Today's episode is sponsored by Ross Signal Group. If you're a leader at a nonprofit, you're asked to do more with less all the time. It's a burnout gig made worse by the fact that most nonprofit leaders don't get any training on how to run their teams in the first place. If you want more predictability, more calm, more confidence as a leader, I personally really
recommend Ross Signal Group's management training. It's led by friends of the pod, Melissa and Jonathan Nightingale and they've helped leaders all over the world build driving teams without burning themselves out. And they always set aside discounted seats for nonprofit organizations. So if you're a manager doing good in the world and you want a better toolkit for how you're showing up for your community, go to worldbestmanagementtraining.com to find out more and reach out to them.
What? Tushy, ass, badonka-dong, bottom, boducks, rear, tukas. Yours are all better than mine. Daryr, money maker, backside, cake. Oh, I always am like a little confused how much of a body that refers to, but I think it's inclusive. What about milkshake, does that count? See, that's what I think. It's maybe more. I mean, I don't know. I kind of think it's more than. I was just listening to that song. But the milkshake that brings all the boys to the yard.
I was like, is it the breasts? Is it the butt? Is it everything? Everything? It is the vibe of my body. Is the butt a private part? It's a really good question. It isn't, it isn't, which I think is part of its appeal. Right, because, and for our purposes, we're talking about the cheeks, not the whole. And that in particular is very liminal. I'm Anne Helen Feederson, and this is the Culture Study Podcast. And sometimes we have people who come to the Culture Study Newsletter, do a Q&A.
It's amazing. But I still want to talk to them more, because there are lots of different things that I want to ask. I didn't fit into a written response. And then also we get a lot of reader questions. So this is going to be a podcast companion to our previous deep dive on Butts, a backstory. If you haven't read the newsletter, I highly recommend it. But you can also listen to this episode all on its own. So the author of Butts, a backstory, is Heather Redke. Thank you so much for being here.
Oh, thanks so much for having me. It's a real honor. So why Butts? How did you first think like this is a book? Well, it sort of started as an essay that I was working on. I was doing an MFA at Columbia in nonfiction writing, and I was working on an essay that was kind of about body shame, but I was really interested in what I call mundane shame. So just feeling bad about your body the way we all do every day.
Like, nothing like a big eating disorder or like horrific bullying, just this kind of like low level feeling of like I don't feel good about myself that I think so many people live with all the time. And for me, one of those things was always about my butt because I had a big, I had have, you know, always will have probably a big butt. I'm a white woman, I grew up in mid Michigan.
I was like a teenager in the 90s, and that was like a time and place and racial category that meant that having a big butt was kind of considered gross or a problem, something I needed to contend with, not something to be celebrated. So I was writing an essay about that about just like some things that had happened in high school and the way my mom felt about her butt. And I got interested in where that shame comes from.
And I think there were some kind of obvious answers or sort of suggestions of obvious answers about race and gender presentation. But when I really started to research them, I just realized how vast this topic was and how there was no way I was going to be able to answer it meaningfully in an essay. So I started to think about it as a book project and it really just kind of like spooled from there.
I mean, I could have, I really do think there could be many, many volumes written about this and this was just like one possible treatment of it. Yeah, that's one of the things I really appreciated about the book is how it used this jumping off point of like we're supposed to feel a certain sort of way about these different parts of our bodies.
And it really got me thinking about like that internal monologue that is so present that sometimes you don't, you forget that it comes from somewhere just like that critique, the constant disciplining of your body that goes on both in terms of like what you put into your body, how you treat your body, but also just like how you think about your body and how it has to be, especially I think for women, we're taught to be constantly trying to reform the body in some way.
You have to have feelings about your body and that's why body neutrality is such a radical concept because just imagine not feeling any sort of like feeling the same sort of way about your body as I feel about a light switch. Can you imagine? No. I mean, I love it as an idea, but I do think it's also a near impossibility because we're just sort of indoctrinated about our bodies from such an early age.
Yeah. In the newsletter Q&A, you said that quote, butts are biologically pretty straightforward, even though they are culturally very complicated. So I would love to hear a little bit about the cultural history of the butt. What are the big moments in the butt timeline? Well, I mean, I really started my butt timeline in about 1800, but obviously there's like much history before that. And I think kind of the big first moment was when Sarah Bartman was brought up from South Africa by two men.
I mean, then one of the many things about her story we don't totally know is if she was brought up on her own free will or if she was enslaved. And she was so she was a woman with a large butt from the Koi tribe in South Africa. And she was brought to London where she was displayed in Piccadilly where a lot of other kind of colonial objects and people were displayed also to show off what was going on as the empire expanded. And people paid to come and look at her and touch her and poke her.
And I mean, it's a horrible story, but it's a story that actually like that is not even the end of how horrible it is. Then she went to France where she died, a very early death, kind of a tragic death. And then she was her body was dissected by a scientist named George Cuvier, who was one of the most famous scientists in France and of that time of the early 19th century.
