The Booty Keeps the Score

Hold onto your butts!

I’m in my home town of Deal, Kent, looking out of the half-open stable door of a little fisherman’s cottage watching a magpie collect twigs for her nest. There’s a wood fire burning and I’ve been writing with a new red fountain pen filled with gold ink. I have a rotten cold. For some reason the cold makes the whole thing fifty percent more romantic.

The night I arrived, I had dinner with some old friends who asked when they could expect my next Substack. I told them I was working on it, that it was part of the reason I came down here; to get away, think, write, think about writing, yearn. When they asked me what it was about, I replied, “ It’s about my butt” which is the answer Bart Simpson would give but also the truth.

The year is 2025 and feminism did exactly what it set out to do. I am a child-free, middle-aged woman with the vapours who has taken herself off to the seaside so that she might have the time and mental fortitude to better write about her bum. I live this free so that I might be an example to the next generation and to honour my ancestors who sacrificed so much so that I might have all the privileges of a seaside booty writer.

My bum has always been a series regular in the TV show of my life. The topic pops up at surprising moments, regular as clockwork, like Kramer bursting through the door. The most recent occasion was after a massage I had a few weeks ago; I was suffering with a trapped nerve and sciatica, unable to turn my head left after doing a sneeze wrong.

My back issues are nothing new. They started when I was around eleven, around the time sportswear became fashion wear and kids all over Britain started culturally appropriating footballers. For some reason, I was obsessed with a very large, very nondescript UMBRO travel bag more suited to a local football coach who needed somewhere to keep permission slips than an 11-year-old girl transporting heavy textbooks to school every day. I loved that bag so much that when the strap inevitably broke, I bought the exact same one again.

Every day for four years, I awkwardly lurched and shuffled the twenty-minute journey to the train station as the UMBRO behemoth slammed against my thigh and chafed holes in the right side of my school uniform. Every day for four years, I walked with urgency and purpose at a 45 degree angle, like a young Brian Clough on his way to a crucial away game against Derby County. Every day for four years, I allowed the cheap polyester strap to gouge chunks of flesh from my shoulder, the plastic connecting doodads squeaking like tortured mice with every other step. And while I never cracked the spines of any of the textbooks weighing that UMBRO bag down, I did completely fuck up the spine of my body in the process.

Giant, overfilled sports bags were the corsets and foot-binding of my generation. The irony of being injured by cosplaying a sporty person is not lost on me.

The back issues have persisted on and off since then. In the past few years, I’ve transitioned from being a relatively embodied director - pointing at things with my arms, using my legs to get out of the way of the crew, and using my voice to shout out things like “Amazing!” to people doing extremely normal things - to working from home as a video editor; a job that is extremely convenient, sometimes lucrative, and absolutely devastating for my physical health.

The posture I opt for when editing is The Fixated Mantis, body hunched in the shape of the famous letter C, the only signs of life my tapping claws and manic eyes flicking urgently like Rain Man counting cards at a casino. I can be in The FM™ pose from anywhere between five and ten hours a day, regularly forgetting to pee, looking up after what I think is twenty minutes to find that the sun has gone down, I’m sitting in the dark, and the dog is dead.

So, this is why I was at the masseuse. Because of the UMBRO-to-editing-horrible-posture-pipeline.

The massage was very good, very powerful, and very traumatic. It was one of those massages where you cry but in a good way. And scream but in a good way. And at the end you say “Thank you, that was amazing”, but it's through quiet sobs and you’re frightened because you felt a demon come out and you know it’s still somewhere in the room with you.

But the most painful and disturbing part was when the masseuse got to my butt. It was like her hands were made of gristle and rocks and my glutes were covered in extra sensitive nerve endings; like two giant exposed teeth. At one point I felt my eyes pop out in a Loony Tunes-style “AWOOGA” motion.

At the end of the treatment as I was shamefully putting away the breasts that she had very much been manhandling only three minutes earlier, I told the massage therapist how horrifying the bum part had been.

She replied, very matter of fact, “ Of course, that's where you’re storing all your emotions.”

This was news to me. Personal trainers have told me that my glutes are weak and hip flexors tight. Doctors have informed me my cholesterol is high and iron low. But not even my therapist tried to tell me where I was storing my emotions.

And “storing” them. Like how people keep dry goods in the larder.

