No Butts About It

If you haven’t been living in a submarine off the coast of Greenland or sailing down the Nile in a hollowed out canoe, you’ve undoubtedly heard about the pseudo-celebrity (who will remain nameless as uttering the devil’s name is just tempting fate) determined to break the Internet with images of her enormous, oiled-up derriere. If you’re as unfortunate as I am, you’ve even seen said images. I hope I’m wrong but I may never get that picture out of my head.

Let’s forget for a second that there is someone out there who is vain enough and spotlight-seeking enough to foist her dipped in butter tush onto our unsuspecting consciousness. What’s more disturbing is the fact that there’s such an insatiable demand for what this woman is selling. I know train wrecks are hard to ignore but if they were on the cover of every magazine short of Field and Stream, you would think the public might get a little tired of looking at them.

On top of the controversy over whether a mother should be behaving like a come-to-life version of an African fertility god, the Internet (when it recovered from being broken) blew up with a couple of interesting questions. Like: Why was a photo of Alyssa Milano breastfeeding her child so offensive to so many people when these photos of a contorted booty were not? And: how could the image of a woman doing something with her breasts that they were meant to do set off a mean-spirited Twitter stream when the image of a woman using her rear end as a coffee table did not?

I wish I had the answers.