Butts

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Introduction to Overthink

0:47Hello, and welcome to Overthink. The podcast where two philosophers bring you into their conversations about anything and everything, including body parts. I'm Ellie Anderson. And I'm David Peña-Guzman. As always, for an ad-free extended version of this episode, community discussion, and more, subscribe to Overthink on Substack. David, I feel like in an episode such as this, a natural place to start is with jokes. How do you feel about butt jokes or the related poop jokes?

1:20I mean, I liked them when I was a kid. I have to say my partner dislikes that they didn't die with my childhood. I still like butt jokes. I like toilet humor. And I think it needs to be brought back from this association that we have that only children can laugh at bodily functions. Oh, I think in my social view, it has already been brought back. I mean, I hang out with a lot of people who work in the comedy world in L.A., and I feel like we haven't really moved beyond it.

1:52I don't think there's much of a pretentiousness around these kind of jokes or a sense that they should have been left on the playground. There is a wholesale embrace of them. And I have to say, I really appreciate that. I think poop jokes and butt jokes are hilarious. Honestly, I think of you as a poop joke girl. Definitely. It's because you know me well. I think people who don't know me are like, oh, you know, kind of like femme blonde girl. Wow. And I'm just like, no, no, no, you don't know. Like, I can be really crass and childish for sure.

2:23I mean, that might not be quite so surprising.

Childhood Humor

2:25But David, why does your partner dislike that you like these jokes? Like, what's his rationale? Why is he anti? He thinks that they're so predictable and that they're low-hanging fruit. And in a sense, they are, right? Like, they are jokes that anybody finds accessible that don't really need a lot of thought and that don't need a lot of explanation. I mean, jokes shouldn't need explanation. But in general, I think he thinks it's lazy humor, which I think he's right about. But I think a well-placed butt joke can deliver the humor at the right time and in the right moment,

2:59especially when it's not expected. And so I think you and I, as academics, sometimes can shock people with our sense of humor precisely through the contrast between expectation and then the reality of who we are. So then even if the joke is predictable or has been heard a million times, like the fact of saying it as an adult and not even a particularly young adult perhaps has a kind of shock value of its own that makes it funny. No, I think that's right. And not only as adults, but as adults who are academics and philosophers, right?

3:30I think philosophers in particular get associated with very sophisticated forms of humor and esoteric references and subtle allusions rather than explicit or crass allusions to things. Although I will say a lot of philosophers have actually talked about these kinds of bodily functions. Montane, Zizek talks about Hegel and shitting. And toilets, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, a toilet. So, yeah. And I feel like, you know, in my own case, my partner has literally made a career on jokes,

4:02many of which are pretty crass in this particular vein, may actually be developing a poop-related app at this very moment. So, you know, my case might be a little unique, but I do think philosophers, we might have, you know, sort of a stuffier reputation than we deserve.

Butts Episode Background

4:19Nonetheless, this is actually not an episode about poop. It's an episode about butts. And so I want to talk a little bit about butt humor and also butt insults, let's say, because I think as a child, like my sister and I would always call each other butts if we didn't like the way the other one was behaving. Just like, you're acting like a butt. And in fact, one of our family friends had this like really iconic neologism that he coined as a child when he was really mad at his mom. And he goes, you, you, you, butt cheese and butt cheese then became like the insult par excellence

4:56of our entire childhood friend group. I think we need to bring this back when we inevitably do an episode on cheese because this is the crossover, you know, I, why butt cheese? I wonder where that came from. Right. I think it just came out of a special, beautiful child brain. Yeah. I just love it. I find butt cheese so funny. So speaking about things that are funny in connection to butts, and in my case, I'm going to connect it to being ESL for the longest time. I was wrong about the expression, nip it in the bud.

5:29And I thought it was nip it in the butt. And I was like, what is the imagery here? It's so funny because I was like, what is getting nipped? And why is it in the butt already? I guess usually most insults, you know. Tend to be about inserting things into the butt, not nipping things that are already there or whatever that might mean. And it was actually- I feel like when you said nip it in the butt, I'm picturing like a little creature, like biting somebody's butt. Or something that is in the butt that's sticking out and you just like nip off the top part.

6:04That is way stranger even. I feel like now I have questions about your understanding of nip.

Nip It in the Butt

6:09I think you mean snip. So is it, but don't you say like nip, nip for cutting? Oh no, it's nips. Oh my God. You didn't understand the word nip. It's at it again. At it again. Yeah. So there were a couple of things that were kind of going on in that situation, but that's pretty great. Did you call, did your brother call each other buttheads? Uh, no, partly because my brother and I have a 16 year age gap. Oh, oh yeah. I forgot. And so by the time I could call him that, I was already in my late twenties and also we

6:40didn't live together. But also in Spanish, we don't really use butt. There is no clear word for butt. We have a word for butt cheeks and another one for anus. But, you know, butt as the whole ensemble, we don't really have a term for it. And in Spanish, it is used much more as an injurious insult. So it doesn't have the childlike, um, the childlike innocence is lost. Devastating. I think the word butt in English is just a fantastic word.

