Maybe, dear reader, you are one for only the most respectable of books, but for myself, I couldn’t help but pick up Butts: A Backstory for the author’s sheer audacity to write a butt book to begin with.
Let’s start with a spoiler – no pictures. Now, moving on…
The book is effectively a collection of essays, exploring the culture, historical import, political ramifications, and psychological impact of the human derriere. While the chapters were cohesive in themselves, I felt the flow between subjects, chapter to chapter, was somewhat disjointed. I could almost sense the author’s proposal to the publisher, promising the many angles from which to approach the subject of butts and being checked off one by one instead of woven into an overarching thesis.
The book is more about fashion, race, gender norms, and culture than about the butts themselves. Instead, butts are the lens used to center these discussions, but I get the sense that a similar book could be written about breasts, women’s makeup, shoes, penises, and so on. Butts become the artifact by which our cultural tendencies can be understood throughout history.
The author also centers a fair amount of the discussion on her own butt, how it has made her feel throughout her life, and how her butt has served as a tool of empowerment, cultural appropriation, and shame.
It was an interesting approach, and there’s some very insightful discussion of racial norms throughout history and the ways that fashion has morphed to both accentuate and deemphasize the butt over time. But I do wonder if aspects of the butt as a cultural phenomenon weren’t missed. In addition to being sexual symbols, butts have also been comedy symbols. People can be pains in the butt, butt heads, and butts of the joke. They can have their heads up their butts and sometimes tell others to kiss their butts.
Butts: A Backstory had a story to tell and used the butt to explore certain cultural and historical phenomena, but one wonders if there isn’t a deeper exploration of the human butt still out there, waiting to be probed.