Is Kim Kardashian guilty of cultural appropriation? (TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images)

The human butt has long been the object of all manner of obsessions. We worry over it: its size, its shape, whether or not it has cellulite on it, how it looks in a pair of jeans. But now, a new source of concern emerges: the alarming possibility that one’s butt — or at least, one’s relationship to butts generally — is racist.
For this we may thank the existence of Butts: A Backstory, a new book by journalist Heather Radke. To be fair, it surely is not Radke’s intention to inculcate racial anxiety in her reader: Butts feels like a passion project, deeply researched and fun to read, offering a deep dive into the history and culture of the human rear end, from the Venus Callipyge (from whose name the word “callipygian” is derived) to Buns of Steel to Sir Mix-A-Lot’s seminal rap celebrating all things gluteal. It is a topic ripe for well-rounded analysis, so to speak. But having been written in the very particular milieu of 2020s America, Butts unfortunately falls victim to the contemporary vogue for viewing all matters of culture through a racial lens. The result is a work that not only flattens the butt, figuratively, but makes the book feel ultimately less like an anthropological study and more like an entry into the crowded genre of works which serve to stoke the white liberal guilt of the NPR tote bag set.
The concept of cultural appropriation has always struck me as both fundamentally misguided and historically illiterate, arising from a studied incuriosity about both the inherent contagiousness of culture and the mimetic nature of human beings. But when it comes to the remixing of thing such as textiles, hairdos or fashion trends across cultures, the appropriation complaints seem at least understandable, if not persuasive: there’s a conscious element there, a choice to take what looked interesting on someone else and adorn your own body in the same way. Here, though, the appropriated item is literally a body part — the size and shape of which we rather notoriously have no control over. And yet Radke employs more or less the same argument to stigmatise the appropriation of butts as is often made about dreadlocks or bindis.
The book is insistent on this front: butts are a black thing, and liking them is a black male thing, and the appreciation of butts by non-black folks represents a moral error: cultural theft or stolen valour or some potent mix of the two. Among the scholars and experts quoted by Radke on this front is one who asserts that the contemporary appreciation of butts by the wider male population is “coming from Black male desire. Straight-up, point-blank. It’s only through Black males and their gaze that white men are starting to take notice”. To paraphrase a popular meme: “Fellas, is it racist to like butts?”
Perhaps needless to say, a wealth of cultural artefacts — from the aforementioned Venus sculpture to the works of Peter Paul Rubens to certain showtunes of the Seventies — belie the notion that white guys were oblivious to the existence of butts until black men made it cool to notice them. But the cultural legacy of the butt is undeniably entangled with the legacy of racism and eugenics, including a sordid and repellent history wherein certain anthropologists of the white male variety both fetishised the physiques of black women with ample backsides and conflated their peculiarities with savagery and promiscuity.
Most prominent in this history is the case of Sarah Baartman, to whom Radke devotes an entire chapter plus countless references: Baartman was a member of the Khoekhoe tribe in South Africa, who in the early 1800s was coerced into travelling to Europe and participating in a freak show-style exhibition in which onlookers gawked at — and sometimes poked or grabbed — her buttocks. If Baartman’s feelings about this remain somewhat mysterious (the records of the time are ambiguous as to how voluntary her participation was), the motivations of the men who trafficked her are less so: anthropologists of the time were obsessed with categorising humans into a racial hierarchy. It wasn’t just Baartman’s butt that fascinated them but her entire body, including the shape of her skull and her elongated labia, which were held up as evidence that she (and hence all black women) were a lower order of human being.
Certainly, it is impossible to do justice to the history of butts without devoting ample space to Baartman. But it’s one thing to give due scrutiny to the fact that some 19th century anthropologists indulged in the repugnant racial stereotyping of black women’s bodies and body parts; it’s another to replicate it ourselves — or to assume that other people are.