7:11And I mean, yeah, the playground humor, I think, you know, is obviously relevant.

Butt Humor and Children

7:15I think also for kids, part of the reason that a butt joke is funny is because it's subversive because of its association with poop. Yeah, no, I think that's right. And I think the association of butts, humor and children tells us something really interesting, not just about children, but also about humor and also about poop in general. And what I have here in mind is that in connection to humor, humor itself kind of trades on the shock of this body part, which is why we talk about somebody being the butt of the

7:50joke, even when the joke has nothing to do with butt or bodily functions. Well, I think it's like the end of the joke. They're like the thing at which the joke is aimed. But the butt of the joke is like the person at whose expense a joke is made. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. And so even in jokes that are not specifically about this, there is already kind of an essential connection between butts and humor that goes beyond content. That's what I'm talking about. And in connection to children, I'm also thinking about the fact that the reason that poop and

8:21butts are so appealing and maybe a source of humor is because for children, at least if we follow a psychoanalytic line of thinking here, pooping and toilet training are a child's first experience of the law, right? That thou shall, like you cannot poop at certain times or in certain places or in certain conditions. And so it is subversive in that sense that when children want to reject parental authority, especially in early stages of life, when there is a tension between child and parent, sometimes

8:53that can manifest in a battle over the regulation of the secretion of body fluids. And that's why Freud talks a lot about the anal stage in children's development as the point at which there is this negotiation of power between parent and child. I think that is a really interesting connection. I do just want to fact check the butt of a joke claim though, because I, it turns out, yeah, the butt of a joke is not the butt in the sense that we tend to think about it. Like the way that we use butt to refer to rear end actually comes from a sort of more general

9:24use of the term butt as the end of something. It's associated with the French word be, for instance, which is like end, gore, aim. Yeah, so I think the general point stands, but unfortunately, David, it is not the case that to be the butt of a joke is, you know, has it has a direct reference to the butt as like, damn it. That was, I thought that was such a good connection, but thanks for the etymology there. And it makes sense, right? Because like, presumably, like a secret. But is it a secret? But yeah, that's not a reference to the body part either.

9:57Yeah, it was like, this would be an example of this more extended use of the term butt, which we're not going to be talking about. We're going to be talking about literal butts. We're going to be talking about the body parts.

10:08Today, we're talking about butts. Why do humans have bigger rear ends than other animals? What do the aesthetics of butts say about gender and race? And how does the sexualization of butts square with there being a source of disgust?

Butt Science and Evolution

10:27David, I'm going to take us a step back here and give our listeners a little sense of what led us to do this episode. Because indeed, we have been talking about doing an episode on butts since 2021, when you were visiting me for some overthink recordings. We were like, wouldn't it be so fun to do an episode about butts? We even considered doing one on butts and one on the anus. Our good friend, fellow philosopher Jordan Daniels was part of this conversation, had

10:58amazing ideas on this friend. We got all excited about it. Yeah, well, initially, I had proposed a series on body parts. I wanted one on mouth, one on anus, one on like other orifices like ears. But, you know, it didn't happen. There's always this tug of war that we have with ourselves over what to cover next, because there are so many things that we want to talk about with each other and with our listeners. But we are finally here with the butts episode. We're finally here, but I still have a couple more things to say about how we got here.

11:30So in 2022, after you first visited me and we had this idea for a potential, you know, series, I saw this book, Butts, A Backstory by the writer Heather Radke, shining at me from the bookstore with a peach emoji on the cover. And I thought, you know, maybe it's really time now for a butts episode. Like we've got some research to go off of. We can like talk about this book. But then we ultimately decided that this was a little bit of a sensitive topic to cover

12:01before I got tenure, you know, like kind of controversial, also seemingly flip. I mean, we have done episodes like orgasm. But I think even that there's like more established work in philosophy of science and feminist philosophy on that. So we were a little worried about this. And so we decided to wait until I got tenure. I did. You know, I got tenure end of 2025. And so finally, here we are. Well, actually, I remember, Ellie, when you got tenure, you sent me a text. You know, you were like, oh, my God, I got tenure. Exactly.

12:32We can do the butts episode now. That was like the immediate follow up. So it clearly was on your mind for this whole period of time. I kind of forgot about it a little bit because we had talked about it. But your enthusiasm about the butts episode convinced me that we should prioritize it. Absolutely. Great. I'm super excited. So it was a good chance for me to finally read butts a backstory. And I want to start here because Heather Radke begins her book by acknowledging that butts are not simply body parts. They are complex symbols fraught with all kinds of associations from the most desirable to the most disgusting.