And he used the autopsy report as evidence of what many scientists believe, but he was a big proponent of which was that African people were not fully human. And that particularly African women were hypersexual. And there was like a whole bunch of reasons why this was a kind of important and convenient theory for white Europeans and white Americans at that time.
But it's sort of like the codification of a stereotype that like we'll see for the, you know, we still see today it lives through the through two centuries. And I think the other thing that's always important to say about Sarah Bartman is Cuvier displayed her parts of her body in his museum. And they stayed on display into the 1970s. And in fact, there was a, there was an exhibit in the 90s at the Musee dorset that included her body parts in this kind of strange cast he had made of her body.
So it's like the kind of history that feels so old or like we would never do that or something but like in fact in both of our lifetimes, we could have seen that those body parts on display. And contributed in so many pernicious and normalized ways to like the larger colonial project that like that's, you know, that still is part of the ideologies that are operating within a lot of these spaces and certainly within like museum spaces up until very recently.
The other thing that I appreciated in the book is that you actually talk about like the buts utility. So like part of your history is thinking about, okay, how did buts make it possible for us to stand? Yeah, yeah, no totally. And you're, I think you're a runner, right? So maybe this is like particularly of interest to you. There's, yeah. So I'm, you know, I work at Radio Lab and I was interested in the science of the but for a bunch of reasons.
One of them was that a thing when I first started working on this project, people always would kind of bring up was this idea that like big buts had some kind of evolutionary purpose. Like there was a real commitment to this idea, particularly from men who would just kind of discuss it casually. And so I, I felt like it was important for me to understand the biological purpose of all the parts of the but and I mean, I think it is a really straightforward, almost simple part of the body.
It's like the muscle is there to make it so that when you run, you don't fall forward. But running is this like amazing human adaptation that was like most scientists now think was very critical to our development into like large-brained people because basically running lets you hunt big animals at which have a lot of calories and you really need all those calories if you're going to have a big brain and particularly if you're going to have a baby with a big brain.
So all the adaptations in our bodies for running, which the butt is one, but it's certainly not the only one, they make it so that like, you know, not even like pre-homo sapien, like we're talking about like homo erectus, those creatures could like run long, long distances. And although you can't like out sprint in antelope, you can out long distance run in antelope because an antelope can run really fast but only for short periods of time.
So what the way you like kind of in this idea at least, the way you would kill an antelope is you just like run forever at this slow pace and eventually that animal will basically like, you know, keel over and then you like beat it with a rock or something. That's right. You need to eat the animal. And then you eat the animal. But you're, I, it's interesting that you point out that I keep going back to this physical park as a runner. And it's really true though.
The more I thought about it, like one of my tweaky areas as a runner is in my right glute. And I like, that's a word for butt, right? It's great. And only, you only say it though when you're talking about like a sporty thing, right? But when I go to my sports massage therapist, like he goes to town on my right glute, like he is up in there in the butt and it never, never feels weird or sexual or like an object area or anything like that.
I'm just like, oh, it is a place in my body that's so many, I hold tension there. So many other parts of like my, my stride connect there and thinking of it through that lens of, this is what makes my body do what I wanted to do, has made me think about it differently. Like, and part of that is naming it glue and part of it too is just being like, this is what allows me to run. Like I need to keep it healthy. Totally. Yeah, I mean, it's an amazing part of the body.
I mean, it's the biggest muscle in our bodies. I think it's the biggest like of that kind. I think your intestines are probably a bigger muscle. But and then also the fat on our butts, which I found very profound when I talked to you, and you're just about this like that, you know, women need a lot more fat than men or females need a lot more fat than males really. If you're going to be a person who has a baby, there's just like, you need to have a lot of fat to store estrogen.
But really it's because you go through so much, so many calories when you're pregnant and then really it's breastfeeding because you just like pound through these calories while you're breastfeeding. And so basically you have to store a lot more fat on your body. And just that fact I found quite profound because we have more fat on our bodies than almost any other animal on the planet except for like whales. That's a lot. That's a lot of fat. Great. And no one's like, oh, that whale is so fat.
They're like, no, that whale has like the correct amount of fat to like allow it to sustain life and like live in the ocean. Yeah. And I mean, it's like, it's like a biological necessity. It's not. Yeah. One of the things I really liked finding out was this idea that fat doesn't show up on the fossil record, which is like a very obvious thing if you think about it. But what that means fat doesn't show up.
Just like by the way, like hair doesn't show up, like penis size doesn't show up, like flesh doesn't show up. So there's a lot of things we sort of, you have like some sense maybe that you know what like ancient man looked like. But like we don't. We have no idea. No, it's important that we kind of remember that because a lot of our fantasies about like what a correct body looked like come from some really kind of not scientific idea about like the original human. Right. Brest too, right?
