No, this is not a short history of all the arses I have known. Firstly, that wouldn’t be short, and secondly, I don’t like having bricks thrown through my window.

This is a short history of the buttock, the bottom, the derriere, the butt, the caboose, the blurter or the stinkhole.

Interesting aside: there are far more euphemisms for genitals than there are for buttocks, and very few of the ones that exist for buttocks are considered particularly offensive, I wonder why that is, because if you think about it, bottoms are, or can be, far more offensive than genitals. Butt (ha ha) I digress, again, on with the article.

While almost all animals have an anus, humans are the only animal to have developed a fully padded arse.

No, I’m not going to make the some-more-padded-than-others joke; that would be infantile and stupid, and I’ve got an entire article to get through here.

Our spongy layer of fat and muscle developed when we stood up on our hind legs and walked around. It helps us keep our centre of gravity in the right place and means we can sit on our butts without using arms to support our weight, thus leaving hands free for typing, driving and giving the bird to passing strangers.

Bottoms may also have a sexual purpose, butt (ha ha, did it again...) we’ll get to that later.

Anatomy

The buttocks are composed of several muscles. The gluteus maximus is the largest and one of the strongest muscles in the body. It shapes and forms a good portion of the rump and is used to extend the thigh and turn the upper leg outward.

The gluteus medius is a broad muscle on the outer surface of the pelvis. It’s partly covered by the gluteus maximus.

The gluteus minimus is the smallest of the three gluteal muscles. It is shaped like a fan and located under the gluteus maximus.

Together, the gluteus medius and gluteus minimus muscles help extend the thigh, turn the upper leg inward and support the body when standing on one leg.

Butt Facts

The word “callipygian” is sometimes used to describe someone with notably attractive buttocks. The term, naturally, comes from the Greek kallipygos, which literally means “beautiful buttocks”; the prefix is also a root of “calligraphy” (beautiful writing) and “calliope” (beautiful voice); callimammapygian means having both beautiful breasts and buttocks.

Pygophilia is sexual arousal or excitement caused by seeing, playing with or touching the woman’s buttocks; people who have strong attraction to buttocks are called pygophilists.

Pygoscopia means observing someone’s rear; pygoscopophobia a pathological fear to be its unwilling object.

Very large buttocks occur sporadically among Sudanid, Aethiopid, and Europid women, and were depicted by Palaeolithic artists in European caves; but their form is rounded in these people, whereas it is particularly characteristic of the Khoisanids that the shape of the projecting part is that of a right-angled triangle, the upper edge being nearly horizontal while the hypotenuse slopes at about 45° (Fig. 56A). Internally the female buttocks of Sanids (and probably of the other Khoisanids) consist of masses of fat incorporated between criss-crossed sheets of connective tissue, said to be joined to one another in a regular manner.

The notion that the ideal of masculine vitality involved hefty buttocks was widespread. Scottish anatomist Robert Knox’s influential 1850 The Races of Man describes the English as if they were race horses, as “broad-fronted, broad-bottomed, best for depth, range and equability.”

Did you know that pimples on your buttocks could be a sign of genital herpes? If you did not know about this and have this condition, you could be at risk.

A 38-year-old former Miss Argentina has died from complications after undergoing cosmetic surgery on her buttocks.

Ulf Buck, a blind German psychic, says he can tell people’s future by feeling their naked bottoms This is proven scientific fact and not at all a scam by some mad kraut with a bottom fetish and hidden webcam.

The US Federal Communications Commission is proposing to fine ABC $1.4 million for airing in 2003 between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. an NYPD Blue episode showing a woman’s buttocks. According to the FCC, the episode violated its decency regulations because it depicts “sexual or excretory organs or activities”. In response to ABC’s argument that the buttocks are not a sexual organ, the ruling states: “Although ABC argues, without citing any authority, that the buttocks are not a sexual organ, we reject this argument, which runs counter to both case law and common sense”.

Famous Bottoms

Ssehura was a young Khoisan girl, orphaned in 1700’s South Africa. She was renamed Saartjie (Sarah) Baartman and known as the “Hottentots Venus” because of her pronounced buttocks and genitals. She was taken to England in 1810 when William Dunlop, a ship’s doctor, told her that she could earn a fortune by allowing foreigners to look at her body.

For several years, working-class Londoners crowded around to shout vulgarities at the protruding buttocks of this unfortunate woman, but she claimed that it was her own choice and that she was earning money by charging the hoi polloi for the right to gape at her. Eventually a bunch of bleeding heart leftys put a stop to it, so she went to France where she became a prostitute and died of syphillus. After her death her buttocks were put on display in a museum in France until as recently as 1985.

J Lo. – Still owes the world a huge apology for Maid in Manhattan and she’s got to be one of the worst actresses to come out of Hollywood, however, she is nonetheless justly famous for her particular round and pleasingly shaped bottom.

American women, having been liberated from the corset and the bustle are now free to have plastic surgery to suck unwanted fat out of their arses, or equally, to have silicone implanted into it in the hope of achieved a JLo butt.

Bums and Sex

No, not sex with bottoms, because God gave women perfectly functional vaginas that don’t make whatever you put in them smell like poo. Sex in the bottom is evil and wrong and anyone who wants such things should be put in a very deep well to think about themselves for a bit (unless of course, you are a homosexual and therefore don’t like vaginas, in which case bottom sex is perfectly fine and natural).

The standard face-to-face position of heterosexual sex is linked to the vertical bipedal position of the humans. Most female monkeys and apes possess buttock pads (ischial callosities), thick and brightly coloured tissue around their genitalia. These organs serve for sexual signalling. When a female is in estrus, the pads swell and redden, and this is the signal a male needs and will understand. The female approaches the male exposing her rear zone, the male comes closer and they mate without any frontal contact.

Butt, in the bipedal position, the pads would be hidden, so the human bottoms are only rainbow coloured when they consume a dodgy curry, 3 buckets of skittles and a bottle of Bundaberg rum in a single sitting.

Initially, buttock pads in humans may have been replaced by the fleshy human buttocks for sexual signalling, but in face-to-face sex, the rear part is not conspicuous. That’s why some ethologists believe that the breasts are a “frontal self imitation” of the buttocks. In other words, breasts in humans imitate the buttocks and correspond to the ape and monkey’s buttock pads.

Humans are not the only primates presenting “frontal self imitation”. Gelada Baboons (pictured left), which live in the Ethiopian plateau, have genitalia surrounded by a vivid red skin portion, edged by white papilae. This pattern is imitated in the monkey’s chest area, where a naked red skin patch is surrounded by white papilae. In the centre of this particular chest region, the nipples got so close to one another that they strongly resemble the genital lips.

Arse Art

Naked arses have been depicted in art since men (yes, it’s usually men, go figure...) first started daubing coloured mud on cave walls.

Depictions of naked arses retain their appeal regardless of changes in artistic or atheistic fashions.

Whatever disgusting smells they produce, or distastes biological purpose they serve, bottoms it appears, are endlessly fascinating.

That’s all I have to say about bottoms for now.

Hope you all learned something.

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