ass-thetics

big butts are in. i keep telling ann this but she seems to think it's my poor attempt to make her feel better about her body image issues. for the record, she doesn't have a big butt. at least, not the kind i'm talking about. beyonce would be the reigning queen of that kind of big butt. is it fine? o yes! you'd be blind if you couldn't see that.

when i think back on things, it seems that butts were big all along. most of our pre-college gfs were not largely endowed breast-wise(there are one or two exceptions, it seems to me). but they already had those large curvy butts(ann marie, holly & marie are great examples). they got even better when they went off to college. but fashions come & go. it's hard for a man to imagine having a body that's out of fashion, nowhere to be seen in vogue or seventeen or elle. it seems that male projection fantasties are more inclusive & identification-based. just check out raider fans. these guys ARE howie long or bill romanowski etc etc. there's no ego deflation in the face of superior physiques, just a ramped up co-optation.

women process this stuff differently, it seems. those impossibly thin models slinking down the runways somehow prevent identification(an unconscious sense of the impossibility, perhaps?). & yet, they can't be dismissed & become objects of unattainable desire. the difference between a raider fan & his object of desire is no less impossible to bridge & yet, it's done.

there must be some sense that these models are NOT superior physiques. this must create a real psychic dichotomy, a true conflict between the real & the imagined. the real must always be repressed(for economic reasons, the imaginary is more free-flowing)but still makes itself felt or known in various ways(symptoms, commercials). i imagine the return of this repressed has a lot to do w/various cultural, psychological, individual breakdowns. beyonce's big womanly butt is a radical slap down of those ultra-thin prancing wraiths. what is really real asserts itself & re-sets the imaginary.


not only are big butts in but small boobs are too.



here the economic is foregrounded but i'd like to think it'll help psychologically too.