surprise grab

Excerpt courtesy of The Guardian, 10 May 2003 by Zoe Williams:

It would be fair to say that, at the moment, mainstream global culture is preoccupied with the aesthetic and sexual properties of the bottom. All celebrities, male and female, are evaluated on the quality of their behinds, and extraordinary competitions are launched between the arses of a brace of stars (I'm thinking of Kylie and J-Lo, obviously). Other stars speak of the arse stars in the most prolix, purple fashion: Justin Timberlake on Kylie ("I didn't just touch her butt, I totally copped a feel") is easily matched by Craig David on J-Lo ("Maybe she's voluptuous, but you wouldn't be complaining if she was lying naked with that arse in your face, would you?"). 

Try to imagine these nicely turned out young men talking about breasts like that - "I didn't just grope her tits, I totally squeezed!" They'd never be able to look the women in the eyes again (although, if they were breast men, maybe this wouldn't bother them). Suddenly, it is OK to objectify women by their buttocks. Normal, post-feminist standards still abide vis-à-vis all other body parts, but arses? Go for it, mummy's boys. Do your worst. 

The butt stars themselves, who ought to be able to see this competition as just another piece of manufactured chatter, have instead bought into it wholesale. Well, J-Lo has, allegedly trying to poach Kylie's bottom make-up artist. A Minogue "insider" was recently reported as saying, "This industry's not big enough for two bottoms of such magnitude. Kylie's make-up girl has found the elixir of arse maintenance, and there's no way she'll let that awful Lopez woman near it." I think you can probably make of that what you will. 

It is also OK to objectify men by their buttocks, Sex And The City-style, where men are judged by their behinds, presumably because attempts to judge them by their pecs and six-packs have fallen flat. This is the root of male buttock fixation - women objectify men by physical attributes to exact revenge for all the years that men have spent judging women in that way. You judge us by our arses, so we will judge you. 

But bottoms don't - certainly not in their modern, idealised incarnation - encapsulate very well the essence of either gender. Look at Kylie's bum: it is round and pert. Look at Justin Timberlake's: it is round and pert. It is possibly a bit hairier (I don't know). With this fascination, we are not rejoicing in our "otherness". We aren't viving la différence. I don't think that this is completely about sex, either. I think this is also about competition, about each gender taunting the other with an equally unattainable model of perfection. And by centring on the same body part, we make the battle cleaner. 

Advertising, which takes such pride in its up-to-the-minute cultural awareness, has been almost embarrassingly slow in this instance - although, I suppose, as the latecomer to the arse party, it proves the lasting significance of this obsession. The Sloggi billboard concept once had a whisper of texture to it - you may remember, they had a bunch of models in skimpy pants, cycling. This has now been jettisoned in favour of a far simpler and actually much more effective line-up: there is a girl with a watering can; there are other girls, all wearing thongs. The Renault Megane TV ad is similar in content. To the tune of I See You Baby (Shakin' That Ass), by Groove Armada, the camera segues from the large behind of the car to, er, some pretty behinds they just found about the place. Again, the "high concept" here is the arse without the face. The campaign for Velvet loo roll bathetically undercuts the arse supremacy with its "Love Your Bum" ads (these also feature nothing but a butt; the difference here being that the butts aren't perfect. They could be yours, and you must love them, anyway). 

Moving on from this frenzied arse appreciation to the next natural step, we come to a fascination with anal sex. This year is notable for two things: the longest and most depressing anal rape scene in cinema (Irreversible, directed by Gaspar Noé, features a nine-minute violation, which has divided critics - in so far as some of them deem it "necessary" and others "unnecessary"); and the appearance of the word "rimming" in mainstream literature. Adam Thirlwell's as yet unpublished novel, Politics, has an anal sex scene so honest and inept that it almost turns the experience into art. 

Martin Amis has been famous for his arse-centricity since 1980, when he contributed to Penthouse the short story Let Me Count The Times - it included the line, "Vernon sodomised his wife twice a year... on his birthday, which seemed fair enough, but also, ironically (or so he thought), on hers." Amis's forthcoming novel, Yellow Dog, is partly inspired by his own research into porn (or, in his 1980s terminology, "porno"), research that rapidly led him to the conclusion that porn these days doesn't stretch to any sex other than anal. "Pussies are bullshit," he famously reported in an article about porn(o) two years ago, an observation made by porn(o)-maker John Stagliano. In other words, pussies are for, well, pussies - real men prefer to watch it up the papa. But isn't this roughly the same as saying, "Women are pointless"? Isn't this, again, about competition? 

Now, John Stagliano and Buttman, the western world's second most popular arse-fixated porn star (after Seymore Butts), are one and the same person, so conceivably there is a bit of bias going on there. But the fact is, of the three most popular UK porn vendors on the internet, two name their number one bestseller as Omar's Arse-Fucking Anal House (the third names an Amateurs video). Which brings us to the question: how many people are doing this in their own homes? Figures are relatively scant - the most recent National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, in 2000, found that the practice of heterosexual anal sex among women rose from 6.5% in 1990 to 11.3% in 2000 (an increase of 73%) and among men from 7% to 12.3% (an increase of 75%). 