13:10They're associated with reproduction, sexuality, excrement, silliness, as we mentioned before, and so much more. And she notes that for women in particular, the size of one's butt has long been perceived an indicator of a woman's very nature. Even the words we have for the butt vary significantly. We also say ass, which is considered the least offensive of all the swear words in the English language. You can say it on TV. Whereas asshole, a little more offensive.

13:41You're not allowed to say that on TV. We've got bum, tuchus, derriere, badonkadonk, behind, bottom, and so on. I like derriere because it's such an old Southern belle way of referring to the butt. And it's something that I associate with Golden Girls because Blanche would always refer to her butt as her derriere because it actually brings it into the sphere of a classy designation. Anything you say in French, automatically classy. Yeah, unfortunately. And I would add that it's not just the size of the butt that adds to the symbolic significance, but also the shape, right?

14:18Whether a particular butt has the right distribution of muscle and a fad to be either like wide or narrow or perky or flat, you know? And either way, it's clear that there are a lot of euphemisms for gluteus maximus. Well, yes and no, because technically gluteus maximus refers only to the butt muscle, but most of our butts also have a good amount of fat. Yeah, I mean, most of our butts, yes. Mine, a little bit less because I have a really tiny butt and it's something that I've been ashamed of in the past.

14:56I feel like your butt is cute. Well, thank you, Ellie, for saying that. I have been told once or twice that by other people, but I've always wanted to have a bigger butt. And the reason for this has to do with my family's dynamics around butts, because I come from a family of large butt women, except my mother. And my mother got a lot of heat. Well, a lot of heat is too strong. My mom got made fun of throughout her younger years and kind of into adulthood for being the one woman in the family who didn't inherit the family treasure.

15:34And then she passed this lack on to me. And so whereas everybody in the family had really rotund their years, ours were really tiny in comparison. See, we're already getting into the variety of significations that a butt can have and how butts bring us almost immediately into the space of judgment, especially of women's bodies. My family story is kind of the opposite. My mom has a huge butt. She has like what the Kardashians pay thousands of dollars to get.

16:05But she grew up in the wrong social context, because as a white lady born in California in the 1950s, she was always made fun of for having a big butt. And she was always super ashamed of it, seeking ways to hide it, you know, like a large skirt or something to, you know, hide what would now be considered a treasure. Well, I actually can't really picture your butt, Ellie, even though you've said very nice things about mine. Yours is like a mystery to me. So woke that you've never objectified me by looking at my butt in all the years that we've known each other.

16:39You know, I have to say it's it's one of my best features, given that I'm otherwise shaped like a celery. It's bigger than you think. So thanks for that, mom. Not a celery. But I guess you should be counting your blessings because it means that you are thriving because you were born into the right era, right? If you had been born into the 1950s and judgments about butts were different, maybe you wouldn't have the same experience of your butt. Well, exactly. Closer to your mom. I know. And apropos of this beautiful era, my mom is actually super excited that we're doing this episode.

17:11Everything I said about her butt, I asked her if it was OK to say it. She was like, yeah, go for it. So this discussion, you know, really takes us into the aesthetics of butts, which are honestly extremely changeable. As we can tell whether large butts are considered attractive or not, and also to what extent their size is seen as an indicator of goodness or badness in other senses, including moral, has developed in various periods of history. Most often tied, as I mentioned before, to judgments of women's bodies, because people, of course, you know, love to judge women's bodies.

17:44Before we come back to aesthetics, though, I want to touch on the science and prehistory of our butts, because one of the things that I learned from this book by Heather Radke is that butts are a pretty defining trait for humans. No animal on Earth has such a large gluteal muscle. Yes, I remember coming across research that talked about this when we did our episode on walking. And if I remember correctly, there is a story here, an evolutionary story about the adaptive value of our butts and especially the gluteus maximus, right?

18:15Like the butt muscle, because it allows us to run for long periods of time and thus to catch up to prey animals who run in like short but fast kind of bursts of energy. And we would essentially run them down and hunt them. And so our ability to be particularly good at long distance running, if I remember correctly, that's the argument, right? Yeah, so this is right. This helped our ancestor Homo erectus, the first species ever to have a butt.

18:47And of course, it helped Homo sapiens. Especially before we had sophisticated weapons, our ability to run is understood as helping us to hunt down predators. Although there's also a competing theory that running didn't help us catching live animals, the prey you mentioned, but rather that it allowed us to scavenge dead animals more quickly than other creatures.

Butt Fat and Human Evolution

19:09Like we could get to those animals before they started rotting or got eaten by other species. The reason that our butts help us run is that they serve as an extensor, allowing us to straighten and extend our legs outward. They're critical in keeping us from tumbling forward. So when we extend our legs, we launch ourselves from our feet and extend forward. Our butts help us from falling forward. And they also help us to slow down as we hit the ground. They're also understood in evolutionary theory to have helped us climb, say, to get away from predators, to squat, and more.