Totally. There's no record. The breasts are gone. And I think that that like whatever we have of these representations, it's extrapolated from our current understanding of like what a hunter and gatherer would look like. Like what that body would look like. Right. And there's probably, you know, depending on the climate, depending on the diversity of life, it's like probably all kinds of bodies looked all kinds of ways then just like they do now.
So I mean, you know, there's obviously all kinds of studies about like the way that there's been more fat over the last 100 years or something. Like there's like I don't mean to say any of that's not real.
It's just that like I think we have to always kind of question our ideas about things like what is like the perfect body or the original body or like one of the things that would come up a lot when I was at parties and talking about this book was people would say things like women with big butts are more fertile.
But that's like this really messy evolutionary psychology thing that really took hold in the 90s and just got into every major magazine, including like the Atlantic and you know, I mean sure like maximum and these kind of men's magazines would also into mainstream publications that were like because the studies are so funny like the word but really goes a long way. Trust me. And so like to put be able to write a headline about that, the science was never very good and it's just not true.
You're saying that like there were studies that were pretty bad that people saw and were like, oh, this would be a good headline. And so publish the findings even though maybe the science was not. Well that's probably a little bit on generous.
I think what was true was that evolutionary psychology became this really big thing in the 90s and that's basically the idea that almost everything including our desire can be explained through like a sort of evolutionary lens so that there's like a reason, a sort of biological imperative that we like certain things that we eat certain things. Yeah, yeah. And this was a really popular way and kind of still is a really popular way of thinking about many parts of our lives.
But that science, according to me and according to all the evolutionary biologists I talk to, is very flimsy because it, I mean for a bunch of reasons that are probably like a little too complicated to go into but basically it's like, it ignores some of the most obvious things. Like they ask questions like, why do men like big butts?
And they come up with answers like, well, a woman who is pregnant, sways her butt out, or, and when I, we show these pictures to college freshmen at the University of Texas, they say they're more attractive. I mean, you can, I mean, I'm being ungenerous like there's a probably a kinder way to talk about that study but you can see a bunch of problems with it, right?
Like, like, ignores the fact that like those are men who have been 20 years living in American culture or what any culture that's like, yeah, suggests that some women are more beautiful than other women or it sort of ignores the obvious that's like, not all men like big butts actually, like as I can attest to, you know what I mean? Right, like that, right. There's just these kind of, but that those studies are fun to read.
They explain something about ourselves that feels a little taboo to investigate. And I also think there's another thing which is like, it gives us an excuse. It makes it so that you think if there's a scientific answer for something like why we like big butts, we don't actually have to think about all the cultural answers as hard. Yeah, that's so true. This is a great segue to all of our additional questions that we got from Culture Study Readers.
So first we're going to hear from E. I would love to hear Heather's favorite terminology for butts. How did we end up using peach and ass and money maker and cake and buddhanka, donk and bum for the same thing? And what about those words that mean other things? The food ones and shape references and words for the end of things are pretty clear, but what about ones like a bum is a butt, but also a freeloader, but also to borrow something.
An ass is also a donkey, the moon as in mooning is also the moon. Also what is Heather and Anne's favorite song about butts and did Heather discover any hidden gems among the many, many songs about butts while writing the book? There's so much here. So let's start with the nicknames component. Well I'm like a big proponent of just saying butt because I feel like the whole thing is like there's no correct word. Like there's no, like what is it like it's turtles all the way down.
I don't even totally know what that means, but that feels like the right thing here to say. Like all the way down. It's not like breasts where there's like a word that if you went to the doctor you would say it and it would be the right word and it wouldn't be super embarrassing either. It would just sort of be like this is the thing. So I like to say butt because I think it's like how I grew up, it's what I grew up saying.
I think it's a little transgressive, but it feels like about, it's not dirty, I don't think. I looked in, so I was interested in this person's question about all the, about the particularly like bum and how that has these multiple. And actually like etymologically they actually come from different places, which I think is true and makes sense. And I think that's also true with ass. Where does it come from for butt?
It comes, okay, just I like got the proper OED for ass and it's like, it comes from, it's like weirdly, I think if I understood it right, arse comes first and then it got like turned into ass, but I couldn't quite figure out where arse comes from. And ass for donkey is flattened I think. Got it. Do you know that when I was in junior high, our mascot originally was the jackass? They changed it to burrows in like the 90s or so. Really good. Come on.
But jackass is the Jennifer jackass is Jennifer junior high school jackass is. It's also funny it was a woman's name. No, no, it was like it was like it's someone's last name, but yes, but the jackass, so I was a cheerleader. We had a picture of a burrow. Oh man. The bag of my little jacket that I had.
