Fashion magazines are obsessed with Kim Kardashian's bum, but no one would describe a pair of boobs in the same "bouncing down the street" way, as one recent article did. Why do magazines such as Esquire and Grazia think it's OK to talk about bums so lasciviously?

Freddie Wolf, London

There is something very, if not exactly racist, then certainly race-ish about the way pop culture obsesses over women's bums these days. But before we get into the race-ish-ism, let's look specifically at the talk of bums.

Kardashian's posterior has been a source of fascination among fashion magazines for a while now, as they are amazed, perhaps, that a woman can still be beautiful despite having body fat. Grazia Daily, for example, recently ran a whole article about how Kardashian dresses her "designer booty", cooing over how her "perky posterior ... wiggles with abandon in a suede pencil skirt", as though the journalist were a thigh-rubbing Benny Hill fan as opposed to a writer for a magazine ostensibly aimed at women. I'm sure these magazines think that their fetishisation of Kardashian's back assets proves that they can celebrate all manner of body types, when in fact it does nothing of the sort. These articles instead invariably reduce Kardashian to her bottom (indeed, Grazia describes her as a "best-dressed bottom", as though the rest of her were naked, and says she only made the best-dressed list because of her "designer booty"), and they do no more to promote body diversity than when Beth Ditto was briefly adopted by the fashion industry, and then everything just carried on as normal. In other words, these magazines treat Kardashian as a one-off freak who they're allowed to sexualise because of her generously proportioned backside.

And now we get to the race-ish-ness. Bigger bottoms have long been associated with black women who, as many social commentators have written elsewhere, are generally expected to be sexual and sexualised in a way that white women are not (compare, for example, the reactions to Rihanna's highly sexualised makeover to Miley Cyrus' similar one). In old caricatures and crude cartoons, black women were often portrayed with exaggerated backsides, and this was seen as an intrinsic part of their allegedly sexual natures (the cover of Nicki Minaj's latest album, Anaconda, is either parodying that or unwittingly replicating it). This is why Miley Cyrus' video for We Can't Stop was so tediously offensive: whereas the rest of the video shows skinny white kids getting high and dancing, in the verse when Cyrus sings about "my homegirls here with the big butts, shaking it like we at a strip club", she's shown dancing with three black women, just in case the "homegirls" didn't make the race issue clear enough. Because black girls have big butts, SEE?!?!?!? And black women dance like they're strippers, SEE?!?!?!? Because they're all so sexxxxed up, SEE?!?!?!?!? Yes, thank you, Miley – now pipe down. And this, in turn, is why it's seen as OK to pore over women's backsides in mainstream publications in a way it really isn't about breasts: because backsides are associated with black women and black culture, and that, apparently, is all up for sexualised grabs.

Kardashian herself is not black – she is half-Armenian, and therefore classified as white European, which presents an interesting opportunity for fashion magazines and pop culture. Here is a woman with the physical attributes associated with sexualised black women, but the skin colour that is preferred by magazine editors. That Kardashian first came to fame via a sex tape also seems to make her fair game to be sexualised by the media. No question, Kardashian does dress in a way that shows her backside's shape, but I'm not really sure what else she should do, other than wear a wimple. Yes, Kardashian might accentuate her backside: the woman's no fool, she knows it gets her attention and that is precisely what she wants. But Grazia drooling over Kardashian's "well-dressed bottom" is akin to the Mail Online claiming that women are "flaunting" their legs, when all they're doing is walking. There is a difference, one apparently hard for some to detect, between possessing a body part and "flaunting" it for the world's delectation.

If any of these magazines took the time to think for a minute about how weird it is for them to obsess over a woman's backside, and how much it makes pages in their magazines look like something heretofore relegated to porn sites, then I'm sure they'd realise the error of their ways. But who has time to take a minute in this fast-paced, 24-hour, internet-hits world of ours? No, far better just to rub one's hands and drool over some woman's backside as though the world was one giant porn film and we're all audience members. This is the world we live in, people.

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