"I feel very defensive about her, and part of that comes from my pure exhaustion with the way we just rip women apart all the time."
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Cosmopolitan.com contributors Danielle Henderson and Lauren Hoffman discuss Kim's Internet-breaking butt cover and why they think Kim deserves your respect.
Danielle: Heyyyyyyyy.
Lauren: MUCH ADO ABOUT BUTTING.
Danielle: BEST. The best.
Lauren: As a jumping-off point: I think about Kim Kardashian ALL THE TIME. Daily. Multiple times a day. Part of that's work related — I take covering the Kardashians more seriously than probably 75 percent of the work I do — but part of it's because I believe that KUWTK and Kimye are going to be, like, major cultural artifacts from the TIMEZ WE LIVE IN. I think alien children will one day be roaming New Jersey and kick the dust off their Vogue cover. That said, I wasn't always a huge fan — when I didn't watch the show or know much about her, I had the standard "ugh, famous for being famous" objections to who Kim is and what she does. Like all the people I've ever misunderstood, I've found myself liking her more the more I get to know her.
Danielle: I agree — people keep trying to push her into cultural irrelevance, and they're mad that she's actually very, very smart. I think about her more now because I played her game, but I hadn't exactly written her off before — she just wasn't on my radar. I watched one episode of KUWTK last month (the wedding episode) and I was hooked. I couldn't believe the family dynamics and how incredibly supportive they are while still yelling at each other about the real, annoying shit families bring out of each other.
Lauren: Do you think it makes people angry somehow that she built an empire out of being victimized, rather than going away/cowering/whatever? That's the one thing I come back to when I try to figure out where the vitriol comes from.
Danielle: ABSOLUTELY. Kim isn't playing to script: She's supposed to have a sex tape released against her will (I think?), be thoroughly shamed, and crawl into a hole. That's how it was supposed to go, because that's our narrative about women and sex; male pleasure is paramount, and if you dare exist within our own sexuality, you're a menace. She not only lived through that, but used it as a jumping-off point to strongly exert her power and identity.
Lauren: I also think people get angry because she "married above her station." When a supposed C-lister marries Kanye West, I think it throws what people need/want to believe about what's valuable culture and what's "trash" into question.
Danielle: When I posted this comment on Twitter last night, someone said something like, "This is about her getting famous for taking it in the butt." And I was like, Wow, you really can't get over that? She's done so much more since then, she's defined and redefined herself in a million ways, and that's your sticking point? Also, that sex was consensual — why are sex tapes made out to be some sort of terrible moral breach when pornography has existed for centuries? It's not a snuff film, for fuck's sake.
Lauren: Did she have butt sex in the tape? The fact that I don't know that means that she is very literally not famous for that. TRY AGAIN, TWITTER.
So you're not super familiar with the show, right?
Danielle: Right — I've only seen three episodes now. But I'm aware of HER, as a business person and pop cultural icon.
Lauren: So, something that's really interesting to me is that there's an episode in the first or second season in which she is invited to pose for Playboy but doesn't want to get naked and I have SEVERAL THEORIES about why that might have changed.
Danielle: Give me one!
Lauren: One is just the passage of time/the prerogative a human has to change her mind. But I'm also wondering to what extent Kanye's empowered her to be more open about her body?
Danielle: YES. A lot of the comments were centered around the fact that she shouldn't be doing this because she's a mom, but what if being a mom is what led her to bodily acceptance? What if being loved and in love, stable and happy, made this seem like a fantastic idea to her? And, again, she's totally in control of what's happening in a way she probably wouldn't have been with Playboy. There's something to be said for the fact that she's probably learned a lot about how to control her own image as a result of having been culturally violated.