Yeah, no, I think that a lot of these are accidental, but we've come to think of them as like holistically, like the connotation is negative in some way because somehow the connotation of there's the one connotation of a but which is negative and abject. And then there's the one connotation of a but which is that is delicious. Yeah, and like juicy. I mean, I think there's got to think like why cake and peaches and stuff. It's like it's ripe and full. Yeah. I'm sort of all for it.
I kind of like that there's so many euphemisms. I mean, I think the fact that there's so many euphemisms tells us something, but I also think it's sort of like humans are so creative. Like what do we think? My mom was making fun of me the other day that I have so many nicknames for my dog. And I was like, it's great. Like I love being able to call my dog. So her name's Bev. Like beef, beef cake, beef stroganoff, beaver, like all of those things.
And I kind of feel bad sometimes calling her beaver. I'm like, beaver, come here. Like that it's somehow like referring to a vagina. And like why is that gross? Like why is it gross for my dog to be called beaver? There's nothing wrong with that. That's right. Take it back. Humans are creative. Which, so what's your favorite butt song? I'm trying to think of mine. Okay. So I mean, I don't actually have any like fun secret ones. I think I, but I did, I was thinking about this too.
And I was like, you know, the one I kind of wish I could have, I had written about, but it didn't quite fit into what I was doing was fat bottom girl by queen. Oh, I love it. It's a little out of time, like the, like most of the stuff I was working on was in the 90s and the kind of like rise of the butt as part of hip hop culture and the white consumption of hip hop. But that's just like this like kind of early 80s ode to full figured women as far as I can remember.
Yeah. And I remember too, we had queen's greatest hits that was on like just constant play in my house. I just always, when it got to fat bottom girls, like it made me giggle a little bit, like it seems transgressive in that way. And, but you can tell that like Freddie Mercury and the rest of queen that they don't think it's gross, right? Like it's not exactly a joke, right? They're not like trying to like make fun of these girls. No, they think it's hot.
And I think it's interesting when I can't remember the year it came out, but it's early enough that it's kind of interesting because it's at a time when right a lot of the women I interviewed who were adults at that time, they would have thought it was gross. Like it, I think most white women and most mainstream beauty ideals at that time were definitely like no, but you could have like a strong butt maybe, but that is like just coming into fashion. So yeah.
And I don't think it was Freddie Mercury. I think it's who's the other guy in queen. Oh, did he write it? It's who's the other dude? What's his name? Brian May. Yes, Brian May. It's Brian May. That's the melody. I think it's Brian May. All right. So our next question is from Sarah. In addition to all the great observations about femininity, fashion and whiteness, I'm a curious why butts are funny. Why is mooning a prank or sometimes bullying? Why do kids crack up about butts? No pun intended.
Is it just about the taboo of it all? Are there other cultures where butts aren't funny? Okay, this is something I was really interested in actually, especially since the book. I actually wrote an op-ed that never quite went anywhere about why kids like butts so much. And also this just to answer the previous question, I think mooning is just pretty straightforward. Like it looks like the moon. If you're a white person and you show your butt, it looks like the moon.
I think that's my guess on that one. I think butts are fun. I think kids find butts funny because it's kind of the dirtiest thing that's still allowed. Yeah. And I think they're dirt. I think they are transgressive and it's for like the most obvious reasons. It's like where your poop comes out of. It's where you fart. Like there's all these noises and sort of discussed that is there, but it's also like at a certain age you're talking a lot about it.
You're like trying to figure out these like what's private and what's public and this is like a thing you're allowed to laugh about and like you know you'll get in a little bit of trouble but no one's like. You know what I mean? It's not that bad if you're sick and you say butt, but if you said you know the F word or something like things would be bad.
I think that's sort of my impression about it and I did talk to a bunch of parents who have kids like I have a kid but she's too young for any of this to kind of quite come into the frame yet but that's my impression from talking to parents about it. So I think that they just occupy this really interesting place of being off limits but not totally off limits. It's like you can show your butt.
You just can't show your butt crack and even on Instagram actually the butt occupies a really interesting place in the history of Instagram because it's kind of the dirtiest thing you can show on Instagram but sometimes they'll ban it. Yeah. Like there's this woman who makes these like little Christmas ornaments of women's butts and I just saw that she got somehow like her images of this like very like benign.
It's not even a real butt, it's a representation of butt got she got like taken off of Instagram or something or not her whole thing but like her images started to get censored. Yeah. And it's this thing that Instagram sometimes goes through some kind of anti butt thing but part of YCran Kardashian got so popular was because she figured out I mean I don't know if it was conscious but she was showing the thing that was dirtiest that you could show on Instagram in the earliest days of Instagram.
Right and that's why kids like it too. It's like the dirtiest thing. I have a quick story which is that my best friends kids who I take care of a lot. They, one of them was down at the beach and they were climbing with some friends on a drift with Fort and Fort collapsed and one of them got hit by some driftwood. It's totally fine but had to go to the emergency room. And while I was waiting in the emergency room it wasn't in paid. It was just like bored and mad.