19:46I just wouldn't have survived in the savannah with my tiny ass. Me and my mom would have been the first victims of evolution. So, you know, good thing that I've been going to the gym recently and doing legs so that I can get some gains for our eventual return to the savannah. Well, although your efforts to enlarge your butt muscle are commendable, David, the butt muscle is not the whole story here. So humans don't just stand out for having particularly large gluteal muscles. We also have bigger butts than other animals in terms of fat. So I wouldn't discount the gains you might get from eating more cake, too.

20:20I have to go to the gym and get a BBL to survive in the savannah. Well, I mean, we'll come back to BBLs a little later. I don't know if I'm going to recommend that for you. So this was a really fascinating part of the book to me, though, where Radke was talking about the fat of butts. Because she notes that we tend to assume that prehistoric humans didn't have much fat. And although that's possibly true, we just really don't have good evidence either way. Because fat is a soft tissue that decomposes quickly. And it's much more difficult to study than muscle.

20:52What we do know today is that humans are the fattest primates. And women especially tend to have more fat than men. In fact, it's so interesting to me. She notes that even the thinnest women have a higher percentage of fat on their bodies than any other creature on Earth, with two exceptions. Seagoing mammals, such as seals and walruses, and bears, just before going into hibernation. So it's like seals, bears, humans. Yeah, exactly.

21:23Well, women, specifically. So those animals need fat in order to keep themselves warm. But for humans, the best explanation we have at this point is a reproductive one. Fat provides a storage that can be used for breastfeeding and pregnancy, which are very energetically costly. Yeah, this is really interesting. And I wonder if this is where the idea that curvy women are more fertile ultimately comes from. And although the size of butts considered attractive has changed significantly over time, if you look at human history, in general, the association of curves with fertility has been around for a very, very long time, right?

22:01So that's not particularly recent. Go off, Venus de Willendorf. You're right about this association. But Radke also wants us to be really careful not to overblow the evolutionary story of the butt into a claim about how, say, men are naturally attracted to women with curves. Like, that's a very common kind of evolutionary psychology story. Yeah, which we both are, like, always very salty about. Well, Radke has a really interesting analysis of this. Part of the danger here is that we just don't know much about how large butts were in prehistory.

22:35But also in part because she notes how easily evolutionary psychology creates just-so stories that serve the status quo rather than being scientifically grounded. And I think, you know, that's often our concern with evolutionary psychological accounts, David. Radke says we should be wary of how evolutionary explanations of behavior may actually be dictated by cultural or historical forces and thus offer an excuse for what our culture values rather than an actual scientific explanation. Like, men are attracted to women who wear heels because it pushes their butt out, and that is, like, seen automatically as more fertile.

23:09It taps into their lizard brain or whatever. And so, like, all these articles, like the science of why you're an ass man, which is literally an article from Men's Health, really overstate what we actually know. It could be that fatty butts don't actually serve an evolutionary purpose at all, but rather that they're just an adaptation that humans happen to have evolved over time. Or that the adaptation once served a purpose in our evolutionary history, but no longer does. Yes, I see. Yeah, and so in theory, it is possible that our ancestors actually had smaller butts because we don't know, you know, how much fat they had.

23:45And so maybe I would do well in the savannah with my tiny butt just like our ancestors possibly did. Hard to tell.

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Aesthetics of Butts

26:08The proliferation of large butt content on social media over the past decade or so has been significant. And even before that, there were some pretty significant changes in how butts started to be perceived in American culture, specifically starting in the 1990s. And so Radke, in the trajectory that she traces, which is just, like, so interesting and rich, talks about how Sir Mix-a-Lot's baby got back in 1992. This iconic song, I Like Big Butts and I Cannot Lie, was meant to make big butted women feel proud and represented in the media.

26:44And the rise of big butts, both, you know, in the work of Sir Mix-a-Lot and beyond, in Sir Mix-a-Lot's corpus and beyond, has been brought about through the aesthetics of Black women in rap music videos, or just, like, the general aesthetics of rap, which have tended in lyrics, in music videos, in representations of, like, relationships in real life that rappers have had with various girlfriends, have celebrated the large butt as beautiful. And I think as that kind of rap aesthetic starts to become more and more mainstream in the 1990s and beyond, we've come to celebrate the large butt, you know, outside of that kind of original, mainly focused in Black culture context to now, you know, being a kind of generalized aesthetic.

27:31And Radke notes that another really important moment in this celebration of the butt was the rise of J-Lo in the 90s. She says that 1998 was the year that people became obsessed with J-Lo's butt. I'm actually a huge J-Lo fan. I feel like she's gotten really cringe, maybe even canceled. I don't know. I haven't been following her lately, but I think she's a true triple threat. I think her singing, dancing, and acting are basically unimpeachable. I wish she'd done more films. Her singing? I love her. Yeah.

