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Dear Camille:
My Paraguayan wife and I enjoy watching the Hispanic channel on TV and have
noticed how certain Latin tastes and definitions of sexiness have started to
affect fashion and sensibilities among Anglos in the U.S. I refer
specifically to butts -- tight, rounded, well-contoured butts. In Latin
America, the derrière has long been an object of obsessive desire and appears
not just in the popular media but in high art as well. In Brazil, believe
it or not, they actually have wet bunda contests, precisely parallel to
our own wet T-shirt events.
Why do Latins so admire the backside and eschew the front? You'd think with
their mother-centric outlook they'd like breasts far more than they do. My
wife says it has something to do with self-effacing, "backward" societies
vs. societies that look "forward," with an orientation toward the future.
Or perhaps it's just that butts are on the whore side of the santa/puta
equation.
Also, do you agree that the Latin fascination with the backside has come to
influence American styles and tastes? Will the butt ever come to replace
the breast for the American male?
We enjoy your Salon column very much.
Professor Thom Whigham
Dear Professor Whigham:
Thank you for your fascinating letter, which I'm sure Salon readers will also
enjoy. We need much more of this kind of international, comparatist
perspective in the United States, not just about sex but politics -- as I have
been gloomily pondering during our embarrassing debacle over Iraq, where the
authoritarian arrogance of sanctimonious American officials has further
complicated a still very dangerous crisis.
Yes, indeed, Univision -- which I assume is the Hispanic channel you refer
to -- is surely a cornucopia of revelations! I will never forget being utterly
floored, flabbergasted and dazzled by a Univision program of the early 1980s,
on which the sultry, ripely mature Iris Chacon was wildly shaking her
voluminous, barely covered bottom as she was being buffeted about the stage
and tossed in the air by an adoring phalanx of handsome male dancers, to the
ecstatic applause of a vast, multigenerational, Latin American crowd of both
sexes.
Your wife's sociological hypothesis is most interesting. I think it would
need slight revision, however, to account for the centrality in African-American life of what talk-show host Arsenio Hall liked to call "the black
onion." Eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia primarily afflict white,
middle-class girls: among working-class blacks, an attractive woman is still
expected to have some meat on her bones. The "waif" look, from Kate Moss to
the drippily posturing Fiona Apple, is nowheresville in black or Latin
culture, where a prominent, shapely "booty" draws admiring attention (which
Anglos call "harassment") on the street.
In my "Women and Sex Roles" class at the University of the Arts, we have just
been surveying the strange female sculptures surviving from the Stone Age,
above all the so-called Venus of Willendorf (which I analyze in detail in
"Sexual Personae" and contrast with the elegant, coldly hieratic, mathematical
bust of Nefertiti). The stress in prehistoric art on the spongy, bulging,
hugely enlarged female buttocks -- a motif technically called steatopygia -- was a
primary aspect of fertility cult, when the procreative mysteries of the
universe had to be invoked or propitiated for human survival.
Your wife's provocative linkage of breast-fetishism to a forward-looking
society would certainly apply to the U.S. in the 1950s, when "missile-cone"
wired brassieres ruled, or the 1980s, when the surgically amplified, non-gravitational bosom loomed large. However, it wouldn't work for the 1920s,
when smoking, drinking, dancing, post-suffrage flappers androgynously
flattened their breasts, or the 1930s, when a lithe, sinuous, small-breasted
silhouette, partly inspired by the goddess statuettes of King Tut's recently
discovered tomb, was the epitome of high-fashion chic.
The postwar U.S. obsession with mammary hyperdevelopment (cf. the cascadingly
voluptuous Jayne Mansfield), along with our enormous commercial consumption of
cow's milk, was interpreted by wine-drinking European analysts as symptomatic
of a deep, never-satisfied craving for mothering. At that time, as I vividly
recall, tales of American women tourists being pinched in the derrière by
passing dandies on the streets of Rome seemed positively baffling.
It was the unisex exercise boom of the late 1970s and 1980s, accentuated by
the emergence of homoerotic iconography in advertising (thanks to Calvin
Klein), that changed everything. California girls, with some occasional help
from surgical tucks and liposuction of love-handles and jodhpur thighs, put
the great ass on the American map, where the gay boy-angel "bubble butt" also
lives and thrives today.
The classic Latin derrière, however, is a bit more opulent. It's predicated
on the metaphor of woman as swelling fruit, that heavy pear shape seen, for
example, in Picasso's brilliant "Girl Before a Mirror" (my tribute to this
painting appeared in the January 1996 issue of ARTnews). The American
exercise queen is manically on the move, a social achiever combating and
conquering the elements. But the Latin vamp is literally grounded in nature,
which is behind us but of course always below and before us too -- something
that should be obvious to anyone with an enlightened view of life.
The women of American pop are increasingly whiny, callow little girls -- trembly
Winona Ryder is the archetype -- because they've lost their connection to
fundamental femaleness, a biological datum whose existence is idiotically
denied by the unlearned and neurotically twisted gender-theorists of academe.
Sticks, runts and sour ironists of the Janeane Garofalo
brand now crowd the sexual landscape.
But there may be hope on the horizon. A recent letter to this column from the
self-dubbed Meat and Potatoes Man celebrates British actress Kate Winslet,
"the fleshy star" of the mega-blockbuster "Titanic," and asks if she, along
with bouncy presidential pal Monica Lewinsky, might "finally ban the anorexic
look and bring back a new era of the full-figured gal." Indeed, in my view,
the emotional charge of "Titanic" is sustained over three hours primarily by
Winslet's lush physicality, not only her magnificent curves but her full lips
and cheeks, which director James Cameron allows his camera to dwell on with
hypnotic, old-Hollywood patience.
Buttock worship is ultimately anonymous and ritualistic, subordinating the
fatiguingly overstressed Western cult of personality to larger cosmic rhythms
(a point made by D.H. Lawrence about the tribal artifacts of "Women in Love").
Its lingering presence in black and Latin taste may be due to the agrarian
roots of those communities. When famine or privation threatened, the fat
woman symbolized health, abundance and the guarantee of posterity. For the
glorified butt to fully replace today's artificially thrusting bust, the
American economy would probably have to collapse -- so that we'd all be rooting
about, like Scarlett O'Hara, for scraps of carrots in the red Georgia clay!
N E X T_P A G E | Women athletes: No crying!
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