It's like telling the story of what happened. And then that asshole log fell on me. He just kept calling the piece of driftwood an asshole and I was like that's funny. And like my best friend she had to be like laughing but not laughing to try to like she's like I don't want him to tell that story to the nurse per se but I do think that like I'm sure the nurse put a lot of shit. It's so really spicy per day.
But it's with all bad words to some extent but there's something about that like you can get away with saying it and like you could say it a recess whereas in the school environment you can't say asshole but you can't say but. Well and that's, isn't that like the famous thing about like you can't say asshole on television although you can say ass. Right. Or at least the whole. It's the whole part. It's the whole part. That's really upsetting to me.
Another kid's story is that we were just texting these friends like these little kids ones in the fourth grade. We're texting around his iPad about like oh do you know where we are because we were overseas my partner and I and he responds just on the fly up your butt and it was so like all of us laughed like his parents laughed like all of them. And like you know where did he learn that?
I don't know like just like when someone probably on the playground was like told that joke or like heard it from one of their parents or started on TV show but like it's just funny. I don't know. I know it is funny. I don't know. Yeah. Do you feel like you have any other insights about like what about it is so funny? Maybe there's something about the bigness of it too where it's like a bulbous nature of it kind of has some kind of cloud. I don't know. I mean totally.
It's just like you know how there are parts of your body that are like noses are funny. eyebrows super funny. I think that but is like in that category of these parts of your body that have developed for whatever reason that are weird like the shape of an ear can you like an ear is really funny. I love it you think all these I'm like are they so I mean yeah they're funny yeah. Yeah. I mean bodies are funny.
I don't know that's the only thing that's the thing about like the charge nature of a body like I really do think body neutrality is such a good idea and I'm all in in for that but there is this other thing that I think is true which is like bodies just aren't neutral they're so strange and beautiful and funny and I'm not light switches they are they're cool.
Yeah they're dynamic and weird and like I know my daughter learned to pick her nose when she was saying just that's just like that's a thing like you have a hole in your body and take your finger into like right and like there's like you pick it and then sometimes
it tastes good like what a marvel I know I don't eat my bookers just to be clear but what's it already I mean bookers are also funny poop is funny like there's so many things that are funny about bodies okay so our next question about butt discourse comes from Liz. How did you learn to talk about butts as a kid and body parts generally how do you think that impact in your relationship with your body today.
Wow this is a great question as like a continuation of this you know how we're thinking about kids right now. I think all the time about like my friend growing up whose mom called her vagina her cat whoa like your cat showing or like don't show me your cat like what an interesting relationship with your vagina. I'm not talking about that it's really intense also like potentially very confusing when a child encounters an actual cat.
So I'm trying to think of my relationship with my butt I think my mom was like you know she was one of those like mindful moms that isn't you know she's she's liberal today and she was liberal then but wasn't like super like you have you should get to know your body or explore your body or that sort of thing. She did call it a butt I think we're allowed to call it butts and she called it like vagina and penis and that sort of thing what about you.
I mean I think we called it a butt I mean I should know I've been thinking about it for five years I mean I had an older brother and I think that I think that one of the things I was thinking about about the playground is I feel like that's just like like up your
butt is like a joke that's just been passed down from like one seven like grownups aren't involved in that joke it's like I like it's like somebody's brother it's like why we all like the Smiths for a couple of years it's somebody's brother got involved in our life. You know what adults aren't involved in is the passing down of the song jinkle bells batman smells.
Like that is still it is still on the playground and you know yeah yeah and the S the S that you do three lines and then three lines and then you connect the things like that that S that all of those things adults not involved this is not our concern.
