Mod Edit: This is a thread about societal expectations and women's health. This is not a thread for drive-bys about what kind of features you find attractive.
Guardian
Bottoms are big business in 2018. For a generation whose mothers spent mornings trying to shrink their thighs in front of Jane Fonda videos, today there is no such thing as a bum that's too big. The perfect body has changed every decade over the past century, stretching and curving over time like a time-lapse sand dune.
Body parts have come in and out of fashion depending on the mainstream obsessions of the moment, from the lean boyish chests of flappers in the 1920s, signifying liberation from corsetry, through 30s bosoms and 40s legs, to the sexualised femininity of Marilyn Monroe's hourglass figure, and on eventually to 80s muscles (Power! Strength!), and 90s, well, bones. Extreme slenderness was maintained beyond the millennium, but with added breasts, a modified Monroe, minus the tummy.
"Big bums are now associated with women with attitude and a sway who are non-white, which is desired," says Susie Orbach, the psychotherapist who has been analysing women's relationships to their bodies for more than 40 years.
In 2012, I spoke to a group of 20-year-olds about the media pressure to change their bodies. Rather than extreme thinness, they said the pressure was to look sexy. "Everyone wants to look like Kim Kardashian, not Kate Moss. Curves, not bones." Which sounded like a positive development, a move away from disordered eating and dangerous attempts at control, until they pointed out that it also requires a tiny waist. You can starve yourself bony, but "the sexy body is much more unattainable".
In 2014, the focus turned to the bottom. Butt lift injections and buttock implants were the fastest-growing plastic surgery in the US, up 58% from 2012. The French sociologist Jean-Claude Kaufmann cited economic reasons. "In uncertain times, people look for security," he said. "Men are attracted to women's hips and the buttocks for security and reassurance. Women respond to this. It's deeply psychological." Or, from Jennifer Lopez: "The bigger your butt is the more attention you get." In 2015, the American Society of Plastic Surgery dubbed 2015 another "year of the rear".
And then came the deaths, 33 of them in the US following complications from BBLs in the last five years.
Today, the aesthetic ideals of pornography have seeped into the mainstream. If a woman isn't built with a big bum, exercise might reshape it, but there's no diet that can create it, hence the booming business in surgery and cosmetic procedures, as well as entry-level purchases, such as firming creams and "butt lift" leggings. At an average cost of £3,000 abroad and £8,000 in the UK, the BBL uses liposuction to extract fat from a patient's thighs to then inject it into their buttocks, but less invasive treatments proliferate. Nearly 320,000 buttock augmentation or buttock lift procedures were performed globally in 2015, according to the International Society of Aesthetic and Cosmetic Surgery, a 30% increase in the number of procedures since 2014.
"My generation are 100% more interested in the shape of our bottoms, rather than our boobs," 24-year-old Beth Cobb told a newspaper, explaining her investment in weekly bum-lift procedures using a roller that emits microcurrents of electricity. "It's probably because we see a lot more celebs showing them off on Instagram. Now we have the technology, we can make our bodies change to fit the trends, not just change what we wear."
In 2014, American Vogue declared the big bum on trend... for white women: as soon as a trend goes mainstream, women of colour are eliminated from the story. "So common is the process, it has its own Twitter hashtag," wrote Yomi Adegoke. "#Columbising – when, like Christopher Columbus, white people think they have discovered something that was already in existence." There is that. There is also the rise of "body positivity", of women sharing pictures of curves they'd been taught were shameful. And there is Instagram as a platform for cosmetic surgeons to advertise directly at women who, tipsy on the combination of insecurity and images of arses as empowerment, will click through to adjust their own.
It's not just cosmetic surgeons who claim they can empower women. For those who felt their bodies had been dismissed and sneered at for decades, but now find their arses the height of fashion, the big butt trend has been sold by the body positive movement as a step towards a more diverse body acceptance. But… can body trends ever be a good thing? "The move towards bigger bums isn't a good thing," says Orbach, "It's a thing. What may at first seem to mirror some women's previously excluded experience simultaneously excludes other women, which would be OK if commerce weren't riding on it and suggesting that big bums are the solution."
While fatalities are the most headline-grabbing result of Britain's new pursuit of the bigger bottom, the implications of a changing obsession are less shocking, and more depressing. A realisation. Women will never be comfortable in their bodies, because the goal posts of what is acceptable keep shifting. We are encouraged to remain constantly at war with ourselves, shrinking, growing and utilising all the evolving technology that claims to alleviate the same anxiety that, simply by existing, it continues to feed us. And, to do so – to try and create your own Kardashian butt – is a rational reaction in 2018. The alternative is to be irrelevant, unbeautiful, and therefore, unseen.
Someone rescue society from the "aesthetic ideals of pornography".
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