Radke does assume, though — repeatedly, persistently, and sometimes in spite of alternative theories or evidence to the contrary. This includes advancing the argument that bustles, the Victorian-era fashion that trended more than 50 years after Sarah Baartman’s death, were inspired by her singular figure — and that white women were coyly, perhaps even consciously, appropriating Baartman’s silhouette in an act of racist fetishisation. Notably, Radke is the first to acknowledge the obvious flaw in her argument: “There is also a question of why a late-19th-century woman would have wanted to look like Sarah Baartman, whose silhouette had been used as the quintessential example of African as subhuman,” she writes. Why, indeed? But Radke answers this question with some crude stereotyping of her own: “White culture and fashion have both proved relentlessly adept at cherry-picking throughout the centuries, finding a way to poach the parts of other people’s culture, histories, and bodies that suit them and leave behind the rest.”
Why would 19th century women have aspired to the silhouette of a sexually promiscuous savage? Because they were a bunch of Karens, that’s why (and here the self-loathing contemporary white woman reader is surely nodding along).
By the time Butts comes around to analysing the contemporary derriere discourse, its conclusions are all but foregone: the political is not just personal, but anatomical. The book calls multiple women, including Jennifer Lopez, Kim Kardashian, and Miley Cyrus, to account for their appropriation of butts, which are understood to belong metaphorically if not literally to black women. The most scathing critique is directed at the then-21-year-old Cyrus, whose twerking at the VMAs is described as “adopting and exploiting a form of dance that had long been popular in poor and working-class Black communities and simultaneously playing into the stereotype of the hypersexual Black woman”. The mainstreaming of butts as a thing to be admired, then, is the ultimate act of Columbusing: “The butt had always been there, even if white people failed to notice for decades.”
There is also the curious wrinkle in Radke’s section on the history of twerking, which credits its popularisation to a male drag queen named Big Freedia. The implicit suggestion is that this movement style is less offensive when performed by a man dressed as a woman than by a white woman with a tiny butt.
Butts doesn’t claim to be a story with a moral, but one nevertheless emerges: everyone may have a butt, but butts are not for everyone. And it is worth noting that however much baggage it assigns the white men who like butts, its implications are even more fraught for the white women to whom the butts are attached. One gets the sense that non-black women are not supposed to have big butts — that those who do have accomplished something unnatural if not outright suspicious. And if you insist on having a butt (and, really, do you have to?), then you must under no circumstances be proud of it, or accept positive attention for it, or — heaven forfend — make it part of your brand.
Ironically, the author of this book is herself a white woman with a large backside, a fact of which she periodically reminds the reader. And yet, Butts thoroughly subsumes its subject matter into the cultural appropriation discourse in a way that implicitly impugns all the non-black women who look — at least from behind — a hell of a lot more like Nicki Minaj than Kate Moss, women who perhaps hoped that their own big butts might be counted among those Sir Mix-a-Lot cannot lie about liking. It is worth noting, too, that the women hung out to dry by this argument are the same ones who other progressive identitarian rhetoric almost invariably fails to account for: the more it indulges in the archetype of the assless willowy white woman, the more Butts excludes from its imagination the poor and working class — whose butts, along with everything else, tend to be bigger. It fails to account, too, for those from ethnic backgrounds where a bigger butt — or, as one of my Jewish great-grandmothers might have said, a nice round tuchus — is the norm.
All told, Butts offers an interesting if somewhat monomaniacal look back at the cultural history of the derriere. But as for how to view our backsides moving forward — especially if you happen to be a woman in possession of a big butt yourself — the book finds itself at something of a loss. Those in search of body positivity will not find it here; Radke is firm on this front, that white women who embrace their big butts are guilty of what Toni Morrison called “playing in the dark”, dabbling thoughtlessly with a culture, an aesthetic, a physique that doesn’t really belong to them. The best these women can hope for, it seems, is to look at their bodies the way Radke does in the final pages, with a sort of resigned acceptance: her butt, she says, is “just a fact”. On the one hand, this is better than explicitly instructing women to feel ashamed of their bodies (although implicitly, one gets the sense that shame is preferable to the confident, twerking alternative). But after some 200 pages of narrative about the political, sexual, cultural, historical baggage with which the butt is laden, it feels a bit empty, a bit like a cop-out. It could even be said — not by me, but by someone — that Butts has a hole in it.