Yeah I mean so I think the word but well I don't know I guess I just feel like my brother was definitely like making jokes about butts and that was part of our lives but I mean my mom had a right about this book I feel like I was like a year into publicity for this
thing I'm like still talking about your butt mom she has a big butt and she out in her you know she had a very fraught relationship with her butt even as she tried really hard for me to not have a fraught relationship with my right right and I think a lot of that
part of it gets passed like for me and then I interviewed so many women and non-binary people about this about like how it's I think that there's like a dressing room world where that kind of thing gets passed on where it's like you're trying on pants and like
that's where you kind of start to see your mom not feeling good about the way the pants fit and you start to have these experiences of like there's something wrong with this body when in fact there's something wrong with the world of pants if you really want to know but so I don't know I think in my in my life like I think my feelings about my butt come certainly from my mom's feeling about hers but then also just the way that girls are with each other where somehow by the time you're in fourth
and fifth grade you kind of start to realize that there's some people's bodies that are quote unquote correct and then there are some people's who's aren't and that's the kind of folk knowledge too that's coming from siblings and culture and parents and you
know it feels unknowable but I mean that was part of what I wanted to figure out was like to to know where some of those things were coming from I wonder how much to really is involved as you said like a dressing room moment or now is I think kids actually
go to dressing rooms less and less but like just that feeling that you have to get a different type of pants these don't fit me anymore right or the feeling of growing out of your pants in some way breaking pants which I think everyone has had some sort
of experience with that like it just gives you when you break a pair of pants for whatever reason it gives you a feeling that like somehow it's your body's fault instead of like you said the poor construction of the pants fault yeah totally like you're just like
living an active life in your pants right and your body's not doing anything wrong in that capacity yeah totally and the reason the pants don't fit it's because pants are an industrial product and there's no possible way to make enough pairs of pants
and kinds of pants that would fit all the human bodies so yeah no I think that that's that is a very common way that people experience like early shame about a body or they come to know that there's some bodies that are right and some that are wrong I also think there's
just that like very intense moment from so many women where when they're young girls and they kind of are like it's like the you have to wear a shirt and your brother doesn't moment yes god like that there's this kind of like period of time that I always want to
write more about that's just sort of like where you're starting to realize that like this utter freedom of childhood is going to be taken away from you there is something interesting that comes on the other side but that for girls especially there's a kind of yeah an
unfreetom you know you have to cover yourself up you have to you're going to have to like be more careful and like this that you're going to get your period this thing's going to happen like you're new you need to like be more aware of the body that is coming in this
way that feels really I mean I think it could be exciting but from so many people I think it's quite sad and rules that don't make sense per se you know a lot of rules that your parents make or that society makes like they you can explain them in some capacity but
when you're like oh when you're six you have to stop going around with your shirt off yeah I remember my mom trying to explain this to me and it just there was nothing that she could say to me at that age that could make it make sense because at that age like
I looked the exact same as my brother and as my best friends in the neighborhood who were boys and like I wanted to do those things and there's this thing that I think is really hard that's true about that which is like there's something about safety that also I think
like a story I heard a lot was about you need to wear looser clothes you need to be make sure your butt is covered as a girl because like develops and part of the thing I think that parents don't want to say because it's so upsetting is like you might be in a kind
of danger I don't even want to think about if you don't do this and that's the fault of this world we live in and it's a very sad thing I mean it's not even a true thing that if you cover up you're in any less danger but I think that that's the fantasy.
The workers are not all right you as a worker you're probably not all right a lot of people are struggling including maybe you to make your career feel right right now whether you're trying to bounce back from layoffs or staring down a hard market or thinking about what's
next and I know it can feel really isolating and it doesn't help that so much of the workplace writing out there is self aggrandizing broetry or just straight up bad advice I found that one of the best sources for truly no bullshit work advice is Melissa and Jonathan Nightingale's
newsletter they are the people that I go to when I want to read something about management that doesn't feel apropos to this episode it was written out of someone's butt they are so great and their newsletter is free and biweekly and always feel spot on they call
it the world's best newsletter but out of respect for my newsletter you can find theirs at world's second best newsletter dot com thank you so much to Rossignal group for sponsoring this episode if you want to advertise on the culture study podcast get
in touch we are totally DIYing this whole pod instead of going through an agency so it's a perfect non intimidating way to dip your toes into marketing I don't know your Etsy shop your proofreading business your upcoming book or podcast your art your jewelry shop
I mean there's so many things you can even request a birthday shout out for your best friend who maybe is also a listener of the pod and it will be a total surprise we won't except advertising from any shady companies or mlms or anything even remotely related
to die culture or turfism or trumpism or bigotry broadly define but if that's not you drop us a line at culture study podcast at gmail dot com our next question comes from Aaron and it's more of a philosophical question I have a very important question there's a
theory that says capitalist our boot guys and socialists are but guys does this hold any weight and where did this originally I had not heard this theory had you heard this three never heard this before in my life but can you extrapolate where you think this
theory is coming from okay well I did a little research because I was like I've never heard of this before on my life and there was a tweet maybe three years ago that went sort of low level viral up that's so I think that's literally where it comes from that's
