any form of physical exertion that involved catching or throwing or hitting a ball, though I adored dancing and riding my bike. My favorite foods were ice cream and steak, and I liked to eat giant spoonfuls of brown sugar when my mother wasn’t looking. Life was good, that day.
The next day I was a normal-looking person from the waist up and hideously disfigured from the waist down. Life, you would therefore understand, was no longer good.
When I entered puberty in the mid 1970s, the ideal for female bodies was boyishly slim, especially through the hips, butt and thighs. Big boobs were great; big butts were not; and your waist wasn’t supposed to be a whole lot smaller than your hips, despite the fact that most women really aren’t built that way. Clothes were designed for women who fit the ideal, not for all the women who simply didn’t want to walk around naked. This was especially true of designer jeans—Calvin Klein, Jordache, which became all the rage when I was in high school. They rose clear to your waist, meaning there were more points where they could fail to fit, and they rose almost straight—you couldn’t pack much extra flesh in either the front or the back. Designed to be worn skin tight, they made everyone who wore them look like a pre-pubescent from the waist down—apparently that was what the Jordache jingle meant by “the look I want to know better, the Jordache look.”
I never bought a pair, though driven by a combination of longing and masochism, I’d try some on every so often. Even if I chose a pair two or three sizes larger than what I wore in other types of clothes, it would be a struggle to get the jeans over my hips and butt. But eventually they’d settle into place; I’d fasten the button and pull up the zipper—only to see my waist floating tragically in the enormous sea of air between me and the waistband of jeans so stiff they stayed upright, defying gravity in ways my ass never could. There was so much excess fabric that I couldn’t even use a belt to cinch them around my scrawny waist. Staring hopelessly into the dressing room mirror, I would confront the shameful and desperate truth: the jeans would never fit me, and I would never fit the world.
It never occurred to me in 1979 to think about what a butt’s ideal shape might be according to any criterion but the standards for beauty of the day. At the time I learned to hate my ass, aesthetics decreed that flat asses were the best asses, so that had to be true. But the bulging curve on each side of the posterior base of our trunks actually sets us apart from other primates, most of whom have much flatter asses because they don’t need a big round one like ours. A well-known factoid about the butt is that the gluteus maximus, the muscle responsible for those bulges, is the largest and most powerful muscle in the body.