Butts cover art

Butts

A Backstory

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Butts

By: Heather Radke, Heather Radke - introduction
Narrated by: Emily Tremaine
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About this listen

 “Winning, cheeky, and illuminating….What appears initially as a folly with a look-at-this cover and title becomes, thanks to Radke’s intelligence and curiosity, something much meatier, entertaining, and wise.” —The Washington Post

“Lively and thorough, Butts is the best kind of nonfiction.” —Esquire, Best Books of 2022

A “carefully researched and reported work of cultural history” (The New York Times) that explores how one body part has influenced the female—and human—experience for centuries, and what that obsession reveals about our lives today.

Whether we love them or hate them, think they’re sexy, think they’re strange, consider them too big, too small, or anywhere in between, humans have a complicated relationship with butts. It is a body part unique to humans, critical to our evolution and survival, and yet it has come to signify so much more: sex, desire, comedy, shame. A woman’s butt, in particular, is forever being assessed, criticized, and objectified, from anxious self-examinations trying on jeans in department store dressing rooms to enduring crass remarks while walking down a street or high school hallways. But why? In Butts: A Backstory, reporter, essayist, and RadioLab contributing editor Heather Radke is determined to find out.

Spanning nearly two centuries, this “whip-smart” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) cultural history takes us from the performance halls of 19th-century London to the aerobics studios of the 1980s, the music video set of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” and the mountains of Arizona, where every year humans and horses race in a feat of gluteal endurance. Along the way, she meets evolutionary biologists who study how butts first developed; models whose measurements have defined jean sizing for millions of women; and the fitness gurus who created fads like “Buns of Steel.” She also examines the central importance of race through figures like Sarah Bartmann, once known as the “Venus Hottentot,” Josephine Baker, Jennifer Lopez, and other women of color whose butts have been idolized, envied, and despised.

Part deep dive reportage, part personal journey, part cabinet of curiosities, Butts is an entertaining, illuminating, and thoughtful examination of why certain silhouettes come in and out of fashion—and how larger ideas about race, control, liberation, and power affect our most private feelings about ourselves and others. Body Positivity Gender Studies Social Sciences Women

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Most relevant
Who would have thought the fat and bones that sit on our pelvis would have the literal and historical weight to have an entire book written about its shape and function. The amount of research that went into these stories have such an extensive merit of knowing and comprehension. Radke takes the reader to the origins and through ways of our behinds through an anthropological, racial, civil and practical lens, and I was animated by its content.

An anthropological & practical lens of the bum

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the book is well written, and well documented, but i felt the topic was not substantial enough to merit so much dissecting and attention, and i think this is also because the perspective is mainly focused on an incomplete american view of things. it was interesting, and some of the remarks the author made were quite on point with my personal values, but just a bit of a stretch, as a book, with this subject, and these chapters. i would have also wished for it to have more of the sparks of psychological analysis noticeable here and there, those parts were brilliant.

interesting, but not substantial

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