The ridiculousness and political opportunism of #MeToo is making me not take #MeToo accusations as seriously. Touching my shoulder in the office twenty years ago isn’t ‘traumatising’ or worthy of police involvement. I’m a woman, I’ve experienced a LOT of inappropriate male behaviour over my lifetime, some more serious than others, it’s not as if I don’t understand. But you can’t make a touched knee a police case years after the fact when you didn’t even say ‘no’ at the time. No means No. But you have to say it. The onus is still on men to do more of the chasing so how is a man meant to flirt at a party with someone he likes, and who is possibly flirting back, without taking a chance here and there?? Do women really want a guy too afraid to make a move at all? These boundaries used to be policed by social etiquettes and women being clear in the moment with a No or a slap in the face. When did women become such cowardly pussies that they couldn’t take that responsibility? Because that’s what these cases seem to revolve around. Knee touching, hugging, inappropriate jokes. Not rape, not stalking, not discrimination in the workplace. In 2021 men know pretty much anything they do or say could potentially get them accused or fired. They know. And we’re seeing behaviours that back that up. Men are actually taking steps to protect *themselves* because despite our supposedly enlightened, empowered times there are women out there who don’t like being scorned, and who are perfectly capable of lying or exaggerating to get their own way. I’ve seen that bad behaviour too. And they often get away with it in just as vile and destructive a way. Sexual politics is never black and white, it’s not just a men bad/ women victim equation. The law is supposed to presume innocence not bow to the convenient presumption of guilt in trial by media. Intent is important. Outcome is important. Did the man not accept the No, did he physically hurt you, verbally abuse you, did he take a No and then pass you over for the promotion you deserved, or that he promised you while he thought he had a chance? Those elements seem somewhat absent. When I read the Bill Cosby accusations I felt genuine anger, Jimmy Savile, anger. That’s my usual reaction to abusive behaviour. So why don’t I feel that way about this? In the Prince Andrew case apparently a Spitting Image puppet touching a breast at a party 20 years ago has left the ‘victim’ trying to ‘move on from the trauma’. Really? You find that traumatising? Grow up. If MeToo is to be taken seriously male behaviour needs to be called out there and then and the benefit of MeToo should be that any negative repercussions for calling it out on the woman would be the genuine protections of the law. These stunning and brave accusers need to start being stunning and brave in the moment so men don’t continue to see this low level bad behaviour as harmless. Most of these accusations of abuse and harassment don’t, in my mind, constitute anything worth going to the police or the press for, they should be dealt with immediately and personally and there is a danger in making a touched knee into a crime as serious as rape or real harassment. The fact that these allegations also seem to be politically motivated demeans their case. It’s like we see with BLM, everything is becoming racist because victimhood is becoming increasingly profitable and ideologically useful. The consequences be damned. This is paying a great disservice to relationships between races and genders and diminishing the impact of real racism and sexual violence or discrimination. Cuomo should have been taken down for his real and political crimes. Hugging someone in the office, sorry but that’s pathetic.
Very well said. Couldn’t agree with you more.
You make an important point that I have long wanted to shout from the rooftops. A slap on the face should be the response to inappropriate sexual behaviour. Teach it in schools right now.
Oh, sorry. That’s now called assault. My mistake.
It could also be deemed appropriate self-defence in the face of inappropriate behaviour.
I actually agree haha
I agree. And I know it is controversial, I am not sure why, but I also feel that the accused and accuser should remain anonymous until the latter is proven guilty. If the accused crimes are so serious in nature, then they should be detained temporarily, but if the accuser’s claims prove to be false. They should face consequences that are equal and be detained for a similar period. Similar to if one is found to have committed fraud.
I do not doubt that sexually inappropriate behaviour takes place, however, the #metoo movement has become a vehicle for far-reaching political agendas and is causing a measurable degree of social division.
The reason we can’t give “consequences” to people who falsely accuse someone of a crime is that everyone would be afraid to report any crime. For example, if you are mugged, and you give a description to the police that leads to a false arrest, you could be charged with a crime. You would probably be terrified of giving any kind of witness statement for any reason. This would be a free pass for criminals to victimize you or anyone else they wanted.
Well said. Nobody likes sleazeballs, but a slap on the face or a put down is surely better than calling the police for something minor.
And is the tindr meat market really better than the risk that some men might genuinely misread the signals they are getting in a face to face situation.
Very well put but I have to say I’ve experienced a LOT of inappropriate female behaviour over my lifetime.
