Big Booty Beauty and the New Sexual Aesthetic

By Myra Mendible, American Sexuality Magazine. Posted January 6, 2009.

Of course, hip-hop culture has consistently celebrated the physicality of a big butt, and many a male rapper has sung the praises of a bountiful booty. As Tara Lockhart points out, Sir Mix-A-Lot has earned a hefty profit with his 1992 song, "Baby Got Back" (which was re-released on the 2000 Charlie's Angels soundtrack). Sir Mix-A-Lot's lyrics situate the fondness for a big butt "squarely within portions of the black community."

In this context, as in my Little Havana neighborhood, a woman with a generous posterior signals an invitation to sexual pleasure. Several specialty men's magazines have sprung up to feed this increasing market demand for models with ample booty. Unlike Playboy or Maxim, which cater to "breast men," magazines like King, Sweets and Smooth appeal to men who covet women with voluptuous derrieres. They sell "authenticity" as well, turning "booty love" into a sign of ethnic masculinity.

"Urban men, we like butts, we like hips. It's a black and Hispanic thing," says Antoine Clark, publisher of Sweets. Big booty isn't just profitable these days for magazine publishers, ad execs, retailers and rap artists. Some women's careers now ride, literally, on their butts. African American model Buffie the Body owes her fame and fortune to her huge butt. As a highly paid model in men's magazines, Buffie has found her calling in life by embodying the fantasies of butt lovers everywhere.

"People normally see the light-skinned, small girls … in magazines, and maybe they were just tired of that and wanted to see something different, something real," she told Ben Westhoff in an interview. "Even white guys are coming out of the closet, admitting their fetish for big butts! They were just always shy about it, sort of scared, before I hit it big. But now there are people from Switzerland, the U.K., Ireland and Canada who order calendars from me." Buffie concludes that if it weren't for her big butt she "wouldn't have made all this money."

Body Politics of Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton

Perhaps, as Erin Aubry Kaplan wrote recently in Salon magazine, "Lord knows, it's time the butt got some respect." Noting that a protruding butt has been "both vilified and fetishized as the most singular of all black female features, more unsettling than dark skin and full lips," Kaplan goes on to celebrate the emergence of Michelle Obama's "solid, round, black, Class A boo-ta" on the nation's political stage. With the election of Barack Obama, Kaplan argues, America finally has a first lady with an unabashedly bounteous behind: "As America fretted about [Barack] Obama's exoticism and he sought to calm the waters with speeches about unity and common experience. … Here was one clear signifier of blackness that couldn't be tamed, muted or otherwise made invisible." Kaplan rightly reminds us that, "Black women are not the only ones with protruding behinds. … How many gluteally endowed nonblack women have been derided for having a black ass? Well, Hillary [Rodham Clinton], for one."

It may well be that America's butt fling signals a growing acceptance of difference -- a desire to broaden the repertoire of acceptable body types and beauty myths. If this celebration of fulsome booty helps women move beyond the self-hatred and anxiety attached to body fat, or encourages ethnic pride in women whose bodies have historically been pathologized and denigrated -- then power to the butt, indeed. But then again, in a consumer society, fashion trends are short-lived, and the demand for novelty fuels profit. Will the buttocks be relegated to the margins of culture once more, disavowed and disowned by a fickle mainstream culture? Either way, I'll still be dreaming of a time when (to loosely paraphrase the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.), women will be judged by the content of their character and not the size of their butts. Now that would be truly bootyful.

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Myra Mendible teaches media and culture studies at Florida Gulf Coast University, where she is chairwoman of the Literature and Languages Department. She has published widely in a variety of peer-reviewed journals and is the editor of an interdisciplinary collection of essays, From Bananas to Buttocks: The Latina Body in Popular Film and Culture (University of Texas Press, 2007).

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