Naturally, I replied, “Is that why it’s so big?”

It was a joke, you see. Because I do have a large bum and this would’ve been something she’d noticed, as many people with eyes and a sense of wonder do. It was an excellent piece of playful banter that had her chuckling away, slapping her knee, then slapping my knee for good measure - although that might have just been a continuation of the treatment.

However, Freud did say that there’s no such thing as a joke. That a joke is just “veiled hostility”, the truth in disguise.

A few years ago, it felt like everyone was reading The Body Keeps the Score, an exploration of trauma’s impact on our physiology. While I’m lucky to have never experienced the “Big T” trauma covered in the book, it made enough of an impact to make me mindful of how my body reacts to stress. But honestly, I’d never included my bum in that equation. What would it mean if I did?

Look, neither the facts nor the hips lie:

• I’ve lived a lot of life

• I’ve had a lot of emotions

• My bum is big

They say that correlation does not imply causation but honestly that sounds like emotionally-stunted, small-bum loser talk to me.

But before I go on, let me just say that my butt is not the biggest butt, OK? It’s not an insane butt. So you might think “Come on, really? A whole essay sent to strangers about your butt and it’s not even the biggest?”

Firstly- it is technically an ass so big you can see it from the front. And secondly - this is something. You know when something is something, and not nothing, when every person you’ve ever met waits for a certain stage in the friendship (particularly at work when there’s a higher risk of HR getting involved) to ask for consent to start vocalising their thoughts about your rear-end.

And like my back issues, my bum journey goes way back to those halcyon UMBRO days.

When I was eleven, I was given the nickname “Mountain Goat” very much against my will. The first time I ever heard it was during Mr Pashley’s science class as I was perched on a high stool tinkering with a bunsen burner - a small pipe connected to the gas mainline that children were allowed to set on fire, by themselves, for science . It started as a murmur before getting louder and louder, through fake coughs and sneezes,“…Mountain goat….Cuh-Mountain Goat!…COUGH COUGH-MOUNTAIN GOAT!!!”

I remember this exact moment vividly. It was the first time I ever felt that weird sensation that would become a familiar part of womanhood; confusion mixed with flattery and fear. Someone has noticed me, I have been singled out and picked! Then, Oh god, I am being noticed, singled - out, and picked. It was that strange feeling of being perceived, and not me, but specifically my body. The feeling of being betrayed by this entity that I didn’t realise was doing a thing that someone had taken as an invitation.

What is a Mountain Goat?! I hear you cry. Well, technically you’re crying wrong. It’s “What is Mountain Goat?” for Mountain Goat is not a singular noun, but a linguistically-flawed metaphor; a vision of utopia cooked up by the horny minds of two boys sitting behind me. You see, it wasn’t me who was the mountain goat, they were the mountain goats (plural!) and my bum was the mountain. Mount Vesuvius to be precise. And they were climbing all over it - very much in their minds and without my consent- at the risk of it “exploding”.

The Mountain Goat trend escalated quickly to the point where I was hearing it yelled across sports fields and dining halls for an entire term. It reached its volcanic crescendo late one night when the boys called my landline- the phone connected to my actual home, where my entire family was sleeping - to scream obscenities to anyone who picked up.

I can’t remember who one of the boys was, but the ringleader (no pun intended!) was a lad we’ll call Spaniel Ritzfartrick to protect his identity. The reason I remember him was because his dad was our postman.

If you’re wondering what’s more mortifying than two boys calling your landline in the middle of the night shouting about how your butt is a somma–stratovolcano located on the Gulf of Naples, it’s your postman turning up the next day holding one of them by the scruff of the neck, and then that man continuing to be your postman so you have to avoid his gaze every morning for the next seven years until you go to university.

Perhaps the next season of Adolescence can tackle that important and challenging teen issue.

But look, none of that, that whole thing, had anything to do with me. I was as much a horrified onlooker as Pliny the Younger watching Pompeii turn to ash in 79 AD.

My butt did that.

My butt writes checks I am ultimately unwilling and unable to cash. Most of the time, I have no idea she’s even doing business back there. Perhaps that’s why I’ve neglected to consider her an integrated part of my body, because she has been treated so much as an entity, in and of herself.

