Butts: A Backstory
Author
Heather Radke
Started
February 2nd 2026
Finished
February 9th 2026
Publisher
Avid Reader / Simon & Schuster
Format
Audiobook
Length
8:13 hrs | 320 pgs
Published
November 2022
Genre
Nonfiction, History, Sociology, Anatomy
Rating
Notes
A fun, but also sad, social / historical survey of the butt. Starting off with the anatomical reasons and benefits of the Butt- (Allowing us to run farther and faster and be more successful in movement and hunting)
The real crux of the book starts with the history of Sarah Baartman, an African woman with a large butt, who was taken and paraded around as a side show the "Hottentot Venus".
Her introduction to the West began the association of large butts (especially those of the Africans) with sexual deviance. And there was this push and pull with butts as provocation ever since. For example, the introduction of the bustle which gave the illusion of a large butt without any actual anatomical structures. Interestingly, later the Asian women later in the 1875s also became accused of overt sexualization based on their bodies. leading to the Page Act of 1875.
A lot of the book dealt with what was normal and what wasn't. a particularly interesting was the quest to find "Norma" the average American woman in the 1940s, 15000 women were measured to find the average (but a lot were thrown out). When standardized clothes were frist invented they used the man's chest as the basis, they tried to do the same thing with women and it was impossible. The author then writes about how fit modeling and fashion designing works, and it's very interesting.
The end of the book then gets to the modern focus on butts after the 80s/90s obsession with thinness, ironically though mostly centered on non-African people: Miley Cyrus and the Kardasians. The author talks a lot about how they get to appropriate aesthetics like Miley having a removable butt she can use on stage and then go back to using her Whiteness. One historical footnote I found was about the invention of twerk, coming rom the Congo Square in New Orleans where slaves from the Corte De Ivor did dances on Sunday, an how Twerk came from a bounce song in 1993 by Jubilee. An interesting plastic surgery note is that in 2012 butt augmentation was not even listed as a procedure and then a year later there were thousands of cases. I think one of the salient statements the author makes is how Blackness is always other, and it allows people to join and leave as they please because it takes everyone.