And of course both of those things are myths.

Just like it’s your responsibility to have a body that looks good and is healthy and is perfect. It makes so much sense that taking control of your own body is very similar to the idea that it’s your responsibility to make the money and make sure you make your life what you want it to be. The rise of fitness culture really maps on in an interesting way to the rise of neoliberalism. As one philosopher-scientist said to me, “any butt that’s not killing you is good enough.” There’s no evidence to support that being the case. But we should be really careful in saying that kind of stuff because what it suggests is that there’s a kind of butt or a kind of body that’s more correct or more fit or more evolved, in some sense, than another one. The science behind that is very thin, and I think those kinds of studies are often cited in Maxim Magazine. Some people think that women with big butts are more fertile than women without. As one scientist said to me, “the fat could have just been in our knees or our elbows.” And maybe it’s just stored in our butts and bellies because you wouldn’t topple over the way that you might if it was stored in your shoulders, so that’s a simple answer.īut there’s a lot of theories that have emerged in the late 80s and early 90s as part of evolutionary psychology that offer other explanations that are pretty dubious and also can cause a lot of harm if they’re not handled carefully. But then there’s a question of why that fat has to be stored where it is.

That’s because it’s very energetically expensive to bear a child and breastfeed. There’s a relatively straightforward answer, which is that female humans have more fat on their bodies than almost any other animal on Earth. The fat on women’s butts specifically is really complicated and really hard to know.

Butts by heather radke