Social scientists have been grappling with the rise of booty in popular culture over the past few years.
As in, ass is everywhere… but where did it come from? Why is Nicki Minaj all of a sudden the flavour of the year? Was twerking really that powerful a movement? It can’t possibly be because J. Lo’s relevant again…
It’s not all smut, of course. The social media fitness frenzy has put babes with backsides front and centre on our Instagram feeds (we’re looking at you, Jen Selter).
Well, turns out the explanation lies within a familiar field when it comes to explaining social phenomenon: science.
And you’d be dead wrong to assume this is just a fad.
So, how can the basis of human life explain why millions of us are enthralled by Kim Kardashian’s anatomically impossible figure? Let’s get into it…
According to a psychology study from The University of Texas at Austin, men have a mate preference for women with a “theoretically optimal angle of lumbar curvature,” optimal being a 45.5-degree curve from back to buttocks.
The reason is truly primitive: this curvature allows “ancestral women to better support, provide for, and carry out multiple pregnancies.”
As the study’s co-author, David Buss, points out, the fasscinating part of this research is the “close fit between a sex-differentiated feature of human morphology – in this case lumbar curvature – and an evolved standard of attractiveness.”
Beauty, therefore, is not in the eye of the beholder. Rather, (male) society’s lust for booty is connected to the relationship between “evolutionary pressures and modern human psychology, including our standards of attractiveness.”
So maybe it’s science that’s all of a sudden cool; maybe we’re all just more upfront about our natural, evolutionary instincts, a fact accelerated by shallow media portrayals but certainly not hatched by it.
And if you think it’s all about size, think again. A second study “conclusively show[ed] that men prefer women who exhibit specific angles of spinal curvature over buttock mass.”
#SpinalCurvatureHadMeLike…
Thank you, science, for assassinating this great myth.
Images courtesy of clinicaladvisor.com, funnyshack.com and vibe.com
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