I learned so much from this book and I thoroughly recommend it to anyone who doesn't mind a few posterior-based puns. Radke infuses her exploration with a strong, intersectional feminist slant, looking at how sexism and racism have informed everything from the so-called Hottentot Venus of the early 19th century through to the Buns of Steel craze, Sir Mix-A-Lot, JLo, and Miley Cyrus.īutts: A Backstory is my favorite kind of nonfiction: tackling a curious subject in an approachable way, and a little cheeky (pun only kind of intended). While it opens with a bit on how and why humans evolved butts that are more fatty than the rear ends of other animals, it primarily focuses on how the 'ideal' body has changed over the last 200 or so years and how women's butts reflect those changes. To call this 'a history of butts' may be the most pithy and eye-catching description, but it is actually a little misleading. Seriously, though, a history of butts sounds like kind of a ridiculous premise for a book but Heather Radke has done a fantastic job. As my husband put it, I wanted books about things that are thick. I requested this book on my Christmas list, along with a history of the Oxford Dictionary.

Which is fine, although it echoes one of my largest complaints about academia, in that, when stripped of the bullshit, it usually lapses into the prolix to make the same damn point over and over. It is largely the cultural analysis of Twitter 2022, grafted onto whatever historical pivot point or social phenomena she is talking about. The pop culture analysis-which I largely agreed with-tended to be repetitive or superficial. In 2022, if you don't have you head in your own aforementioned butt, you are likely aware already that fitness programs can tend to focus on bodily sculpting instead of holistic health, or that the illusions of modeling (and now Instagram) can create unrealistic expectations for young women. I am largely familiar with the shifts of the last sixty years, and chapters on the Flappers or European history were more engaging to me, personally.

I actually craved more historical analysis to understand how our collective opinion of the butt has mutated over the years. I am not sure there is enough room for all of this, which Radke acknowledges early on, trying to get ahead of the problem by saying her work does not claim to be an exhaustive history or political analysis of the butt. Radke is certainly ambitious, melding history, personal anecdotes, scholarly research, feminist political frameworks, and plenty of pop culture, all in a relatively short work. This is a fun book, which is not a descriptor usually at the forefront of a nonfiction work. Butts! Can't live without them, can't live without them!

Butts backstory