5. The rise (and rise, and inevitable fall) of the ass

That bum you like is coming back in style

(I’ve written about the R Kelly verdict for UnHerd, so here’s something completely different for the newsletter.)

The one, the true, the supreme ass

Are asses over? This is an unhappy thing to have to consider if you’re me, a person with an ass. It is a strange experience to have a body part come into fashion; it’s even stranger when it’s a body part which you’ve spent most of your life considering misshapen and embarrassing. I am a lady with back. Big in the behind. The word now is “thicc”. The word when I was a teenager was “fat bum”, which sounds much less pleasing.

If you’re a woman, you’ll probably know the merciless tyranny of jeans fashion, which will shift around with little to no consideration for what actually looks good on you personally. When I was in my early twenties — which is, in my opinion, the peak time for making unflattering clothing decisions given the combination of disposable income, inexperience and impressionability — the jeans style du jour was the bootcut hipster. Think, obviously, of Britney: hipbones showing, tight stomach on display, trousers so low you needed a Brazilian to be decent.

Problem one: I am quite short, and bootcut jeans tended to overhang my trainers and drag in puddles. Problem two: I had a baby in 2002, at which point I ceased to have the kind of abs I wanted on show in any sense, and yet was still cursed with a constant (and, in winter, constantly cold) slice of visible midriff. Problem three: my (large) ass was in a constant war with the low-slung waistband. Every time I sat down, I was confronted with the inevitable outcome of insufficient fabric vs abundant behind (as were any unfortunate onlookers).

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So the noughties were a pretty unhappy era for me, my rear and denim. You might assume, given all this, that I would have embraced without reservation the skinny jean, which started to come in from the middle of the decade. Absolutely not. I was a skinny jean refusenik, convinced that (given my, as mentioned, large ass) it would be fatal to surrender the allegedly figure-redeeming powers of the bootcut.

Then, in 2007, I saw that a friend in New York had written a blog post. And it was all about ass: the quest for the perfect one, in which “perfection” was defined as full, high and round. I was sceptical. If I knew one thing, it was that nobody wants to have a big bum.

I was wrong: 2007 was also the year Keeping Up With the Kardashians debuted, and launched the Age of the Ass. The Kardashian figure was ostentatiously hourglassy: slim waist and epic hips. Kim denied that her behind was surgically enhanced, having an ultrasound on the show to prove she was sans implants. But implants are not the way to achieve this look anyway. The best way to create it is by liposuctioning fat from one part of the body and injecting it (carefully, avoiding arteries where it would cause an embolism) into the rear — a procedure called the Brazilian butt lift.

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The BBL is now the fastest-growing cosmetic surgery in the world. It’s also the most dangerous: one in every 3,000 operations is estimated to lead to the death of the patient. That’s a heck of a ratio to dice with just for the chance of the ideal rump.

Why do this to yourself? You can make an evopsych stab at explaining it as a “signal of fertility”, but the truth is that the “skinny-thicc” figure doesn’t look natural, so why would any natural instinct be tailored to respond to it? Now the big ass look is giving way to a more subtle sculpted shape (according to this video I watched recently, anyway), it’s obvious just how odd a figure like Kim’s in the “break the internet” picture (above) is.

Dan Savage wrote something that’s always stuck with me, in a 2004 column — not about BBLs, but about the supersize boob jobs that were popular in the ’90s (and look, Dan Savage is not always an exemplar of feminist analysis, but seriously I don’t think Dworkin could have nailed this harder):

“The sudden appearance of women with ridiculously huge boob implants was arousing in part because of its shock value. There was the shock of women with such exaggerated racks, of course, but there was also the more important and, sadly, the infinitely more arousing shock of women finding a novel new way to imperil their health in order to attract the attention of men. Men have always found it arousing when women go to bizarre extremes — self-mutilation (bound feet) and self-torture (high heels) — to make themselves more attractive. That enormoboobs played into the deeply ingrained and thoroughly eroticized misogyny that plagues all human cultures to varying degrees was lost on most men.”

In other words: the point of these extreme procedures isn’t to signal “reproductive fitness” by any inherent standard. It’s to signal compliance. An outrageously exaggerated butt is a way of announcing your submission — to beauty standards, to men. When enough women are doing the same thing, it ceases to send that message, and something else will emerge as the next signifier of supreme femininity. This is bad news for my fleetingly a la mode ass, of course. But at least I know never to inflict hipster jeans on it again.

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I love hearing from readers, so if you have any thoughts on noughties denim, plastic surgery or the shifting fortunes of the ass, please reply or leave a comment!

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Gimme, gimme more…

• There’s a new documentary about Britney! I haven’t watched it yet, though this review makes it sound like schlocky stuff

• No perky exclam on this one. Katie Price has been busted drink driving

• Jennifer Aniston has launched a beauty brand! Or rather, she’s launched a “glossing detangler” AKA a leave-in conditioner AKA a product I hope works better than the thing my mum used to splodge on my hair in the hope I wouldn’t scream and cry when the comb came out. I should probably, and will probably, write something at some point about celebrity brands: this looks to be a smartly put-together one, at least, given Aniston is synonymous with amazing hair