The Newsroom | Macleay College

If your girlfriend asks you if her “bum looks big in this” then you should probably say “yes”.

Like most trends, the wonderment for big booties has stemmed from celebrities… and YouTube. We all know Kim K ignited the booty craze, but let’s not forget the 2013 phenomena of twerking – to dance in a sexually provocative manner involving thrusting hip movements and a low, squatting stance designed to show off the dancer’s bum… and provide the rest of the population with hours of amusement via YouTube’s twerking fails.

JLO and Beyonce have had their behinds on display for some time now, but it’s only in the last year have we seen such a trend in pop stars shaking their money makers whilst singing about it. Now throw Nicki and Iggy in the mix and you get a plethora of borderline pornographic music videos with a semi catchy song behind it. Team this with deep and melodic poetry such as “He love this fat ass yeah! This one is for my bitches with a fat ass in the f***ing club I said, where my fat ass big bitches in the club?”, and you have yourself a candid 2014 pop song.

However, it wouldn’t be fair to glorify curvy women through song without putting down the skinny bitches would it? But it seems to be the attitude adopted in current pop culture. Meghan Trainor’s All About The Bass, which has been sitting at #1 in international music charts for the past few months, is praised for invoking confidence through women’s body image. But she ultimately slams the skinny bitches too. Despite it being an endearing love song to her fellow booty babes, the lyrics “I’m bringing booty back; go ahead and tell them skinny bitches that” may make the “stick figure silicone Barbie dolls” a bit unhappy. In Nicki Minaj’s Anaconda, the equally as imaginative lyrics “F*** those skinny bitches in the club, I wanna see all the big fat ass bitches in the motherf***ing club, f*** you if you skinny bitches” shares the same sentiment. Body image psychologist, Sarah Truss says that these songs are sending mixed messages to women regarding body image “you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t… you will get put down if you’re too skinny and you will get put down if you’re too fat”.

However, the trend seems to have caught on. In the last year there has been a 58 per cent increase in buttock augmentations in the US with Australia trailing not far behind, according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery. Dr. Joseph Ajaka, a cosmetic surgeon from the Cosmos Clinic in Sydney, said, “Buttock augmentations have definitely increased over the last year, in our Sydney clinic alone we now perform on average two buttock augmentation procedures every week, this is up from only two buttock augmentation procedures per year, only a year ago.”

These buttock augmentations consist of either implants or fat transfers in the butt. Implants are inserted either above, below or between the gluteal muscle to create the lift effect. However the fat transfer is a more common procedure. It consists of taking fat (in the form of liposuction) from either the waist, hips or thighs of the patient and injecting it into each butt cheek and molding the butt to the patients liking. According to Cosmo Clinic the majority of their clients “base their desired butt on that of a celebrities, with the most common being Beyonce.” But getting a B like Queen B will cost you. The average cost of these surgeries in Australia is approximately $8,000 – $18,000 plus a really sore butt. Recovery from the injections of the fat into the buttocks takes around 2-5 days, plus three weeks for swelling and inflammation to go down. Yes, the time has come where people are paying thousands of dollars to have fat injected into their ass. But alas, it is 2014.

If you’re not prepared to fork out that kind of money or make that kind of commitment to your butt, there are other options. There are exercise groups and programs such as the Booty Barre and Brazillian Booty Workout, designed specifically to tone and define your booty through yoga like workouts. Personal trainer Claire says the thing her clients want to improve the most are their butts. “So many of my clients (girls in particular) ask me to get a bigger butt, so for the first time in my career I designed a workout program specifically for your bum”. One needn’t spend money on exercise groups either, when there are thousands of popular butt workouts found on the internet. According to Mashable, the Squat Challenge was the 8th most popular searched workout on the internet for 2014.

But if you’re not into physical activity, hard work or a hideous amount of squats – for $35.95 you can get yourself the Studio Europe Butt Lifter Panty. It’s designed to give you the ass of a 20-year-old Brazilian woman while looking like a Dominatrix, but with no effort needed! Hooray! The bra for your butt!

But what is the point of having an amazing butt if you can’t show it to the rest of the world. Well, that is where the belfie comes in, yes people, a butt selfie. Inhabiting your news feeds and worldwide web are photographic self portraits featuring the buttocks, commonly posted by females in tight clothing on social media networks. Butts in music videos, butts on TV, butts in songs, butts at the gym, butts on Facebook, butts getting bigger!

So, move over boobs, it’s all about the bASS.