Look Closer: There Are Lots of Backsides Behind Kim Kardashian’s

Up until now, we had told ourselves we wouldn’t talk about it. All this hubbub over a backside – really? And then, there you have it, because of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, we wanted to talk about it. The progression is strange, we’ll admit.

Quick rewind for those who haven’t been following.

Same Old Same Old on the Web

Kim Kardashian, the American reality TV starlet, made the front cover of the winter 2014 issues of Paper, from behind. Her impressive backside is naked, she looks into the lens of frenchman Jean-Paul Goude with a self-assured air.

Her open mouth resembles a smile, as much as it can, and her hair is pulled up into a bun. By the tip of her (black) gloved fingers she holds a (also black) robe that she has just taken off. Beneath her behind, this caption:

Break the Internet

Kim Kardashian

The Internet didn’t break, but it got pretty excited. All the newspapers, or almost all – the exceptions being Mediapart and La Croix – talked about the photo. On Twitter, the posterior became a meme, the images being used in humorous ways.

Up to that point, it was the same old same old on the Internet – much ado about nothing. And then the Met tweeted this witticism:

“Here at the Met, we have artworks that can #BreakTheInternet too! On view in gallery 150.”

This was all accompanied by a photo of a neolithic work, the Venus Callipyge, dating to 4,500 B.C.

I started to think. What other works of art, what other bodies did Ms. Kardashian’s make me think of, staged the way it was?

Rump of the Slave

I thought, of course, of Saartjie Baartman, nicknamed the Hottentot Venus, whose large backside had, like that of our American, fascinated crowds of people. Big difference: The young woman of the 19th century hadn’t chosen that exhibition. They displayed her like a fair animal.

Today, in showing off her backside herself, at a time when anorexic models are fashionable, Kim Kardashian is doing something political. It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that her bare ass is a raised fist.

In Atlantico, the sociologist Christophe Colera, author of “La Nudité, pratiques et significations,” or “Nudity, Practices and Meanings,” published by du Cygne in October 2008, said in an interview:

“Thinness was a characteristic of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs), for whom large buttocks belonged to those of the lower classes (former slaves or women from exotic countries).”

Caroline Pochon, author with Allan Rothschild of the nonfiction work “The Hidden Face of the Backside” (2009), also says that Kim Kardashian — like the singer Nicki Minaj, for example — turns a stigma upside-down.

Bustling Around

But Pochon also advises nuance and caution. Reducing a large behind to an exotic sense of identity, and comparing it to Neolithic Venuses, is a certain reading of history.

“We found these statues, but we totally don’t know what they mean. We wonder about the objects of the past with the questions of the present.

When the notion of prehistory emerged, we said: ‘Body-wise, these black woman resemble these prehistoric bodies,’ which was useful in the time of colonization.

But in the West, there have always been very large women and women with large backsides – what do we make of that? It’s a little of the collective unconscious that is expressing itself.”

She reminds us that not only has the time not always been ideal for small behinds, but that big ones have been celebrated — she cites Courbet or Rubens.

(At that point in our phone conversation, that did it; I had the behinds of Vallotton’s work in my head.)

At the end, the nonfiction writer highlights that the feminine ideal of the 18th and 19th centuries is, for example, a good rear end.

“We even added bustles to the backs of dresses. The idea that we exaggerate the feminine posterior is not new.”

So, what happened to make us go from the bustles of yesterday to the women’s bodies of today, thin and without many curves?

Getting Those Asses in Gear

During the First World War, women had to work, even those in the middle class – whose bodies, up until then, had been constrained, corseted and almost immobilized. And then came the sexual revolution. As Pochon describes:

“Middle-class women became students… The time of frills and long skirts was truly over.

We’re probably coming back to it today because things have changed, women have been able to vote, to liberate themselves… But what is interesting is that there is more than one standard to invest in.”

And here is how Kim’s derriere ends up going to our head. A little bit like Beckett and his “Molly”: “We’re not, in my opinion, very familiar with this little hole; we call it the asshole and we affect a contempt of it. But wouldn’t it more likely be the doorway to the individual whose famous mouth would be nothing but a service entrance?”*

*Editor’s note: This quote, though accurately translated, could not be verified.