28:01I thought you meant threat literally, like, it might harm you. No, no, triple threat. That's a musical theater term. Okay, okay. I know, I know, I'm joking, I'm joking, because I would describe her singing as an actual threat to your ears. I think I'm most often, like, coming as a J-Lo apologist for her acting, because I think she's, like, actually a good actor. But anyway, that's, like, perhaps neither here nor there in relation to her butt. Her dancing is most related to this. But all this is to say, I think, you know, J-Lo's butt, huge icon of the 90s, starting in 1998, and then, you know, in the 2000s and beyond, really essential moment.

28:38And then more recently, of course, we have the Kardashians, who- Of course. Largely through surgical interventions, as far as I understand, although it's never totally clear to me, have really become popular for these giant butts. You have the image of Kim Kardashian in Paper Magazine on the cover with a champagne flute on her butt. Yeah, on her derriere. Yeah, but, I mean, I really do believe them if you- No better use of derriere than to describe the Paper Magazine cover. But I honestly do believe them that the massive transformations in their body and their look have been achieved with nothing more than water and exercise.

29:20Well, and, like, maybe the supplements are cheese that they hawk from time to time. But I think your point is well taken that there has been this transformation from the 1990s to the present moment, where maybe in the 1990s, especially through music, there was an effort to celebrate women with big butts, whereas now big butts have become a beauty norm that is enforced upon women. It has become much more widespread, and it's something that now shapes how women of all races and, you know, all sorts of backgrounds think about the image that they want to have.

29:55And I think the spread of the big butt aesthetic, especially in social media, is to blame for a lot of the problems with self-esteem that many women report, especially when it's specifically about their butts. So our student assistant, Sophia Melton, did some research for us about this particular issue, and she found an article that is really, really intriguing, which is about how women in different countries perceive themselves and their butts and, like, how happy they are with them.

30:27And so I want to share some of the results from this study because I think they are an interesting entry point into a larger cultural pattern. So when women in Japan, Germany, the U.S., and Nigeria were asked how happy they are with their butts, as they are in the present moment, there is a big difference. So Nigerian women tend to be very, very happy. They report a 4.3 out of 5 satisfaction score.

30:58Okay. Whereas people in the U.S., women in the U.S. are a little bit less happy, 3.6 out of 5, and women in Germany and Japan less happy than that, specifically in Japan, only at 2.1 out of 5 satisfaction score. Now, when those same women were asked by researchers whether they would surgically change their buttocks, the percentages are quite interesting because they don't exactly map in the way we might expect. So Nigerian women, it makes sense, they were really happy with their butts, so only 8% of those women said that they would surgically change their butts.

31:33But interestingly, if you look at Japan, most of the women said that they were relatively unhappy with their butts, but also most Japanese women said that they didn't really want to surgically change that. So only 4.3% said that they would be willing to undergo surgery. If you now look at the U.S., they were actually relatively happy with their butts, but when they were asked about surgery, 63% of American women said they would undergo surgery to change the appearance of their butts.

32:04And so— Oh, my God. You know, like, there is a clear social pressure here, and according to this research, social media is the number one influence in women's low self-esteem in connection to their butts. And so the conclusion to be drawn here is that, at least in the case of American women, the desire to undergo surgery is not because of the way the women themselves feel about their own bodies. It's because of this external pressure that causes the vast majority of women to say that they would say yes to surgery.

32:39And this is despite the fact that augmentation surgery for butts has one of the highest mortality rates, right? So, like, think about your Brazilian butt lift. They are really, really dangerous procedures, which I assume is why you, Ellie, said that you wouldn't really recommend it for me when I made a joke about that earlier. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, they're becoming so normalized, I think. And, you know, questions of surgery—I'm not, like, anti-surgical intervention for cosmetic reasons, but I think that statistic is wild, given how dangerous and intensive invasive these surgeries are.

33:13So when we're talking about the aesthetics of large butts, you know, far beyond not only the Brazilian butt lifts and the celebration of butts in Sir Mix-a-Lot's baby got back, there is one person we have to discuss, and she is a major figure in Radke's book, Butts, A Backstory.

Sarah Bartman and Butt History

33:31This is Sarah Bartman. Bartman was a woman from rural South Africa, born in the 1770s, a member of the Kowei people from southwestern Africa. The Kowei were a source of fascination for Europeans because they were considered by colonial explorers from Europe to exemplify stereotypes about African people, including having a lazy demeanor and having large butts and labia. And so Carl Linnaeus, for instance, the father of modern taxonomy, classified the Kowei as homo sapiens monstrous, a category of half-human.

34:08Yeah, I mean, and anybody who knows about Bartman's story knows that it's a really tragic one. She was captured by Dutch colonists as a child, and she worked as a servant until she was brought to England in 1810 by the Scottish doctor Alexander Dunlop. Dunlop brought her to England to be exhibited in a freak show as a prized specimen of the Hottentot, which was a derogatory name for the Kowei people. And she has since become known and was known at the time as the Hottentot Venus. Exhibitions of foreign people were quite popular in London during the 19th century,

34:42And Bartman was especially a source of fascination because of her large butt. So this was the key feature of Bartman's exhibition in a freak show, was her large butt. And she was exhibited wearing a thin bodysuit. People would even be able to touch her butt. And then a few years later, she was brought to Paris, where she caught the attention of Georges Cuvier, who is an extremely influential and important anatomist whose work involved hierarchizing humans based on race. And I've read about the relationship between Cuvier and Bartman, largely through my work in the history of science and the history of biology.