Lauren: When the Kardashians did that Oprah interview (it was like a two-hour special), Kim was just starting to date Kanye, and Oprah asked her if she thought she was beautiful, and she couldn't say it — like, she backed off and said she could call herself "pretty." I don't think you can really do a cover like the Paper cover and NOT feel beautiful, so why the fuck are we not celebrating the fact that a fellow woman (most of the Twitter hate I've seen has been girl-on-girl) has come into her own in that way?
Danielle: It's telling that the first reaction was "how terrible" and not "fucking GO, KIM, look at you, celebrate yourself, etc." Though I was happy to see that a lot of feminists were sticking up for her. Did you expect that? I don't generally divorce feminism from body positivity, but Kim is such a feminist sticking point. I feel like people are coming around to her more for some reason.
Lauren: I do think people are coming around a little bit more, and I've thought a lot about why that might be. I think the part where she married Kanye sort of split the reactions about her — some people got affronted that she was marrying too far up, other people realized that if Kanye West loved her, she probably had to be pretty cool. I didn't expect people to stick up for her, and I'm wondering how much that has to do with the big celebrity photo leak a couple of months ago. Were people just relieved to see a woman exposing (that word has a bit more of a negative connotation than I like) herself on her own terms? "Sharing" might be better.
Danielle: I think you're right. People seem to be aware of privacy and agency in a way they weren't before, so maybe that kept the backlash at bay. But I also think it plays into how quick people were to say she was photoshopped; it seems like being a woman with a body is an untenable situation: "You're too sexy! You're not sexy enough! You can't be real!" It's like, why are people unable to just calm the hell down about this butt?
Lauren: It's interesting to me because I feel like we can stomach women's nudity as long as we can justify it as being somehow "noble." Keira Knightley was proving a great point! Olivia Wilde was breastfeeding her baby! You're right — a butt should be able to just be a butt, and I'm not buying the "but she's a MOM" or "she's a ROLE MODEL" outrage. (Pro tip for parents: If Kim Kardashian is your daughter's role model, what a great way to talk about making informed decisions about your body, and all that conversation would carry. TEACHABLE MOMENT, YOU'RE WELCOME. )
Danielle: We can't be a culture that uses "MILF" liberally and then demand moms be asexual. (Also, ew, stop staying MILF.) But the fact remains that people can't handle Kim, at her core, because she defies the cultural boxes we want to put women in. She's sexy AND a mom AND a businesswoman AND married to the most famous dude AND funny, all at the same time. People generally talk about moms as if they cease to exist outside of their family; our unwillingness to see moms as autonomous people is a cultural problem, not a Kim K problem. We keep pushing this Victorian idea of motherhood down women's throats, and Kim rails against it. She just seems to be like, "Oh, my kid is an addition to my life, not something to keep me from living it," and it doesn't jive with how we conceive of the rigidity of motherhood.
Lauren: Yeah, I think you can especially see the prevalence of that Victorian ideal in our culture when you look at how frequently the term "class" comes up in conversations about her and Kanye. Or the idea of "good taste." Kim seems wholly uninterested in what others consider tasteful (and I think that's new in a lot of ways, and, like we were saying, closely related to being married to a man who does not give a fuck about what he should be doing); I think some people find that off-putting, but for me, it's one of the best things about her.
There's a quote from a Kanye article that talks about how he really wanted to get that first Instagram of their wedding done right because of "how important Kim is to the Internet." That's my favorite thing ANYONE HAS EVER SAID.
Danielle: I think that's why she's debased, or why people feel like she's outlived her use as a celebrity — on the Internet, your fame is fleeting, but "THIS BITCH WON'T DIE," man. She understands her relationship to media, and the medium in which she's most widely distributed. There's some deeply embedded Saartjie Baartman, Hottentot Venus shit happening, of course, but I've never seen a body part more widely discussed, reviled, celebrated, and known as Kim's ass. WHY ARE PEOPLE SO OBSESSED WITH HER ASS?