I have had men follow me for blocks at the mercy of her siren song, a dog whistle only they can hear. I have dated men who, after the initial polite courtship, make a beeline for my butt, the person they’re most excited to build a relationship with. It’s what I imagine dating as a conjoined twin is like “Oh, you’re here for Linda? Hold on, let me see if she’s in”

Once, I was walking through Brooklyn on a hot summer’s day when the back of my floaty, polyester trousers split wide open. I was wearing a thong but because there was no cool breeze to alert me to the fact that both arse-cheeks were now fully exposed to the good people of Bed-Stuy, I walked eight blocks to the subway wondering why all the cars were honking and men were dangling their full bodies out of windows. When I found out what was going on back there I felt such shame. It felt utterly obscene to have allowed the bawdy wench out in public.

So, storing my emotions is just another thing my butt is doing that I didn't know about. It’s now writing checks and keeping the score; I’ve basically got a Ladbrokes betting shop back there.

I’ve always been embarrassed and perturbed by it. It's big. It's fat. It’s covered in cellulite. As a teen I would sit on my bed in my underwear and measure my hips and thighs with my hands, asking myself “Is this acceptable?” And in romantic situations, I have regularly walked out of bedrooms backwards lest my partner see my “wobbly bits”.

People always tell me I should be proud, but I could never really muster that feeling. I am grateful, sure, to be born into a healthy, well-proportioned body, of course. But being born into a body is just like that show Quantum Leap. I just happened to leap into this one. So, what’s pride got to do with it?

But, don’t you keep it in good shape - isn’t that a thing to be proud of? The shape! The shape! The good, good shape that you are maintaining with the help of diet and exercise! Look, I was a profoundly unathletic kid who quit every single sport I ever tried. Netball. Rounders. Dance. Touch rugby (it’s rugby, but gentle, for the ladies!) I only started working out in my mid-thirties, so up until then, the only thing this body was running on was the fumes of my P.E. teacher parents’ genes.

But my metabolism could only do so much to combat twenty years of excessive drinking and sugar consumption, and as a result, my butt became the canary in the coal mine, my picture of Dorian Gray. Mysteriously, my underwear would start cutting lines into my hips, my jeans began to look like they were painted on, and my arse would explode out of my trousers in Bed-Stuy. The booty was indeed keeping the score.

Exercising has helped me reach a point where I can be grateful for my body’s utility and strength. I now see that my butt has a sort of eternal, primordial quality. It is thick-set and dense yet moves like water. The fat and cellulite settles like rings of a tree around the tops of my legs; not quite butt, not quite thigh, something somewhere in between. The shape of my body is the shape of the bodies of all the women in my family, and the more I watch it age, the more I wonder about the women who came before them, and before them. I wonder what stock I’m from. Strong, sturdy gals. Indestructible.

One particularly rough New York winter, I fell down my icy stoop and the only thing between me and a broken spine was my bum, which had somehow managed to bend the laws of physics and lay itself further up my back like an airbag. This is true and if you write me an email asking nicely I’d be happy to draw you an annotated diagram.

If I know my butt, she’ll be the last thing on me to die. She might even outlive us all. I’m sure by the time I go they’ll have found a way to bring us both back; me uploaded to the cloud and my butt behind museum glass in Juicy Couture sweatpants hooked up to an IV. Don’t ask me why. All I know about the future is that it’s going to be very mad, if the present is anything to go by.

Even my niece glances at it sideways and asks “Why is it like that?” to which I respond, “You mean, why is it so perfect?” then I play Bootylicious by Destiny's Child which is probably about eight years too early for her since the song is quite provocative with lots of complicated elements to explain (like, who is Michelle?)

Side note: there’s nothing more humbling than watching the respect drain from a six-year-old’s face while you showcase the cool dance moves and music of your youth.

But it has taken me a while to get to gratitude. And sometimes, if I’m wearing particularly tight jeans, I’ll still tie a shirt around my waist to hide Linda. Maybe it’s embarrassment. Maybe it's PTSD from the infamous Brooklyn butt explosion of 2017.

