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 I knew it was for people with bodies worth loving, not awful ones like mine), but a clear statement that someone else flat-out loved a part of my body I hated—so it therefore must not be so bad. Why, I asked myself, why hadn’t I heard this song when I was 14 and really, really needed it?
But I had heard songs like it when I was 14—“Fat Bottomed Girls” by Queen, for instance, released in 1978, written by guitarist Brian May (who was straight even if singer Freddy Mercury wasn’t). I’d heard that song over and over and over. I’d never considered it anything but a joke, and a fairly insulting one at that, perhaps because it never bothered to explain how fat bottomed girls made the rockin’ world go round and because what the song really praises is the naughtiness and dirtiness of “big fat Fanny”—it says nothing about her beauty. Whereas something about Sir Mixalot’s insistence and the clear, obvious image of those strong, confident, sexy women made big butts seem beautiful, desirable and well, downright respectable in a way that nothing had before.
Not that the song negated all the ways butts are ridiculous. It’s bad to be the butt of a joke, and butts are the butt of jokes more than any other body part, certain to get a laugh in the most juvenile form of humor. But clearly they weren’t merely stinky, dirty, germy absurdities. It took me long enough to realize it, but big “healthy” butts really are powerful—and not just because they help you climb stairs. They’re also one of the things that make someone want to climb onto you.
So probably butt jokes are a way of diminishing the power of the ass, especially for young people who can sense that power but don’t understand it or know what to do about it. And maybe I was just unlucky, not only that I got an extra big butt, but that I got it when I did, when they were really out of style. There have certainly been times when big butts have been considered very attractive—right now, for instance, women are proud to have “junk in their trunk” and uploads videos online of themselves twerking, shaking their asses in a way I would have been really good at. In the late nineteenth century, women actually padded their butts and wore bustles. And even if women didn’t always exaggerate the size of their asses, they probably weren’t expected to have skinny, flat, boy butts for most of human history, the way they were in the blighted 1960s and ‘70s.
But the way I was most unlucky was that for so long I couldn’t hear any voice but the ones that told me I was deformed. I couldn’t bring myself to search out voices that might have told me I was OK. I discounted any evidence that I was.