RACHEL JOHNSON: If Kim claims that really is her, she’s got a (huge) cheek…and I have the photographs to prove it
As I write I am staring at two pictures of Kim Kardashian’s posterior, a body part so large it has its own postcode, so culturally significant it has become a meme, and so venerated that it’s probably worshipped as a god in several countries.
The first is on my own iPhone and taken a couple of months ago when I was standing right behind her at a black-tie awards ceremony in London. There was so much junk in her famous trunk that I couldn’t resist taking a picture.
The second is the picture of her glistening naked rump that was thrust into the face of an unsuspecting world on Wednesday by a hitherto-unknown publication called Paper magazine.
The married mother had mooned for its front cover (the next day, full-frontal shots were also released, though I warn you they are ‘NSFW’, ie not safe for work viewing).
Don’t panic – I’m not going to write one of those sorrowing pieces about how women all over the world work very hard in all sorts of ways not to be objectified, and how a man would never strip naked and be sprayed with WD40 to try to break Twitter or whatever the objective was (not without everyone laughing hysterically, anyway), and how regrettable it all is. But I will say this…
I compared the picture I took of Kim to the one in Paper magazine. In mine, which you can see below, she is sort of in proportion, but in the mag shoot, she has an unfeasibly tiny Victorian waist and massive tits and arse (sorry, I know it’s Sunday but we must call a spade a spade).
I can’t say with any certainty that the mag pix have been Photoshopped to kingdom come, but Paper credits not one but two digital assistants for the shoot – ie one for each cheek – and here, I think, is the problem I have with the whole thing.
The international celebrity of her own bum has contributed to, if not led to, big butts becoming big business: padded pants; booty classes in gyms; and, in the US, the ‘Brazilian butt lift’ (when fat is sucked from other parts and pumped into the behind).
Last year, buttock implants were the fastest-growing type of plastic surgery in America, with more than 11,000 procedures, up 58 per cent from 2012.
The Kardashians started the trend, but the singers Beyoncé, Rihanna, J-Lo and Meghan Trainor, who has just topped the charts with All About That Bass, a song about ‘bringing booty back’, are also fashionably steatopygous (translation: having extremely fat or prominent gluteal regions).
The music video for Nicki Minaj’s Anaconda has been viewed hundreds of millions of times. It shows well-endowed black girls windmilling and grinding their ample buttocks to a male voice singing ‘Don’t want none unless you got buns’ and a chorus of ‘Oh my gosh, look at her butt.’ KK and her ilk are thus partly responsible for the fetishisation of the fat-bottomed girl in pop culture.
For Kim, it’s made her rocking world go round: she banked about £7.6 million last year and her new mobile phone game, Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, is a huge hit, so she sure knows how to shake her moneymaker.
Kim’s a$ is really enormous; I’ve seen it with my own eyes, and in 2011 KK had an X-ray (on her own TV show, of course) to prove to those who couldn’t believe it was real that she hadn’t had silicone implants in her backside.
I’m not saying she’s had work as I don’t know, but what bugs me here, with this shoot, is that it appears that even Kim Kardashian – a female icon to millions if not billions, the social media equivalent of a fertility symbol, a modern-day Venus of Willendorf – has allowed her appearance to be digitally altered (and if she hasn’t, I’ve never seen a crazy cartoon body like that in real life, have you?).
HER latest shoot – her bum is the size and shape of James’s Giant Peach and just as fantastical – can only encourage more girls in a doomed quest for unattainable and unnatural body shapes: in the UK, ‘fat transfer’ procedures are up 15 per cent on last year, at a time when ten million women report feeling ‘depressed’ because of the way they look, and a recent inquiry by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Body Image found that girls aged as young as five are anxious about their appearance.
Until I see the raw, unretouched pictures of Mrs Kardashian-West, then, this is my line: If you’re going to ‘break the internet’ with a picture, Kim – and you seem a nice lady, from what I’ve seen of you, and I’ve seen it all – don’t try to do it with a misleading image of a freakish body part that will encourage females to dislike their own God-given bodies even more than they do already.