our theory is a tweet got it I mean and then I guess you know it's really hard to say but I guess like I've known some socialist gizok bro then style gizok for men in my life I don't know I mean I guess like the best thing I could say is that breasts like big breasts are
sort of a mainstream you know for decades we're part of like what it was to be attractive in a mainstream white way and I guess like if I think about like playboy and wall street and I mean I I guess I kind of can see it and then I think that there can be a kind of fetishization
of the I don't know the sort of periphery or in the world of like the gizok bro so maybe there's something about like the idea that like you know the pervasive stereotype that it's non-white women who have big butts or that there's something even like a little bit like I don't know like
I'm such a good guy I don't like the traditional shape or something like that this is like like I'm really like out on the limb this is like my just me just guessing I don't know what do you know no and I think the boobs like what there are a number of like assumptions of what type of boobs
what type of butts that we're talking about we're saying like capitalist like boobs and socialist like yeah that's true maybe the capitalist like small boobs no well I think you're right I'm either they like the ideal perky beacup like I don't know that you have for like two
years if you're a beacup like that and then go yeah like that size or it's like the we like things that are bigger than are possible and possibly cost cancer like you know what I mean like we only have the like the aesthetic we don't care about the consequences yeah which is implants like
in fake boobs and that that understanding and like I think that also suggests that like there are so many reasons why women do things to their boobs right so many reasons right totally bigger smaller all sorts of things get rid of them all together and this is assuming like an understanding
where like women the women who gets a breast implant is doing it specifically for the male case so like a capitalist is also within this framework like a traditional patriarchal status quo upholder right and a socialist within this understanding is like a feminist right yeah I mean I it's like
there's so many assumptions being made and I including by me in this question I can't really yeah parse it all but yeah I was assuming in both like both the it's like the Wall Street bro and the G Jacques bro like they're all yeah flawed and both of those guys ultimately suck
I was just asking there's no there's no hero in this story it's kind of what I'm saying all right our next question comes from Julia in the era of breaking down stigmas why aren't we talking more about down there issues and normalizing vaginal penile and butt related problems
I know four people very well who have Crohn's disease or have had to have their colon removed and I personally had to undergo pelvic floor physical therapy after a car accident caused major vaginal issues for me when I had a colonoscopy my GI doctor told me everyone has hemorrhids
so why is this so kept behind closed doors why do we as a western society view these natural things as so gross and feel uncomfortable to talk about them when we've worked so hard to normalize talking about other things that are natural like mental health issues sexual orientation etc
oh man I could talk about this all day I'm out of the up to here what's your thought well I mean I so there's this theorist Julia Khrustava whose work I absolutely loved in grad school it's like very heady but she wrote this book called Power's a Poor that's all about like why
things that are gross things that are abject like why we have to label them as gross and as other and some of that work is involved in like okay like if we look at old Jewish laws about like why you have to keep things separate and why you shouldn't have sex with women during their period like
all of these things were meant to essentially keep us alive right to like not get sick and then they've evolved since then to become things that like we have to label things as gross just to maintain social order and some capacity so with that said like that's why I think you know
we still have this understanding of poop as abject as a menstrual blood as abject all these things but then also and women too like there's this whole thing of like mothers like the feminine the abject feminine as gross and like the desirous vagina as gross yeah and again that's there
to to maintain patriarchal order I do think that we're getting we're normalizing some of this stuff you know I wrote a newsletter a couple years ago about my first colonoscopy just because like it felt like something that I didn't know anything about and the only people that could help
me were actually a couple of my guy friends who also had family history who had to have them a little bit early and if I had talked more openly with like my friend group I would have found out that several of them had had colonoscopies and it's just like why do we not talk about that if we
talk about pap smears to some extent some people more than others why don't we talk more about colonoscopies and I think as people age they're much more confident in talking yeah I think that makes I mean the truly a christieva thing that's interesting I think I mean I think people are
more open to it than they were even 10 years ago I mean one thing I saw when I was doing I mean again I do work on the cheeks not the whole but I mean it's obviously all of a piece and a lie I think a lot of the taboo is about the whole and both about anal sex and about poop I mean in
fashion magazines they wouldn't even say the word but until like 1999 I mean they would say dairy air which is so I mean it's like even in like jet and essence and I mean I bet like if I had looked at sassy magazine they wouldn't have said dairy air but I feel like yeah even magazines
that I was surprised like I don't know why I'm like just all of them they said dairy air that feels like such a sort of covering over and so like it's French it's fancy so I do think it's changed and I think even the way people have like wanted to talk to me about butts on this like a little press
tour I've been doing I feel like that's it suggests an interest in an openness but again it's not I'm not talking that much about poop um yeah I do think it's discussed and I think it's shame I think that there's a way that like even talking about vaginas and I was thinking about like yeah
like pelvic floor therapy there's something even a little like sexy about that even as it's also obviously not sexy but I think that there's kind of a way that stuff around pooping pooping too much the possibility of having something be wrong with your colon like I think all of that is
embarrassing in a really different way because it's sort of like this thing that you're supposed to control and that is like fun to you can you learn to control so early you may not be in your control anymore and that it's like obviously there's like smell and but I think it's like just really