The anecdotal evidence is revealing. Deirdre Sanders, agony aunt on the Sun for 20 years, told me, "I'm not someone who usually goes in for big changes and trends, but I think the internet is having a huge effect on young people's sex lives. The availability of porn, the fact that they can be looking at it in their bedrooms, is affecting how younger people see sex. They see it much more as a commodity. The boys are coming at it with the idea that anything goes, not specifically anal but, yes, threesomes, foursomes, oral sex, anal sex... I wouldn't say it plays a huge part in my mailbag, because I only hear about it when there's a problem. But there's a lot of pressure on young women from young men to do different things, to swap things around." Caroline Buchanan, agony aunt at Now magazine, identifies a different factor, so old school that I'd forgotten about it. "I have heard that teenage girls are being pressured into anal sex, because they don't get pregnant that way. That's the thing I notice again and again: they're just not using contraception." 

Let's rewind a bit to what female commentators have made of the rise of the arse in terms of fashion and celebrity. Fashion editors are routinely quizzed on what, exactly, is going on here, and the majority of them see a positive message for women. Marie O'Riordan, editor of Marie Claire, has said on the matter, "We love a big bottom. Maybe this will be the trigger for a different fashion shape." And the journalist to whom she said it, Frances O'Toole, remarked, "And not before time. Any change in fashion that celebrates the way women actually are has to be for the good." This is the orthodoxy, that misogyny requires women to be thin, while a respect for women requires them to have curves. But the reality is not as simple: J-Lo's bottom is easily as unattainable as Kate Moss's upper arms; Kylie's arse is about as womanly as Jordan's breasts. The truth is, you would be crazy to see this backdoor mania as an empowering function of feminism. 

There is another, far more obvious misogynist top note to anal sex, and that is that many women don't like it. The bald truth of the matter is that men have an anal G-spot and women don't. Eschewing vaginal for anal, therefore, is just another way of saying to women, "Your pleasure is secondary, if not irrelevant." Which is fine, in its place, once in a while (on your birthday?), but not fine if the whole sexual culture is driving in that direction. Now, this is not the whole story: The Ultimate Guide To Anal Sex For Women, by Tristan Taormino, provides sound physiological reasons as to why anal sex shouldn't have to be a girl's own nightmare, as well as techniques for the proof thereof in the privacy of your own homes (I'm too squeamish to go into this; look it up on Amazon). But what kind of cultural trajectory is that? To idealise a mode of sex that effectively excludes one party, and then have to backtrack to re-include that party? Why not idealise a mode of sex that everyone can start off enjoying? 

Susie Bright, an American broadcaster and cultural commentator, argues that our obsession with anal sex has come out of the Aids crisis: "There was such a lot of talk at the height of Aids about the dangers of anal sex that straight people started thinking, 'Wow, it must feel really good for people to take such insane risks!'" I don't buy this, otherwise I'd have taken heroin to see why it screwed me up, and so would you. 

Here are some alternative thoughts from David Cronenberg, the dirty-minded visionary, apropos his film Crash: "It expresses that element of disconnection. It's a question of 'How do you have sex when you're not quite having sex with each other?' It felt right, getting both actors looking towards the camera and not at each other." Again, anal is dirty, "disconnected", raunchier than "loving" sex; but what is truly sexy about it? The disconnection, or the idea that the female is getting nothing from it? That the act is not one of union, but one of usage and solipsism? 

Anal retentiveness has been taken up as a shorthand for people who like to organise their desk items at right angles to each other, but the more faithful rendering of the anal character, as defined by Freud, is a person whose main energy in life is directed towards having, saving and hoarding money and material things. It's a stretch, I grant, to extrapolate from this that an anally-fixated society is one that, by definition, directs its main energy towards having money and material things. But it is certainly the case that we are hurtling towards the apex of capitalism, the most materialistic age man has known - and we are also fixated by Kylie's butt.

Now, it would make no sense to have this discussion without mentioning the racial aspects of arse-centricity. I don't want to say that black women have more sticky-out arses than white women - regardless of whether or not it's true, there is a racist overtone to the observation, since white culture has traditionally focused on the black female arse for racist reasons. David Marriott, author of On Black Men and lecturer in black cultural theory and critical theory at Queen Mary and Westfield, recalls an article headlined Black Venus in the early 1980s, "which reproduced lots of Old Master-type paintings and ethnographic images of black women, which were invariably obsessed with the butt. What was really being anchored was a racist view of the black physiognomy." 

That is, it was all just a (not very well) coded way of reinforcing the idea that black women were closer to simians - and, having more in common with monkeys, how could they not be savages? But though essentialism has largely been rooted out like the bindweed it was, it hasn't entirely gone away. I give you Sir Mix-A-Lot, the novelty rapper, and his song, Baby Got Back (you might know it as I Like Big Butts). The intro features a lot of scoffing about the size of a girl's behind ("It's so round", "I mean - gross"), and concludes that Becky is "just so... black!" And note the recent shocked newspaper coverage of tennis player Serena Williams' big, powerful body. 