35:20And Cuvier examined Bartman and made her strip down in front of him and his colleagues. And then after she died, she was further exploited because Cuvier dissected her body. And he preserved her brain, her anus, and her labia in a jar of embellum and fluid and created these casts of her labia and her butt specifically to sort of like preserve the memory of what they had been for posterity. But then there's also the fact that he added her bones.

35:52I'm sorry, this is a little bit graphic, but he boiled the flesh off of her bones and then added her bones to his collection in the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. So you have this colonial logic of racialization, but also this desire to display this black body all the way down to to the bone, literally, for a white gaze, for the gaze of white European museum goers. Yeah. And the size of her butt was treated as monstrous, but also as profoundly desirable.

36:26Radke talks as well about how the butt was seen as basically an extension of the vulva. And so, I mean, this is just truly such an awful story and really telling about how the history of the aesthetics of butts has been one of sexualization and exploitation and also one of straight up eugenics. I mean, regarding the eugenics point, Cuvier concluded after assessing Bartman, as you described so graphically, that she was a closer relative to the great apes than of humans.

36:56Yeah. And there is something strange about this reasoning, honestly, because what you said earlier, Ellie, is that humans are unique among the animals because we have big butts, right? Like we have bigger butts than even our closest primate relatives. And so having a big butt, in theory, should be a marker of our humanity. And so by that standard, somebody like Bartman should be more human than somebody like Cuvier. And it doesn't seem to be the case, right? Like that's not the point that Cuvier is making.

37:28He's actually associating having a bigger butt with being of an inferior race that is closer on the scale to non-human animals. I know. I was thinking the same thing. I'm like, if he actually knew about how human butts were different from animal butts, he'd be like, oh, wow, she's, you know, the highest in the hierarchy. Not that we want to hold on to the hierarchy, right? I mean, unfortunately, racists are going to find a way to justify their racism, no matter how twisted the logic. And I think anytime you're finding a racial hierarchy, that's, you know, that's maybe something you don't want to do.

38:02But the gender studies professor Janelle Hobson has written about how Bartman's display helped justify colonialism and the continuation of slavery. It also created an association between big butts and the exotic or erotic, and in particular, an association of African women as essentially more sexual than white women. And that claim then served as a pretext for the acceptance of the rape of enslaved women in the U.S. Right. And I mean, that's a stereotype that continues today, right? The hyper-sexualized Black woman.

38:33Yeah, of course. And I think generally speaking, the influence of Bartman's body on the perception of Black women and their sexuality in Europe and the U.S. is difficult to overstate, even though her body was displayed by men who essentially owned her. We don't even know the name her parents gave her. Sarah, Sarah Bartman is the name the colonizers gave her. Ellie, we have discussed how butts are sites of sexual attraction and how they are charged with symbolic and semiotic significance that goes well beyond their factual, anatomical, and physiological functions, right?

39:12Butts are more than just butts. And despite not being reproductive organs, they very frequently get coded as such. They serve as proxies for sex, for fertility, and also for sexual desire, especially in connection to women. But butts are also sites of a different kind of reaction, and that is an aversion and a repulsion because of their association with animality and with excrement. And we find a philosophical exploration of this side of butts in George Bataille's essay, Solar Anus.

39:49Now, this is a really wild text that was published in 1931, and it's a series of surrealist aphorisms that explore themes of life and death, growth and decay. And Bataille uses the image of the earth as an anus, specifically the anus of the whole universe. The text is really wild. I mean, I haven't read much Bataille, but I've hated pretty much everything I have read by the guy. So I'm not surprised that he's out here talking about the earth as anus.

40:23Well, to be honest, I also am not a fan of Bataille, and I really disliked this piece. I was really excited to talk about it because an episode on butts, what comes to mind? Bataille's solar anus. Well, yeah, this was one of the things we talked about discussing years ago when we first had the idea for this episode. Well, and then I read it and I was like, oh, God. And it's the kind of text that you just have to be drunk to enjoy. And maybe I would have rolled with it a little bit more happily if I had had a couple of beers in me. But I think it also depends on how you read Bataille.

40:55Is he being serious in his claim that the earth is the butthole of the universe? Or is he parodying the history of Western metaphysics? You know, is he like laughing at it by presenting this ridiculous metaphysics of his own? But either way, what he does in this essay is he depicts the cosmos, the universe as a whole, as an interconnected web where the sun is a phallus of light that is constantly penetrating the butthole that is the earth.