important that we just I mean it's like anything it's like the more you talk about it the less stigma it has and I think colonoscow is a really good one like I think people are talking about that more and more or it's also possible I'm just getting older and now I'm talking about it more and more
it's 100% that you know how like there's all these parts of pregnancy and postpartum that women still feel like no one told me about this stuff yeah that to me is astonishing that we are in at this far along that there are still like these parts of the postpartum experience that people
are age who have like some sort of willingness to talk about quote unquote taboo subjects like that there is still an astonishment of like oh I didn't know that it did this to my vagina yeah but I also think what I mean one thing having just gone through not just but relatively recently
gone through a pregnancy and birth and postpartum I mean there's also just a lot like I started to wonder about what some of that stuff like I'm of course some of it is shame and some of it is taboo and it's you know thousands of years of shame and taboo I think that there's also a life cycle
question like that there's a set of information maybe you don't need to have until you're actually pregnant and postpartum and that there's there's a way that like having it might free you out too much and then it's not that bad anyway you know like yeah like I had a C section it you know it
hurts to cough it's like you know you feel crazy when you poop the first time but like and then it's fine like a few weeks later it's fine and like maybe me knowing that and intimate detail out of time wouldn't have helped it just would have made me feel scared I don't know I guess that
I even with the colonoscopy stuff it's like it's good for us to just talk about it like it's a normal thing like go into the gynecologist or whatever but also like I guess maybe I'm just thinking out loud here maybe I'm making argument for like not making it such a big deal yeah
and also not making not hiding it like that by doing it the middle way you're also kind of that's what makes it feel normal when it's not like super sensational like wait till you're 40 and then this like and then it's a horror show like have a baby and your body turns into a monster
I think that you know the it's also parted in parcel of this move towards like well we're not gonna use blue liquids to demonstrate like how tampons work anymore right exactly and I just remember grind up like seen so many commercials that I'm sure kids have no exposure to any work
because they don't watch like broadcast television right for hemorrhied cream and hemorrhied wipes oh yeah and being like I don't know what those are because no one ever says like a preparation age commercial would never say like what it was and if they just would say it like maybe we would be
less freaked out when you get them which many people do over the course of their like most people yeah when I was when I was knocked out from my last call and I was basically I apparently had a long conversation about hemorrhieds with the like the people who were doing the procedure I have no
memory of it but he told me afterwards well I'm sure he's true I mean hemorrhieds is a great example because like I don't think I really knew what a hemorrhied was until I was pregnant and then some like I was like they were like well have you had a hemorrhied and I was like can you just tell
me what it is but I actually think because I'm a reporter I actually way more willing to ask a question like that than most people like I'll ask a stupid stupid question to a doctor and I mean it's not stupid because no it's like they're like you know nobody ever asks but this is what
it is and you're like maybe tell them like maybe just be like FYI if no one ever told you what a hemorrhied is here's a picture and some information what if you could like go to the doctor when you like graduate from high school and they're just like none of these are a huge deal like these are
just things that happen as you get older like here's what a hemorrhied is if it gets really bad this is what it will feel like and this is when you should come to a doctor right so instead of doing all of our frantic googling where if you google it google hemorrhied and just come
some like all these horrible representations that you just be like oh that's a hemorrhied um it would it would be really useful I know just some really simple patient education it probably helped them too I bet people come to the doctor all the time they're like oh my this horrible
thing is happening and it's such a big deal and they're like try preparation age you know like it's a real life favorite this is our PSA to anyone listening and hemorrhies are not a big deal there are many creams and other things available also a bath of epsin salts works for a lot of people
most for most people it too will pass that's right but um also we are here if you ever want to like cascas more body questions I mean I'm no expert but I'll talk about we're not experts but we'll talk to you for hemorrhies this has been a total pleasure thank you so much for coming on this show
Heather where can people find you online or on the podcast app if they want to find more of you yeah thanks so much for having me it was really great I'm I'm sort of like have a weird relationship with social media but I'm on Instagram I'm rad H rad gay on Instagram and I work for radio labs
so I'm working on some stuff for them right now and yeah just in the inner webs at various places thank you again this has been great thank you so much if you're a paid subscriber stay tuned for today's triple a segment I'm answering a question about what to do when it feels like you have
too many friends I know rough question thanks for listening to the culture study podcast be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts we have so many great episodes in the works like so many and I promise you don't want to miss any of them if you want to suggest a topic ask a question
about the culture that surrounds you or submit a question for our subscriber only advice ham segment head to culturestudypod.substac.com that's also where you can support the show and get bonus content it's five bucks a month or fifty dollars a year and you'll get ad free episodes and exclusive
advice time segment weekly discussion threads for each episode and a link to a special google forum so your questions go to the front of the line if you're already a culture study newsletter subscriber you also get a really good deal if you don't know how to make that work just let me know
I'll send you all the details but you might also already have it in your inbox and remember that your subscriptions make this show sustainable no we're not supported by any big company melody and I are splitting all of the profits 50 50 so right now we have enough to keep the show going for
a few more months but your subscriptions and the small amount of money that we get from a few ads that's what's keeping the show alive if you wanted to continue become a paid subscriber the culture study podcast is produced by me and Helen Peterson and melody rattle our music is by pottington bear you can find me on instagram at and Helen Peterson melody at melodia 47 and the show at culture study pod