ATOMIC DOG
Back to the Butt
by TC

The Atomic Dog is a weekly feature that isn't necessarily about weight training or bodybuilding. Sometimes it's about sports in general, sex, women, or male issues of some kind. At times it's inspirational, but it can also be informative, funny, and even a little weird, but hopefully, always interesting and a little controversial. We hope it reflects the nature of Testosterone magazine in that, just as no man is completely one-dimensional and only interested in one subject, neither are we. If it makes you think or laugh — or even get angry — it's served its purpose.

What you gon' do with all that junk?
All that junk inside that trunk?
I'ma get, get, get, get, you drunk,
Get you love drunk off my hump.
What you gon' do with all that ass?
All that ass insigh' jer jeans?
I'm a make, make, make, make you scream
Make you scream, make you scream.
Cos' of my hump, my hump, my hump, my hump.
My hump, my hump, my hump, my lovely lady lumps.

— "My Humps" by the Black Eyed Peas

Last year, 2,361 American women had their rear ends augmented. No longer content to have their jeans drape limply over their butt like an old bedspread hanging off a clothesline, they decided to pack some junk inside that trunk.

For the most part, they had their choice of one of two methods. The surgeon could either slide in a contact lens shaped silicone implant just above the sciatic nerve, or he or she could remove fat from one part of the patient's body and painstakingly inject it, globule by globule, into the Dickensian butt:

Please sir, may I have some more?

The first method has its drawbacks. The incisions sometimes break open. Infections are a possibility. And patients just don't like feeling like they had two giant George Costanza-sized wallets between them and the sofa cushion.

The second method isn't perfect, either. For one thing, it takes from 6 to 8 hours, and since the procedure is just as much sculpture as surgery, the results are heavily dependent on the surgeon's artistic ability. Hell, accidentally get hooked up with a cubist and you've got an ass that looks more like a Picasso painting than a Playboy centerfold!

Furthermore, the body eventually reabsorbs much of the injected fat — up to 40 percent.

In either case, patients have to refrain from sitting or lying on their back for several weeks. That means weeks of lying on their stomach, after which their breasts probably look like the Hostess cupcakes in your sack lunch after the fat kid sat on them.

Despite, the drawbacks, more and more women are choosing to pimp that ride. The cost? Umm, 'bout twenty thousand dollars.

While surgical butt augmentation is relatively new, using artificial means to increase the size of the derriere can be traced back to Ancient Greece where women would actually perform a dance where they literally kicked themselves in the rear to make it bigger and firmer.

In fact, the word callipygian, meaning shapely butt, comes from the Greek word kalliphygos.

While this questionable method didn't survive the ancient Greeks, women in more recent cultures accentuated the size of their rear by wearing a bustle, hoop skirts, and dresses designed to grossly exaggerate the hips.

It wasn't until the 1950's that doctors got involved. That's when surgeons from Brazil and Mexico started taking fat cut from the abdomen and transferring it to the gluteal area, but much of it was reabsorbed.

After the silicone breast implant was invented in the 70's, a few doctors started cutting the implants in half and implanting them in the buttocks, but the result was too close to some weird, four-breasted, hemispherically symmetrical creature from that nuclear fallout movie.

The 1980's saw the advent of the contact-lens shaped silicone implants specifically designed for the derriere, but there just weren't that many women interested in having the procedure, at least in America, where breasts have been king of the hill, or hills, for a long, long time. Most of the women that initially wanted butt implants were either Brazilian or Mexican, where the ass has always had more allure than the breasts.

Enter the 1990's. Enter J-Lo.

My friend, retired plastic surgeon Bruce Nadler, one of the ass-implant pioneers, says, "J-Lo did for the butt implant what Pamela Anderson did for the breast implant."

"I'm deeply and totally in love with your jungle rump."

— Will Ferrell to Jennifer Lopez on "Saturday Night Live"

Suddenly, asses were in and remain so. They're so in that plastic surgeons and amateur aficionados alike spend a lot of time discussing the qualities unique to primo ass.

Two Mexican doctors, Dr. Ramon Cuenca-Guerra and Dr. Jorge Quenzada, by request of The New York Times, studied 132 patients and more than 1100 photos and determined that a beautiful ass has the following characteristics:

• Slight hollows on each side

• A curved fold where the butt meets the thighs

• A V-shaped crease that looks like cleavage

• Two dimples in the lower back

• The ability to deflect small-caliber gunfire

Okay, I made that last one up, but it's not hard to believe the butt pictured below could pass that test.

Perfection?

Another expert, plastic surgeon Constantino Mendieta, was similarly tasked but he came up with a different conclusion. Dr. Mendieta believes that overall butt shape is more important. He concluded that they come in 4 different shapes: square, round, V-shape, and A-shape.

"The prettiest buttocks," he explains, "look like A's, like upside down hearts with a wider bottom than top."

The four butt shapes, as described by Dr. Mendieta.

Clearly, Dr. Mendieta never worked at a grocery store. Otherwise, he'd place more value on the square butt, if only because of its stackability. Anyhow, Dr. Nadler tends to side with Cuenca-Guerra and Quenzada, saying that he likes dimples and the lower differentiation between thigh and butt, a characteristic he calls "the smile."

But this butt mania can't be all because of one moderately talented Latino with a piñata-sized butt, can it? I sure as hell don't think so, but my theory might seem even more implausible to you.

I think, and bear with me here, that this butt renaissance has to do with some complex anthropological, evolutionary, and sociological underpinnings that have been partly overridden by alienation and depersonalization.

Boy, ain't that a mouthful? I sound like one of those schmucks on talk radio, but let me make my case that this butt mania is more than just fashion before you blow me off.