41:28Of course there was going to be a phallus in there. Yeah, apparently you cannot have a butthole without a phallus. And, you know, basically the sun is a penis of light and the earth is a dark, damp space that is receptive to the sun's approach. I mean, I'm definitely not anti-metaphors of anal sex, but like I'm more just commenting on, you know, 1930s weird texts, surrealist texts like this. Like there's going to be a phallus somewhere. Yeah, it's probably going to be depicted as penetrating an orifice.

42:00Oh, yeah, for sure. Like the phallus has to be engaging in an action, you know, like nobody talks about the phallus as what it most of the time is, which is just like a limp piece of flesh that's just like hanging there. Some feminist philosophers do. Rihar talks about how in intercourse, like the vagina is actually like shielding the phallus. And yeah, anyway, there's... Or engulfing it. Yeah, yeah. There's some interesting stuff on that. But that is not what we're talking about here. Yeah, well, that's not the men who will ever describe their penis as just like a little piece of flesh hanging around for no purpose.

42:33But so, but Tai, in this text, he has one aphorism, if we want to call these expressions that, where he says, The sun exclusively loves the night and directs its luminous violence, its ignoble shaft toward the earth, end quote. And so, again, he's doing this thing, maybe serious, maybe not, but he is modeling reality after a somewhat violent session of anal sex where the sun is fucking the earth.

43:06And the universe, because it contains both of those things as its parts, is effectively sodomizing itself. The universe is using its own sun to fuck its own earth. And I don't really want us to spend a lot of time with this image. I don't know where to take it. The only point I really want to make here is that the association of anuses with darkness, with wetness, with decay, is something that this text captures that goes beyond this text.

43:38And I do think that explains why butts in general are a site of aversion. Yeah, and the fact that poop, like, has a lot of bacteria that, you know, can lead to illness in a way that, you know, not all other orifices, yeah, or have, or, like, they're not all dangerous that way, right? But I think you see this aversion at work in how societies have treated anal sex, going so far as to criminalize it, presumably because of the association of anuses with impurity, contamination, and taboo.

44:11And so the history of anti-sodomy laws in the U.S., for example, I think we could consider here, but this goes way beyond the U.S. In fact, the first laws banning anal penetration, or sodomy, were written around the 6th and 7th centuries CE. And historians have traced earlier laws, even, without written documentation, to the 2nd century BCE. Oh, my God, that's longer than I knew. But, I mean, in connection to sodomy laws in the U.S., they've been ruled now unconstitutional.

44:45But the weird thing is that there are still anti-sodomy laws on the books in a number of states. Twelve states still have laws that ban sodomy. And even though they're not enforceable, they still can be used, and they have been reported to be used, to harass and discriminate against queer people by saying, hey, there is this law, and hoping that people don't know that it's actually no longer constitutional to apply. And I think the mere fact that they're in the books and haven't been repealed reveals that some people remain attached to them, even if only for symbolic reasons.

45:20Although, who knows, by the time this episode comes out, not that long after we record it, the Trump administration is probably going to be trying to overturn the unconstitutional character of sodomy laws, and then these will come back. They'll be raised from the dead. Well, yeah, raised from the dead is actually the right expression here, because the laws are called zombie laws, because they're still there. They're in the books, but they don't have legal life. And so the interesting thing is that even though there are zombie laws, there have been politicians who openly oppose their elimination from the books, where they actively say, no, we need to keep these, even though they are unenforceable.

46:02But I think this ultimately gets us to the core of our cultural anxieties around butts and around anuses. And I think those anxieties are anxieties about the penetrability of the anus, which is, you know, why the obvious target for anti-sodomy laws has historically been gay men, because gay men come to represent that which is antithetical to dominant narratives of masculinity, which is penetrability. The idea of being penetrated, especially by another man or another phallus.

46:36Yeah. And this is where a queer theory lens is helpful, because queer theorists have done a lot of work calling into question this construction of anal sex as a sign of perversion and a threat to masculinity. And of course, queer theory is a theoretical field that emerged in the 1980s and 90s through the convergence of feminist theory, gay and lesbian studies, psychoanalysis and post-structuralism, especially the work of Foucault. And it sought to deconstruct inherited norms around sex, desire and identity.

47:07Well, and queer theory was shaped to a large extent by the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and its aftermath. Right. So it's impossible to think about this field independently of that development. And that crisis in particular threw into the open these associations between anuses, death and decay that you see in a different register in the Bataille piece. And I'm here thinking of a particular text that's very common in queer theory circles and, in fact, is a classic of queer theory, which is Leo Bersani's Is the Rectum a Grave?

47:42Which is a text from 1987, where he talks about how anuses, you know, and again, this is like during the AIDS crisis, became a site of a politicized collective disgust because of the association of HIV, AIDS, anal sex and homosexuality. And so in this text, he in particular takes the Reagan administration to task for its response to the AIDS epidemic. You know, he points out how there was no support for people who contracted HIV, for people for whom it developed into AIDS.