There are many things to be said about a culture that makes women feel so conflicted about the bodies they landed in. I grew up in a white British culture, in the 90s, that said big butts were very bad and that “heroin chic” - being dangerously thin - was very good. But white people’s fetishisation of thinness is nothing new. One of the books on my reading list is called Everything is TB by John Green, which explores turberculosis’ impact on society including our beauty standards. TB, or “consumption”, a disease causing weakness, pale skin, and emaciation, was romanticised when wealthy white people started to suffer from it. Charlotte Brontë once said, “Consumption, I am aware, is a flattering malady” as she watched her sister Ann literally die from it.

Victorian women suffering from TB, a bacterial infection only treatable with antibiotics, would regularly be sent to the seaside so that the salty air might cure them. Perhaps that’s why I feel like being sick by the sea is romantic.

Butts: A Backstory by Heather Radke, explores what our complicated relationship with butts tells us about larger issues around race. The culture has moved on since the 90s, and for the last ten years big butts have been very much “in”, popularised by non-Black celebrities appropriating the features that Black women have long been persecuted and ridiculed for.

There is no doubt there is a racial component when we talk about butts. The men who have waxed most lyrical and effusive about my bum have been Black and Latino, men from communities where vocalising your appreciation for women’s thickness, strength, and curves is normalised.

There's an SNL skit that highlights the racial divide well. It's set in a workout class being led by rapper Megan Thee Stallion, a strong, big-bootied Black woman encouraging attendees to squat and twerk their way to a bigger butt. There’s an alternative workout happening next to her being led by two white women, SNL regulars Chloe Fineman and Heidi Gardner. Their work-out is for the benefit of the “Flat Butt Army”, women who do not want big butts. In the skit, when Megan Thee Stallion encourages the class to pick up dumbbells, the two white women encourage their class to use their own thumbs as weights, presumably so they don’t get strong at all. The joke, or veiled hostility, is What kind of woman could possibly want a flat butt in this day and age?

But what if you are a woman who does not have a big butt in this day and age? And more specifically, what if you are a Black woman who doesn’t have a big butt?

In recent years, there’s been a rise in Black women travelling to Europe to get invasive BBL surgery (Brazilian Butt Lifts) after finding their own bodies do not meet the standards that are apparently indicative of their race. It's gotten so bad that social media support groups for flat-butted women have sprung up, offering words of encouragement to the real life #FlatBootyNation, women resisting the pressure to modify their bodies for a trend.

But the Mountain Goat boys at my school were white - the whole school was - and this was 1995, six years before Bootylicious came out and twelve years before the first episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashian’s. Their vocalisations about my butt were less lyrical, definitely less fashionable, but no less genuine.

While Freud might say their joke was veiled hostility, it’s so clear it was veiled desire. There’s no way you’re casting my butt as the world’s most dangerous volcano and yourself as a mountain goat roaming around on it unless you absolutely love volcanos. Those two boys were basically reincarnations of those mad French scientists in the documentary Fire of Love.

“Chèvre de montagne!”

What they were responding to was the perfect mix of what the butt is: the sexual with the comical. It’s so perfect for a boy leaving childhood and venturing into the first erotic stirrings of teenage life. It’s right there, on the back of all the girls and women you’re walking behind. Alert, bouncy, fun. It’s also where the kaka comes out and the person who owns it has no idea what it's doing back there - it’s sexy, comedy gold!

Boobs serve a similar function- jiggly, silly, where literal milk comes out- but if you want to look at them, you’ll have to contend with the beady eyes of a girl who hates you hovering a few inches above. It’s high risk. There’s also the whole oedipus element.

I’m not saying our culture's most recent way of monetising the insecurities of fifty percent of the population - ie telling women they now need big butts- isn't racist or hypocritical, what I’m saying is liking butts is innately human. But because our beauty standards are always changing we’re not allowed to desire bums, or accept them, or purchase them, unless our fucked up culture tells us to. The culture is always moving the goal posts, which, if I know anything about sports, plays absolute havoc with the players’ ability to win.

In recent years, in parallel with 77% rise in BBL surgeries worldwide, there's been a rise in celebrities using weight -loss drugs like Ozempic, leading the New York Post to proclaim, Bye-bye Booty: Heroin Chic is Back. Back to smallness. Back to weakness. Everybody just disappear.

It’s been said a lot by women way more tired than me, but this is exhausting.

I know multiple women who have the same relationship with their boobs as I have had with my butt. Women who, tired of back pain and being overly sexualised since childhood, opted for breast reductions as adults. And it's not just butts and boobs, there’s a whole body of parts to have a problem with.