There will always be the chronically stupid, but for a very long time now men have been very well aware that anything they say or do could get them into serious trouble and likely fired. It is far more common in my experience for women to make sexually loaded comments/gestures and no one dares challenge them over it.
As for men doing the chasing, why on earth would they want to do that?
While I agree with much of what you say, it is a very long spiel somewhat missing the point that Cuomo’s real crimes are far worse than groping a few women. He was an appallingly bad leader in the covid crisis, cauing the deaths of thousands of elderly people, while deciding that a good use of his time was to write a book. He was lionised by the American Left and nearly all the mainstream media on the grounds he opposed Trump.
What next? Politicians who kiss babies will be accused of paedophilia?
Cuomo’s state had one of the worst records on Covid deaths in the western world. Whether he handled it well should be what matters. From this side of the pond, the US media seemed to be so obsessed with Trump that Cuomo got a free pass.
Cuomo was not brought down by his inability to follow changing social customs over decades as by changing circumstances since Biden won the Presidency. For most of last year, the narrative in the Democrat supporting media was that Trump had made a mess of Covid but Governor Cuomo was an example of a Democrat who had in contrast responded competently. The care home deaths were covered up and Cuomo was given a $5m book deal. He was seen as playing a positive role in getting Biden elected.
All this changed with Biden’s election victory. Cuomo had served his purpose and he was now seen as a threat to Harris winning the nomination for the 2024 election. He had to be politically eliminated. Fortunately for the Democrat Establishment, this was easy. The protection he had received from prominent women such as Melissa DeRosa and Democrat controlled organisations linked to the MeToo movement were removed. The accusations of sexual harassment which have been suppressed for years could now be made public. The small piranhas in New York politics, people such as Letitia James who want to replace Cuomo as Governor, were given the green light to attack him.
Cuomo is the third successive Governor of New York to fail to finish his term due to a sex scandal. All were Democrats.
The best part about this whole thing is that Letitia James, the New York Attorney General, is doing the same thing to Cuomo that he did to Eliot Spitzer, the previous governor, when he was the Attorney General. Cannot make this stuff up kids!
Probably the most balanced/sensible article about #metoo I’ve read, although I’d not heard of the man. So many creepy politicos, just keeping up with the ones in my on country takes up more time than I have.
Pity all his celebrity fans that came out as ‘Cuomosexual’. How quick they are to disown him. With friends like these who needs enemies?
I’m looking forward to the time when all the sanctimonious finger pointers, the self righteous accusers and the band wagon jumping self promoters get their own #Metoo moment.
Because, as sure as eggs are eggs, (although gender neutral and non binary eggs are also available) nobody living on this earth is without some dodgy stain on their reputation.
And while all this pointless effort and energy is being expended on such issues, real world problems are not getting the necessary attention.
The wasted paper used on the report and the hot air expended by the protagonists are both environmental crimes. Get those fingers out and start pointing immediately!
Well said.
No invocation of #MeToo as an attempted thought-stopper is complete without recalling that, shortly before making her accusations of sexual impropriety, one its originators — Asia Argento — allegedly groomed and raped a minor and settled out of court with him.
There are legitimate grounds for moralising about Cuomo’s behaviour. Invoking a morally bankrupt ploy from a morally bankrupt ideology is not one of them.
The Democrats were always dirty baskets, in every sense of the term. I don’t really know how to take this. On the one hand, it’s an absolutely delicious example of how the left poisons everything it touches, including itself; on the other hand, this clown’s got thousands of deaths in nursing homes on his watch and apparently, that’s not a problem — but God forbid he should touch a woman in a way that has retrospectively been judged inappropriate. But I suppose that’s leftist logic at work.
This morsel of juicy scandal is actually pretty convenient for Cuomo. It might just avert the rather timid hounds long enough to help him evade a criminal charge of at least 2nd degree manslaughter. Instead of hearing “shame, shame, you bad boy” he should be hearing the clank of a cell door shutting him away for the rest of his miserable life.
Cuomo getting metooed was always a distraction from the massive nursing home scandal and subsequent document shredding and cover up.
If they ever re-make The Godfather, I can think of an out of work Italian-American politician who’d look the part…
I must be virtuous, or maybe just smarter than average, because during a lifetime’s experience of ever changing sexual and moral fashions and taboos, I have always managed to keep my hands and my tongue to myself. Have I been disadvanteged? No, not noticably. Slobbering and fumbling over a woman, like a mangy alley cat is not a particularly effective way of getting into her bed. And anyway, If she actually wants you in her bed, she’ll let you know, without you needing to grope her to check her out.