48:18He talks about how the medical response at the time focused primarily on spread rather than cure. Like people didn't care about curing the gays who had it. They just wanted the disease not to spread to the traditional family. Especially to women. There was like this worry about the fertility of women or their, you know, sexual viability if they received AIDS from their husbands who'd been secretly screwing men on the side. Yeah. And, you know, there was that worry and also the worry that the very purity of the white race, in a sense, was contaminated.

48:56So he talks about the connection between whiteness and homosexuality and homophobia. And he also discusses some political developments that were really troublesome in the 1980s, like the fact that people were told that they had the right to fire employees if they even suspected that they had HIV and that that could potentially somehow by some magical mechanism spread to other people in their corporation. And so the main point that he drives home in this essay is that the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s transformed the oppression of gay men not into something that was morally acceptable, but it transformed it into what he calls a moral imperative.

49:45To be a good moral agent meant oppressing homosexual people who became symbols for the destruction of American society and the family and, in particular, the purity of white women. And one point that I really love from this piece is Bersani says the response, the political response to the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s shattered a myth that a lot of white gay men had embraced up until that moment.

50:17And the myth was that if they just keep their mouth shut about systematic racism and if they just keep their mouth shut about classism, white affluent society would eventually accept them despite being gay, it would tolerate them. Yeah. And the AIDS crisis really crystallized that that was never going to happen and that from the standpoint of white dominant culture, straight culture, white gay men were just as disgusting as the rest of us.

50:50And so it was a wake up call for the queer community, but it also brought into focus a lot of tensions and fractures internal to that community. Yeah. Yeah. And I remember, I mean, when we first talked about doing this episode, we were like, we got to talk about the Bersani piece, too. And I think you've done such a nice job of laying out the key features of it here and the relevance of it. I mean, see, hopefully by now, all of our listeners realize butts are philosophical. We're nearing the end of the episode, David, and we can't end it without talking about ass eating.

51:25So I want to slightly switch gears here. Um, so we've been talking about the cultural repulsion around butts, and I think that is very much still alive, but some have argued that there's a switch happening culturally starting around 15, 10 years ago as ass eating has become more acceptable and talked about. There's this article by Dinah Holtzman called Ass You Lick It, Bay and Jay Eat Cake, and Holtzman suggests that ass eating is slowly entering pop culture.

51:56I mean, that suggestion, I think, is, like, pretty unimpeachable. I definitely think that's, you know, well-established at this point. But Holtzman talks about how in 2010, Beyoncé made a public appearance wearing a T-shirt that said, Let Me Eat Cake, which is a play on Marie Antoinette that's a euphemism for ass eating. Jay-Z also mentions eating cake in a verse on Beyoncé's song, Drunk in Love. And Holtzman interprets this as a down-low affirmation of reciprocal analingus. Spicy. Love that phrase, down-low affirmation of reciprocal analingus.

52:29It's just incredible. Yeah, it's really fun. Another example that we might throw into the mix here is the rapper Kevin Gates, who has openly advocating ass eating. And so, you know, it has entered into sort of the Overton window of popular discourse. We might have some critiques about rappers' depictions of women, but hey, we can't deny that they've been on the front lines of the acceptance of butts. Yeah, the affirmation of reciprocal analingus. Although, I want to note that, you know, all of these are examples of heterosexual ass eating.

53:03And I think the taboo around homosexual ass eating remains just because of the persistence of homophobia in our culture. And the author of this piece, again, a really fun article, notes that analingus can be liberatory even in these heterosexual settings because it plants the seed for a new way of having sex that, as they put it, sidesteps the privileging of gendered genitalia. So, like, there's something deeply democratic about ass eating because everybody, you know, like, as people say, opinions are like assholes.

53:37Everybody's got one. Yeah. And there is a quote here that I want to just read to you by way of conclusion. Everybody has an anus and they appear similar despite gender and racial differences. Ass play may thus be understood as the most democratic of all sexual practices. I love it. This is what Foucault had in mind when he talked about bodies and pleasures, exploring, you know, our perverse natures and not being so focused on a very narrow conception of genitalia.

54:08Also, for the record, why our friend Jess Locke says that asshole is her favorite insult to use. We all have assholes. Don't call women B-words. We can just call each other assholes if we do something mean to each other or wrong each other in some way. Or heck, maybe we just want to call each other butts. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please consider subscribing to our sub stack for extended ad-free episodes, community chats, and additional Overthink content. To connect with us, find episode transcripts, and make one-time tax-deductible donations, go to overthinkpodcast.com.

54:43You can also check us out on YouTube, as well as TikTok and Instagram at overthink underscore pod. We'd like to thank co-producer and audio editor Aaron Morgan, production assistants Bayarma Bat-Urdeen and Kristen Taylor, and Samuel P.K. Smith for the original music. And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.