I am someone who has had two nose jobs. My relationship with my face is really complicated. Since getting my second nose job at thirty-two, I’ve come to accept my face. But then a few weeks ago, I got a really bad haircut which brought up a ton of old feelings about it. I didn't realise how much I was relying on my long, thick, blonde hair to make me feel beautiful. Pull on that thread and there's a whole bunch of stuff that comes out of the swamp; about race and blondness, about Eurocentric facial features, about how gender expression, ableism, and ageism is all interwoven in our hair length, hair colour and hair health.

I’m forty. This stuff never goes away. I could do a million more things to my face, or my hair, or my body and there would still be more to do.

We live in a culture that's all curation. Since the Industrial Revolution we have all operated under the insatiable ethos of MORE. That used to just mean more things, but now it means more choice, more customisation, more changing your mind, forever and ever into infinity. We can edit and tweak anything. And why not? Why deny yourself? In western colonial countries, especially America, the self, the individual, has a manifest destiny to expand and actualise at the expense of all else - health, environment, community and connection.

What comes with a culture that is constantly in pursuit of technological superiority is deviation from human nature. For example, throughout history, women have always given birth on all fours. But with the advancement of medical interventions in the 18th century, it became standard practice to place women on their backs so that doctors might better access them with medical instruments. Some say the trend started as far back as the 17th century when King Louis XIV insisted his mistress give birth in the supine position so that he could see better.

Maybe it does something to the world if you can't even see a butt waving proudly in the air the day a new human comes into it. Maybe we lose something. A little comedy. A little bawdiness. A little humanity.

My bum just so happens to be genetic and all mine. There have been no surgical interventions on this part of my body, at least. She’s not imitating or appropriating anyone, as far as I know, and if she is, it’s definitely a Midwestern Mom as opposed to an African Queen. It's all in the spread. And the fact she’s called Linda. My butt is definitely from Minnesota.

But unless someone mentions her, I don’t really think about her at all. And because of my cushy work-from-home gig, I don’t really have to think about whether she’ll fit into jeans. Like a lot of people, I’ve been in sweatpants since 2020. So when I do find myself hating my body, or like right now, hating my hair, I have to remind myself that suffering comes from not accepting what is.

A beauty standard is nothing more than an invitation to suffering and alienation. A beauty standard is nothing more than veiled hostility. My body will never be fixed - in both senses of the word. It is always changing, always imperfect. It will forever get away from me because from the day that I was born, my body started the process of dying.

I really do have a shit haircut right now, guys. But it’s OK. Because guess what? Hair grows. What’s great about our bodies is that they regenerate. If you give them time.

Yesterday, I had an epic two-hour phone conversation with Emma Tattenbaum-Fine, who was just waking up in New York. We talked about how the scale of time in modern culture has been dissected and split so small, like the atom, that no one has time for anything, let alone a story. Let alone a long rambling story. Let alone a long rambling story about my butt.

This essay is the longest essay I’ve ever written. I’m not even sure where this essay went or that it went anywhere at all. I didn’t need to give you half the information I did. The UMBRO-to-editing-horrible-posture-pipeline was a side-quest that no one really needed. And so I found myself going back over it looking to “trim the fat”. I was embarrassed thinking,“This is too much. This is obscene, it’s unacceptable.”

But it’s not. It's fitting. It fits. I wrote it this long because this is how long it is. My butt is this big because that's how big it is. And not because of emotions or medical intervention. My butt would not be better if it were smaller. This essay would not be better, shorter, it would simply be shorter, shorter. Different, shorter. Less UMBRO.

So, at the risk of losing you all at Pliny the Younger, I resisted cutting any of it. Because I am a cranky and congested woman in a three hundred-year-old cottage that will outlive all our butts, who has spent an entire weekend expanding into some ideas and jokes about bums, resisting the desire to make any of them smaller.

That's the flabbiness I'm actually proud of. That’s the part of me that took work, dedication, and time. Writing is my touch rugby! If I spend more time on my art, more time with the people I love, that's the kind of more that I want. Life should be flabby, that’s where all the good stuff is, where the meat of connection lies. In a highly curated, fast-paced culture, we need people who are being messy and taking their time.

Besides, you won’t really know me unless I’m flabby.