This was merely petty tactics by the republicans to weaken their opponents. An eye for an eye on the top political stage. it will be a wider belief that Cuomo’s behaviour, in reality, was nothing short of playful inappropriate flirting. And until there are evidence-backed examples that are undoubtedly more serious than an unskilled man trying his luck. I have little confidence in the merit of Metoo. Should an unwelcome lothario or seductress be called out for their actions? Of course, but these matters should be easily mitigated and I think we all should take issue that the Metoo movement has developed a god complex that is tremendously condescending and short-sighted and relies desperately on lack of due diligence to do its work. I cannot seriously give any weight or trust to a largely unpopular Marxist feminist movement that blocks out the rich granular narratives of history in exchange for a pixelated version to wage its war. Anything that has so many double standards is clearly gynocentric and until the media address this more sincerely, there will always be concerns.
Um, this wasn’t the Republicans behind this one. They tried to get him on his COVID response and failed. This attack came from a fellow Democrat, and one that ironically he helped get into the very position that allowed her to make this attack. As this article mentions, and as I have seen discussed elsewhere when she first started this investigation, there is a chance that this was attempt by James to open the way for her own run on his seat. Granted, this is indeed a fairly petty way to get rid of a political opponent. But she couldn’t well take the COVID angle, despite that very much being a matter of substance; that had already failed and would have left her associated with the Republicans, which is political suicide for an NY governor candidate. So she tried another tack. And to be honest, if it turns out the allegations are true, I think they would have made him an inappropriate candidate to run for governor again. These kind of things can get you fired as a janitor at a private company, why should they be okay for someone holding the top position in the state? Immediate resignation is a bit more unclear (though still–that janitor or middle manager at a private company would be let go immediately), but given how long he has been resisting it so far and even promising he would never resign earlier in the year, it makes me suspect he knows there really is finally enough material to get him in trouble. And now that he’s a private citizen again, he can just call up his brother and have CNN run interference for him on this story. That would have been inappropriate as a governor…oh, wait…
Wrong. Letitia James is a democrat.
I agree with some of this, but not all of it.
My concern is that “sexual assault” as a term has become as misleading as “sex work”, because both terms encompass so much that the term has no meaning.
As an adult, I don’t consider getting grabbed on the butt criminal sexual assault. I consider it sexual harassment which, in the context of the workplace, should get a reprimand and a warning from HR, then firing if it happens again.
If a boss or a teacher grabs an employee or student’s butt, that’s harassment and the boss/teacher should lose their jobs and possibly be sued.
Any adult who inappropriately touches a child is a pig who should be arrested and jailed and put on the sex offender registry.
When it comes to actual sexual violence – such as when a person is trapped in a situation where sexual contact is forced upon them – the perpetrator should be arrested, charged, convicted, and imprisoned until his d**k falls off.
Sadly, most actual sex offenders rarely spend a day in prison or experience any kind of public shaming, while high profile idiots who make women feel uncomfortable are dragged through the streets and pilloried.
The term “sexual assault” should not cover everything from a butt grab to child rape. And yet it does.
“Sex work” is another misleading term used to cover owning a brothel, producing porn, camming, and giving blow jobs next to a dumpster behind a gas station.
All of these are PROFOUNDLY different things.
But the Woke Left obscures inconvenient realities by using vague terms that can be abused to spread lies (such as the lie that “sex work is work”. My god, how childish and naive).
Anyway, #MeToo needs to draw a hard line between sexual harassment, sexual assault, and child abuse so that crimes can be prosecuted as crimes, and harassment can be handled by HR.
But the opportunists won’t let that happen, because they never really cared about ending sexual violence anyway.
Good commentary. The sex and gender bits have far exceeded the truly unforgivable pandemic transfer of sick elderlies improperly and conveniently returned to nursing homes so prematurely. Coupled with his behavioural of so-called Latin cultural mannerisms (ie excuses which he ought to have been fit to sublimate if he had any sense of his social context) this aging immature male person has no right to be in a leadership role of any kind – either in church or state domains.