The prime importance of the arse in black sexual identity is referenced constantly in rap music, from the really sexy, grubby lyrics of early 1990s hard men (like, er, Lil' Kim) through the more cutesy phrasing of Destiny's Child ("Can you handle my buttocks?" they effectively ask in Bootylicious), to novelty rappers. J-Lo, even though she is Hispanic and personifies that body ideal more than any other, is nevertheless associated through her music, and through her former relationship with Puff Daddy, with rap culture and thus with black culture. The contest between her (sticky-out) arse and Kylie's (tidy) arse is more than a piece o' fun concocted by the tabloids for our enjoyment. While on the one hand black culture is powerfully attractive to, and influential in, mainstream culture, there is a tendency in the white mainstream to water it down - to co-opt it, repackage it and send it back out with a white face. 

Kylie's timid behind is, in essence, a conduit for this very Anglo-Saxon message: defined arses are unarguably nice, but you don't have to be strident, or rapacious, or voluptuous, or black, to constitute a perfect model of femininity. You can be neat and small and white, and still be just as pretty as a picture. That's why it has taken on a life of its own, distinct from Kylie herself, just as J-Lo's has (with rumours of its having been insured for $1bn). In the inevitable backlash, fans on Kylie's website have said, "We're all bummed out. Put your ass to bed once and for all." Even while objecting to the arse, they still buy into the notion that it has a life of its own, and can stay in bed while the rest of Kylie goes out. 

This isn't to say that black culture has more respect and/or love than white culture for the "natural", assertive female form. As Marriott says, "It's relatively recent that the arse has become a designer object. But, for far longer, it's been a part of popular culture, of dancehall culture. There are black street cultures that have always engaged with this obsession. Why, I'm not sure, but I don't see anything in it other than extreme phallic fascination. Men want to penetrate women as if they were men. And certainly in Jamaican and ragga culture, their style of dancing would seem to go hand in hand with an intense homophobia. That's a very simple narrative: that what people most want, they most disavow. I don't see how it could be liberating for women to be put in that position of mediating homoerotic desire." 

This raises an interesting rejoinder to the widely held belief that a cultural fixation with bottoms and anal sex constitutes a kind of tacit acceptance of homosexuality. On the face of it, the more receptive the mainstream is to homosexuality, the more receptive it should be to anal sex. But anal sex with women is not necessarily a means of signalling general acceptance of anal sex as a modus operandi. It is, if you take the Jamaican example, a means of marginalising homosexuality still further by appropriating sodomy for heterosexual sex. In the same way that white culture absorbs black sexual imagery, remodels it and sends it back out in the shape of Kylie, so straight culture absorbs gay practice, grafts it on to heterosexual couplings in which 50% of the group isn't, by consensus, enjoying itself, and sends it back out in the shape of Bridget Jones's Diary (you no doubt remember the scene in which Renée Zellweger says to Hugh Grant, "What you just did is actually illegal in several countries." "You", not "we", of course). This is not about acceptance and belonging; it's about perceiving a threat, an otherness, then milking it down and saying, "Well, it's fine the way we do it, but you're still weird." 

Where ragga culture has arse-centric dancing, middle-American culture has Jackass, which focuses on the arse to an absurd degree. You may or may not have seen the movie, in which good-looking, articulate young men seek to hurt themselves in wholly revolting ways. They shoot metal pellets into their own stomachs and have bruises that describe whole continents on their bellies. They paper-cut their lips and between-finger areas: it's enough to make you sick. They make projectiles of themselves, to fire off every conceivable roof. And then one of them sticks a toy car up his arse, in a condom (the detail of the prophylactic is in itself extraordinary, since they take no precautions against pain or infection in any other stunt). And one of these guys, Steve-O - who has already stuck his head in a vat of jellyfish and then poured his own urine over his face to ease the exquisite pain - won't do it because his parents would be "disappointed". And the car-guy makes such a girlie fuss -"Ooh, this is so uncomfortable. Oh, I hate this"; this from a man who's jettisoned himself down a busy road on a shopping trolley - when he goes for an x-ray. 

And you cannot help conclude that, unlike any other stunt, the pain here is not physical. And the shock that they're confronting, unlike in any other stunt, is not physical. The format is to unleash shock and awe on their audience for the extravagant, imaginative pain and the untold risks they're prepared to take - and the most painful it gets is the humiliation of having something up your arse; and the greatest untold risk is that you might look as if you're enjoying it. 

Like any change in social mores, one assumes the arse thing is a move forward. One assumes that the deification of the lady arse is a blow for feminism, for womanliness. One assumes that the chorus over J-Lo's butt is a blissful union of black and white body ideals. One imagines that the rise and rise of anal sex is striking out in the direction of sexual liberation, of understanding, of the breaking down of barriers. One hopes that the day everyone has his and her brown wings will be the day humanity realises, and rejoices in, its proper urges. And all this adds up to a nice theory - but there's a crack in it.