All mammals, with the exception of humans, mate from the rear, and it wasn't all that long ago, evolutionarily speaking, that humans did, too.

Our primitive relatives (along with most current-day mammals) exhibited periods of estrus where the females would be sexually receptive to males. This estrus was advertised by various sexual signals — the rump, breasts, and labial lips would angry-up and increase in size.

These brief periods of estrus would result in multiple couplings in a brief period of time — sort of a biologically determined frat party.

This all appears to have changed, though, about 500,000 years ago when homo erectus established permanent home bases with shelter and fire. It was no longer biologically necessary to determine matings based on factors like safety and availability of food.

Consequently, human females lost their estrus cycles and became sexually receptive all the time. To advertise this delightful fact, their breasts and butt became permanently enlarged. Suddenly, the male homo erectus' biologic surname finally made sense to him because he sure was erect!

Mating, however, still took place largely from behind, and usually when the unsuspecting female bent over to pick up a shiny pebble.

But something else was happening, evolutionary-wise. Homo erectus' brain was getting bigger, at least compared to Australopithecus, his low-rent cousin. Bigger brains needed bigger heads, so the female pelvis started getting bigger. The pelvic opening grew longer and more round and this adaptation probably forced the female erectus' legs farther apart while forcing her knees closer together.

This adaptation caused her to grow a bigger butt and new muscles to accommodate these changes, along with causing her to sway and wiggle when she walked, as perhaps best illustrated by Marilyn Monroe wearing that wool skirt in Niagara.

Marilyn Monroe, a victim of bigger heads.

Now here's what I consider the truly interesting part. When a female monkey mates, she can get up and do monkey things without losing any of the sperm she just collected. She's on all fours, so her vaginal tract stays horizontal. She can hang from a tree and that egg will still get fertilized!

The human female, however, with her newfound bipedal, upright locomotion, along with her newly modified pelvis, has a vaginal tract that's practically vertical to the ground.

As such, anything that could keep her horizontal during and right after mating to keep future generations from dribbling down her leg would be a pretty good idea. If you wanted her to bear offspring, you needed to do everything possible to keep her out of a tree, which still pretty much bears true today.

Hence, doggie style sex was on the way out. Sex had to get frontal for successful mating.

Additionally, all the eye-to-eye contact during frontal sex was important for strong pair bonding. Sex had to be not only functional, but personal too. After all, it was important for the male to stick around to protect the mother and infant.

The trouble was, all that engineering had gone into making that ass so damn attractive!  If the female was going to make the male interested in frontal sex, she had to do something, evolutionarily speaking, to make the front of her body more attractive!

According to anthropologist Desmond Morris in his landmark book, The Naked Ape, the "protuberant, hemispherical breasts of the female" are copies "of the fleshy buttocks, and the sharply defined red lips around the mouth must be copies of the red labia."

"If the male of our species was already primed to respond sexually to these signals when they emanated posteriorly from the genital region, then he would have built-in susceptibility to them if they could be reproduced in that form on the front of the female's body. And this, it would seem, is precisely what has happened, with the females carrying a duplicate set of buttocks and labia on their chests and mouth respectively."

Desmond, you just blew...my...mind!

Eventually, women developed permanently swollen, hairless breasts, along with full, reddish lips. Holy mackerel! I don't mean to embarrass you miss, but you've got a tookus on your chest and a hoo-hah for a mouth!

Enter several thousand years of face-to-face frontal sex. Enter millions of children who begat millions more, who in turn begat millions more.

But all that begattin' has sort of run into a sociological diaphragm. Sex is no longer procreational. Rather, it's more recreational than it's ever been. People don't date, they hook up. Getting intimate is asking your partner's name...afterwards.

Eye contact is no longer needed. In fact, many would prefer not to look into each other's eyes. That's too...personal. Besides, it's just sex, no need to get all gushy over it.

As such, there seems to be a return to the butt. There seems to be a return to doggie style sex, and even a distinct movement towards anal sex, if the reports from the schools and Howard Stern are to be taken seriously.

The butt has hoisted the sexual mantle from the breasts and lips and placed it on its curvy brow.

Consequently, today's female, either consciously or subconsciously, has adopted fashions that call attention to the posterior proclivities like never before. Low slung jeans, tramp stamps, colorful candy colored thongs, and molecule-thick spandex exercise shorts that lift and separate the butt cheeks are the uniforms of the day. Add to that the higher and higher heels that puff the modern female butt clear out — just like her ancestors in estrus — making it increasingly difficult to squeeze by her in the grocery store aisle without getting at least a little bit friendly.

Most women, too, seem to base their entire workout on shaping and toning the upper thighs and butt to the exclusion of all other body parts, save perhaps the stomach.

And then there are all those butt-jobs at the plastic surgeon's office. And the hip-hop songs that glorify ass. And the ubiquitous ad campaigns based on photos of rear ends.

We're clearly in an ass culture, but we'd better watch it, lest the evolutionary pendulum swing the other way and women start evolving into creatures with giant asses and no breasts that look kind of like NFL linemen.

Do your part to preserve the evolutionary status quo: look into her eyes. Tell her she's beautiful. Tell her you love the way her breasts mimic her fleshy buttocks.

And afterwards, keep her out of the trees.

References:

How to Stuff a Wild Bikini Bottom, Natasha Singer, NYT, March 2^nd, 2006, page E3

Sexuality — Female Evolution and Erotica — 2nd Edition, Rhawn Joseph, Ph.D. Neurodynamics, Brain Research Laboratory.

The Naked Ape, Desmond Morris, Dell Publishing, 1967

NOTE FROM TC: If you read this article, the impulse might be to start posting pictures of women's bee-hinds. I'd really prefer that this thread not turn into soft-core porn. As such, please, please, please don't post any butt pics.

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