What are we like now?
- Thread starter shiels
- Start date
I dunno @Clinamenic will say there's a demand for it from crypto loners. Fem dom as assuaging the superego. The perpetual reprimand.
Which is why I was frothing with rage at sheils saying that artists should reflect the mundane present. worse than being into Taylor Swift, that one.
ver$hy ver$h
Well-known member
shakahislop
Well-known member
shakahislop
Well-known member
yeah
mixed_biscuits
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IdleRich
IdleRich
> The concept of cultural appropriation has always struck me as both fundamentally misguided and historically illiterate, arising from a studied incuriosity about both the inherent contagiousness of culture and the mimetic nature of human beings. But when it comes to the remixing of thing such as textiles, hairdos or fashion trends across cultures, the appropriation complaints seem at least understandable, if not persuasive: there’s a conscious element there, a choice to take what looked interesting on someone else and adorn your own body in the same way. Here, though, the appropriated item is literally a body part — the size and shape of which we rather notoriously have no control over. And yet Radke employs more or less the same argument to stigmatise the appropriation of butts as is often made about dreadlocks or bindis.
> The book is insistent on this front: butts are a black thing, and liking them is a black male thing, and the appreciation of butts by non-black folks represents a moral error: cultural theft or stolen valour or some potent mix of the two. Among the scholars and experts quoted by Radke on this front is one who asserts that the contemporary appreciation of butts by the wider male population is “coming from Black male desire. Straight-up, point-blank. It’s only through Black males and their gaze that white men are starting to take notice”. To paraphrase a popular meme: “Fellas, is it racist to like butts?”
(> Perhaps needless to say, a wealth of cultural artefacts — from the aforementioned Venus sculpture to the works of Peter Paul Rubens to certain showtunes of the Seventies — belie the notion that white guys were oblivious to the existence of butts until black men made it cool to notice them.)
Breast culture, the past couple decades, has transitioned into ass culture: in part a product of the mainstreaming of hip-hop culture, and of female rappers in possession of shapely backsides; in part as a product of new beauty ideals and body positivity. Kim Kardashian, Nicki Minaj, Iggy Azalea, Meghan Trainor's "All About That Bass" (“You know how the bass guitar in a song is like its ‘thickness,’ the ‘bottom’? I kind of related a body to that,” Trainor told Billboard). Tramar Lacel Dillard's apple-bottomed jeans (not so far from Bonita Applebum); Thomas Wesley Pentz's Bubba Gump bumper. "Pull me locks, slap my ass, make me show you how me wicked / Baby baby mek me tell you bout the body yah.
> The book calls multiple women, including Jennifer Lopez, Kim Kardashian, and Miley Cyrus, to account for their appropriation of butts, which are understood to belong metaphorically if not literally to black women. The most scathing critique is directed at the then-21-year-old Cyrus, whose twerking at the VMAs is described as “adopting and exploiting a form of dance that had long been popular in poor and working-class Black communities and simultaneously playing into the stereotype of the hypersexual Black woman”. The mainstreaming of butts as a thing to be admired, then, is the ultimate act of Columbusing: “The butt had always been there, even if white people failed to notice for decades.” There is also the curious wrinkle in Radke’s section on the history of twerking, which credits its popularisation to a male drag queen named Big Freedia. The implicit suggestion is that this movement style is less offensive when performed by a man dressed as a woman than by a white woman with a tiny butt... And it is worth noting that however much baggage it assigns the white men who like butts, its implications are even more fraught for the white women to whom the butts are attached... Ironically, the author of this book is herself a white woman with a large backside, a fact of which she periodically reminds the reader... Radke is firm on this front, that white women who embrace their big butts are guilty of what Toni Morrison called “playing in the dark”, dabbling thoughtlessly with a culture, an aesthetic, a physique that doesn’t really belong to them.
See also the JBP copypasta:
"Well its like tits vs. ass (sniff) I mean, tits are life giving, tits are milk, tits are beauty, THAT's order but ass... well... ass is shadow, (voice cracking) ass is CHAOS, and ass...that's NOT GOOD. Ass is the pit where man must slay the dragon (crying)...I just (trails off)"
IdleRich
IdleRich
Booba is a great word
Bizarrely, for an HMG post, I actually agree with this.
I think the point of difference might be I don't think it's a good thing.