When I was 25, a dance troupe from the Ivory Coast came to town, and in addition to a couple of performances, offered a free day-long workshop. It was exactly the sort of thing I couldn’t resist. Decades later, I still remember one of the dance moves and the message behind it: a stylized, slightly exaggerated head wobble, a way of saying that you were grown up enough to do something as dangerous as jerk your head around without risking serious injury to your neck. Of course you didn’t just stand there and wag your head from side to side: you also thrust your butt out, bent your knees, stepped forward and back with one gracefully pointed foot and then the other, all while rolling your hips. Explicitly designed to announce sexual maturity and availability, it was also joyous and fun, and I was happy to try out it on a dance floor one weekend with my friends. I probably shouldn’t have been so surprised when a cluster of men formed behind me, watching what I did with my backside. But I was surprised. I still didn’t think my butt was beautiful, but I was finally starting to understand that maybe men really did like to see asses in action.
And then, a few years after that, I saw the video to Sir Mixalot’s “Baby Got Back.”
You know this song. It starts off with two white girls looking at the very curvy posterior of a black woman in a skin-tight yellow dress. One teen says to the other, “Oh my god, Becky, look at her butt. It is so big.” The girl continues her tirade about the size and grossness of this woman’s butt, how “black” she is, until Sir Mixalot himself begins to rap, announcing, “I like big butts!” as the camera pulls back to reveal that he stands on a giant ass.
I watched the whole video, riveted, confused, scarcely daring to breathe. Five black women in tight yellow shorts jumped, bent over, shook their generous asses. It was sexist. It objectified women. But it’s five million times better to be a desirable object than a loathsome one. And the sentiment was undeniably genuine and clear: Sir Mixalot really did like big butts. The other men in the video seemed to agree. The fat-bottomed women dancing so vigorously were strong, confident, sexy, beautiful. I could see, in ways I never had before, that these women weren’t sexy despite their asses; they were sexy because of their asses. A word used repeatedly to describe their butts was “healthy.” The way they showed off their asses certainly seemed healthier than the way I had tried to hide mine.
The song ended. I didn’t move. If I’d had a replay button, I would have watched it again. Something important had happened, and I sat on my ass and thought about it. I realized that to counter the horrible messages I’d received about how awful my body was, I needed not just acceptance, not just encouragement to love myself as I was (that was all so easy to dismiss, since