Lauren: Well, and also, why are people fine with objectifying a clothed ass but MONOCLE-SHATTERINGLY horrified with a naked one? But yeah, Kim's ass is the only one I've ever known to have actual truthers associated with it — there was a KUWTK episode where she literally got a butt ultrasound to prove that she doesn't have implants. And to be fair, IT'S A NICE ASS. But SERIOUSLY, WHAT EVEN.
Danielle: AMERICA. LOOK AT YOURSELF.
Lauren: Do you think it speaks to how we want our women thin even as we extoll the LA FACE WITH THE OAKLAND BOOTY, as it were? We claim to like curves, but that ass is a really nice one, and all we do is pick on it.
Danielle: People have completely screwed themselves over when it comes to how we conceive of the female body; it's like everyone is walking around with toast crust where their eyes should be. By definition, Kim has the exact body, proportionally, that comic book guys draw and men (traditionally) have desired forever. The total 36–24–36 thing. Is she problematic, then, because she acknowledges it? That she's part of, and refuses to be removed from, the conversation about her own body? There is really something defiant about her butt, but I'm not sure if it is inherently defiant or if we make it that way by catering to gross, salivating baby-men.
Lauren: Yeah, she even gets it in her own family — they all constantly say Kendall (tall, pale skinned, no curves) is the prettiest one. Really, the more you look at it, the more evident it becomes that to be as willing to take photographs like these is actually a pretty substantial act of bravery. But I say that without wanting to surrender my right to think she is sometimes ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS as a human (showing up in Thailand and trying to take a 12-year-old orphan home with her on a whim, taking over a thousand "selfies" for her husband, buying a Lamborghini for a baby) — which is to say that you don't have to unconditionally love Kim to get that what she's doing is really very powerful.
Danielle: And the things that make her ridiculous can be said about anyone that grows up in the captivity of the wealthy. With Kim, I don't think we can remove race from how people conceive of and talk about her body. For all intents and purposes, Kim is a (partially) brown woman with a naturally big ass who dares to showcase herself. It's all very complicated, but I don't think the "all about that bass" girl or whatever white person Vogue is saying invented twerking would get the same cultural backlash that Kim is getting. And that's an even deeper pathology — the pathology of race, class, and gender all coming to fruition in this one woman. People's heads are exploding and they can't even pinpoint one reason why.
Lauren: I guess that's what makes me saddest — that knee-jerk, thoughtless reaction. I'm not surprised — WE ARE ALL KIM KARDASHIAN WHEN WE'RE LADIES ON THE INTERNET, AM I RIGHT? — but it's disappointing.
Danielle: Exactly. The first reaction to a woman's body, a woman's agency, or a woman existing in a way that doesn't cater explicitly to men is KILL IT WITH FIRE. I'm afraid of the way we talk about gender, race, and class now, because everyone has hunkered down and is holding on for dear life to their own little piece of cheese. There's no dialogue about stuff like this, it's just "I HATE IT AND YOU LOVE IT SO WE MUST BE AT ODDS FOREVER."
I really never used to think about Kim at all and now I feel very defensive about her, and part of that comes from my pure exhaustion with the way we just rip women apart all the time. You can disagree with how she became famous or think it's weird, but you cannot deny this woman. You can't deny her power, her business acumen, or how agile she is about being so completely tuned in to and way, way ahead of pop cultural moments. Remember how Gaga released that album about pop art, and was ramming it down everyone's throats? "I'M AN ARTIST, I DO ART, THIS IS ART"? Kim is so much subtler in how she presents her life as a work of art. It's weird and remarkable, but her awareness of cultivating a life in the public eye is not offensive to me.
Lauren: I agree. And I find watching it unfold really fun. That said, I think it's entirely acceptable to find her boring or dislike her or to be uncomfortable with her naked butt on a magazine cover. Those are OK ways to feel! But there's a jump from "not my thing" to "stupid bitch," and I think people are taking it far too easily.
Danielle: People don't even dislike her as much as they dislike the IDEA of her, which is just wrong.
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