Back in vogue: the plump female bottom!

As I have long maintained,female fashions in the past several decades have been designed to call attention or emphasize women's buttocks. (Just as the mini-skirts of the 1960s cried out "look at my pretty legs.")
Certainly back in the mid 70s when the tanga or string bikini hit Brazil, giving the "cheeky look"popularity,though it took some time to become popular in this country, one could see the trend starting. And since then there has been a boom in the popularity of ultra-skimpy swimwear except in more conservative parts of. the world and of parts of this country. The suits in Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition got smaller and smaller and magazines like Swimwear Illustrated and Swimwear USA from the Ujena and Venus swimwear companies appeared in the 80s. Swimwear companies who specialized in barely-there thongs and g-strings such as Malibu Strings and Australia's Wicked Weasel came on the scene. And don't forget Baywatch.
Shorts too got shorter, oftimes displaying some butt cheek, what are called booty shorts. Of course earlier the hot pants of the 70s could sometimes reveal a slice or arc of cheek but that was not especially common, hot pants were more about showing leg.
I think some of it has to do with the increased acceptance of women and girls participating in athletics and with the fitness boom in general. Lots of skimpy or butt-clinging garments there.Yoga pants are of course the perfect example. But there are suoertight spandex pants of various lengths that show off every curve of a pair of rounded,toned buttocks. Not to mention how short so many runners wear their shorts. And even high school girl track and field teams have often gone to tight spandex short-shorts that do occasionally ride up to expose some cheek. And of course there are the volleyball shorts. Basketball has gone in the other direction, to long, loose, baggy shorts that are far from attractive. Soccer strikes a happy medium, shorts that are neither really short or tight, but not sloppy either.
While Yoga pants are a fairly recent development, might point out that tightfitting trousers on women have been around for awhile. Tight blue jeans of course and I have heard that for a time in the late 50s something called toreador pants were in fashion.
There is a book called Culture Against Man by Jules Henry that I recall ,some sort of sociological study of American popular culture in the early 60s. It had something about a teen oriented club somewhere called Tight Pants Teen Town where girls go wearing tight pants. Recall he said he saw one girl in pants so tight he was amazed she was allowed out of the house in them.(I thought Aha!, she snuck out and. when she got home her Mom applied a paddle to the seat of. them!). Interesting, as at that time women wearing pants were still frowned on in many circles, and often forbidden in the school or workplace,
As for underwear, would say that scanty, more daring underwear has become more popular and accepted. Its been around, places like Frederick's of Hollywood. But in years past such lingerie was thought to be the province of strippers or burlesque performers, not the girl next door.
First bikini panties and now thongs, more and more rear exposure.One thing though that has seemed to vanish is exposed thongs above low riding pants or jeans. Seemed like 10 or so years ago that was not uncommon,entertainers like Britney Spears or Paris Hilton getting photo raphed with thongs showing(Britney of course got photographed going commando as well).
Know many. thought it was tacky, but I thought it was sexy( unlike guys with baggy, droopy pants. And it produced some good quips along the lines of "shine on,harvest moon!"

I wonder if anyone here has heard about what the scientific theory which anthropologists hypothesize about a tribe in Africa. There is an ethnic group in Africa - they used to be called "the Hottentots", I believe the correct name is "the San people" - the European settlers/colonialists were amazed by the size of the women´s buttocks in this ethnic group. The buttocks were typically enormous.

Anthropologists have come up with the hypothesis (which I suppose is unproven) that roughly one thousand years ago there developed in this ethnic group a cultural preference for women with fleshy buttocks. So most of the male members of the San people would prefer to marry and have children with a San female who had relatively fleshy buttocks. And then, lo and behold, that force which is natural (or in this case not-so-natural) selection led to the development of a stock of homo sapiens in which the buttocks of the female were consistently BIG!

So, apparently, the preference for big bottoms on the part of the weaker sex is ancient!

From your (self appointed) South African correspondent.

Members of the forum might be interested in the story of Sarah Baartman, the South African woman taken from her homeland in 1810 and showcased as the "Hottentot Venus" in Great Britain. I found the following information on the Internet:

Baartman's enlarged buttocks were an example of steatopygia. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines steatopygia as "an excessive development of fat on the buttocks that occurs chiefly among women of some African peoples and especially the Khoisan." Dictionary.com defines the term as "an excessive accumulation of fat on and about the buttocks, especially of women." Another source explains that the fat "is not confined to the buttocks regions, but extends to the outside and front of the thighs, forming a thick layer reaching sometimes to the knee". The trait, which is usually attributed to females, is also a characteristic of the Pygmies ethnic group of Central Africa and Southeast Asia. Although Baartman was paraded around Europe as a freak show, South Africans lauded her steatopygia as a sign of beauty and femininity.

Steatopygia is also one of the traits of the evolving human adapting to his surrounding as it was a means of survival in seasonal environments. "It maximizes their bodies' surface-area/volume but keeps enough fat to produce hormones for menstruation. With fat deposited heavily in only certain areas of the trunk of the body, limbs are left slim enough to expel heat more efficiently." This explains why steatopygia is very useful in dry warm climates such as those in Africa, and other places where those of African descent inhabit.

And note that the various "Venus" figurines found throughout Europe by archeologists have. large, exaggerated breasts and buttocks, and are usually thought to be fertility images, or of some sort of ritual significance.

If well-rounded bottoms are back in style, I have to stand and applaud.
Bravo!

Redskinluver

Those cavemen weren´t so primitive after all!