Last week, I was running in the park when a strange man called out to me. I swiveled around, breathless, sweaty and turnip-faced, thinking I had dropped my keys. I was astonished when he smiled and said simply: "Nice butt."
My first impulse was to grab the man by the lapels and slap him across the face - not for his rudeness but for his mistake. Me? Nice butt? You must be kidding. What I've got is a perfectly normal, healthy, medium-sized butt with neither the fleshy decadence of Beyoncé nor the compact rigidity of Megan Fox. It's a workaday tush - unaugmented, unremarkable and, until recently, unthought-of (except as a reason to get off it and jog).
What surprised me most about this encounter - apart from the fact that it happened in London, a city in which a woman is more likely be vomited on or mugged than complimented by a man in the street - is the fact that he ignored my breasts. True, they were strapped firmly into a sports bra and secreted under a sweat-wicking hoodie, but even so it seemed an oversight. Surely this guy was crazy? I'm not saying my breasts are so great; it's just that, for as long as I could remember, breasts - not just my own, but all breasts - were the main event when it came to attracting random male attention.
As it turns out, this moment in the park was a concrete example of a larger cultural shift of focus, one that can be summed up as a slow downward vertical pan. Bottoms, it seems, have become the new tops. Rarely have women been so obsessed with the size, shape and feel of our own backsides.
It's been a banner week for bums. First there was the controversy over Demi Moore's hips on the cover of W magazine. While both the actress and the magazine vehemently denied allegations in the Huffington Post that her lower half was Photoshopped, the star's furious twittering was met with further speculation that she might have had her body swapped with a 26-year-old model's ( check out the full story if you happen to care about that sort of thing).
Far more disturbing (yet perhaps no less surprising) was the news this week that yet another young life had been snuffed out in the quest for total hotness - in this case, a firm arse. Solange Magnano, a 38-year-old former model, onetime Miss Argentina and mother of twins, died of complications from elective surgery three days after undergoing a buttock lift in Buenos Aires.
The South American fashion designer Roberto Piazza lamented her death in media by puzzling over this new obsession with bottoms. "Last year she had surgery on her breasts and they came out perfect, but she did not need this butt surgery. It was stupid."
But gluteoplasty, as it is called, is on the rise. The American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, which classifies a "lower body lift" as a "standard procedure," says its popularity has risen steadily since the society began keeping numbers in 2002.
This is not just disheartening news for aging supermodels and beauty queens, but also for the un-photographed majority of regular-butted women like myself.
In The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf wrote about "the official breast" and now we have the "official ass." Like its perky upstairs neighbours, the new backside is highly circumscribed and protocol-bound. It must be small (but not too small), hard (but not too hard), eerily spherical (imagine two halved melons side by each) and virtually impossible to achieve through biological accident.
The last time the world seemed this obsessed with female posteriors was back in 2002, when Kylie and J.Lo were busy distracting us with their arse cleavage in the wake of 9/11. And now again, post-economic crisis, the butt is back. Clearly there is something about the tush, with its primal, baboon-like suggestiveness, that appeals to us in times of economic and political instability.
In the past, feminist critics such as Ariel Levy (author of Female Chauvinist Pigs) have criticized the trend toward ultra low-rise jeans and plumber's crack as part of "raunch culture," a more darkly sexualized obsession than the age-old focus on comforting, harmless mammary glands.
While women certainly worry about their breasts, the dilemma is simple - you either have cleavage or you don't. And if you want some, you know where the buy it. Bums, on the other hand, are rather more complicated. There is no "Perfect C" cup size to aspire to, and one woman's ideal butt is another's banana split disaster. There is something difficult to quantify about the female rear, which is why I've always studiously ignored my own.
But the park incident got me thinking - could "real" buns like my own be making a comeback? I asked a single male friend if he liked an ample behind (such as Beyoncé's, for instance) and he looked at me like I was nuts. "Men like small bums," he said, "and anyone who tells you differently is lying." This friend did not go so far as confessing to admire grown women with "12-year-old boy butts" as I have heard other ostensibly heterosexual men do, but I still found his answer somewhat alarming.
"So exactly what size do you mean then?" I pressed on gently, attempting to drain the neuroses from my voice. "For instance, my own butt -"
He cut me off with a withering look. "Do you think I was born yesterday?" he asked. "I'm not answering that."
Which pretty much answers my question. When it comes to butt anxiety, I just hit rock bottom. Finally, there's nowhere to look but up.