Kim Kardashian's infamous Paper magazine cover from 2014 that 'broke the internet' was compared to images of Baartman and accused by critics of culturally appropriating and sexually exploiting the Black female body.

Black women and big butts started to become associated with hypersexuality. Nicknamed the 'Hottentot Venus,' she was brought to Europe and put on display for people to marvel at her large backside - at least larger than what Europeans at the time were used to. Sarah Baartman, an 18th-century Black woman from South Africa, was 'foundational to our obsession with butts,' according to Radke. Much of our complicated relationship with butts has to do with race. Journalist and Radiolab contributor Heather Radke is the author of Butts: A backstory. 'For me, butts became a sort of lens through which you can see the world and just kind of start to understand how we think about bodies,' Radke told The Sunday Magazine host Piya Chattopadhyay. And it can tell us a lot about our relationship with gender, race and bodies, according to journalist Heather Radke, whose book, Butts: A Backstory, details the cultural history of the bottom. (The original article is no longer available online.) Butt obsession goes back centuriesīut this cultural obsession with the derriere, both large and small, actually goes back much further than that - centuries, in fact. Back in 2014, Vogue wrote that we were 'officially in the era of the big booty' and was met with much backlash. If all this debate and discussion over a woman's backside seems familiar, it's because this sort of thing has happened before - a lot, actually.

They also pointed out the inherent racism in declaring that a particular physical attribute that many women of colour have naturally is no longer desirable. Some critics swiftly shot back, saying that women's bodies should not be reduced to trends. And the New York Post ran a headline that said 'Bye-bye booty' and declared that heroin chic was back.

Cardi B recently shared that she had her own implants removed and cautioned others against getting butt injections. On TikTok, users speculated that Kim Kardashian had her butt implants removed (a procedure she never confirmed having in the first place).

The Sunday Magazine 20:03 The politics behind butts are anything but peachyĪfter almost a decade of our cultural obsession with twerking, peach emojis and Brazilian butt lifts, 2022 apparently marked the end of the era of the big booty.

Butts a backstory heather radke