Nowadays — if popular music is to be believed — we’re currently “all about that bass”. Prominent posteriors are everywhere on the Billboard charts — Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda” ode to big butts, Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass” curvy girl “bringing the booty back” anthem, and, of course, Jennifer Lopez and Iggy Azalea’s “Booty” celebration. (Not to mention Beyonce’s always-revered rear.)
Butts are clearly having, well, their biggest moment ever, a fact that evolutionary psychologists like Gordon G. Gallup, Jr. of the University of Albany finds unsurprising. According to Gallup, a man’s attraction to women with bigger butts — see Trainor’s assertion that “boys like a little more booty to hold at night” — is woven into their genes.
Evolution isn’t about survival of the fittest, Gallup told MTV News. It’s about pairing your genes with someone “who has genes that code for health and vitality and fertility.” In some cases, that means all the right junk in all the right places.
“The reason narrow waists and broad hips are so prized — the reason males rate these as being attractive, even though they don’t have any insight into why they do — is two-fold,” he said. “It means, if a woman has a narrow waist, she’s not pregnant. And if she has broad hips it means that the underlying skeletal morphology is probably such that she’d be able to have a relatively unencumbered childbirth.”
Translation: An hourglass shape indicates ...
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