tell her she's beautiful. Tell her you love the way her breasts mimic her fleshy buttocks.

And afterwards, if she hasn’t run screaming out the door, keep her out of the trees.

References:

How to Stuff a Wild Bikini Bottom, Natasha Singer, NYT, March 2^nd, 2006, page E3

Sexuality — Female Evolution and Erotica — 2nd Edition, Rhawn Joseph, Ph.D. Neurodynamics, Brain Research Laboratory.

The Naked Ape, Desmond Morris, Dell Publishing, 1967