Two Thirds Norma
guest editor cassandra del taco on podcast You're Wrong About: episode The Most Normal Girl In Cleveland
This is You’re Wrong About’s best podcast yet. It’s called The Most Normal Girl In Cleveland. Sarah is interviewing a Radiolab producer named Heather who wrote a book called Butts. Heather seems to understand the American woman’s butt as a profound poli-cultural semiotic, which sounds pretty boring, which means she thinks butts represent more than they are.
I am not much preoccupied with the action of the anus except to leave it benignly alone and keep it clean and protected. I myself have always assumed the function of the gluteal form is that twofold- lift and buffer. Why the woman’s butt historically- anecdotally- occupies more terrain than the man’s interposes a lot of questions that this particular podcast seeks to answer.
Norma and Norman, “The Most Normal Statues Of American People,” are brainstormed in the mid nineteen forties by a pair of low key eugenicists looking to motivate Americans to pursue personal physical excellence because it is way better for people to make lifestyle changes on their own than be railroaded into them (see what i did there?).
By amassing and culling tons and tons of measurement data popular at the time, these folks divine The Golden Average from the set of 58 measurements taken from willing (?)women and construct Norma. Norma is described as “if they didn’t have breast implants yet but really wanted that look.”
This social engineering sartor-not-satire has a home on You’re Wrong About specifically because it turns out the data the eugenicists used to make Norma was hideously biased against “non-white” women. If you are unfamiliar with You’re Wrong About, episodes are structured addressing and correcting inaccurate cultural myths when those myths derive from bad (or bad faith) data.
Apparently in the forties it was too hard to just find and measure willing White women, so the Measurement Squads (platoons of presumably white women armed with Justice Department measuring tapes and uniforms) sought to build “good favor” by condescending to non-white members of the community and including them in the measurement process.
Then these measurements were discarded from the schedule. Approximately a third of all the data. Now in a museum (?) Norma, the embodiment of Averaged American Woman Data. Two Thirds Norma.
Full disclosure, I am not enamored of the butt. Rather, I guess I am, insofar as I adore and admire or alternately abjure and apologize for an ass, and then, I walk away from it. Aesthetically and actually. The ongoing inner goingson are of no interest to me, a dispassion which yields occasional brutal confrontations with my husband, who comes from a long long line of “butts are so so funny-gross-funny” traditions. Still, willful excision of data chaps my size 2 to 8 hide. This is a funny joke about why women’s clothes still don’t fit (if you have listened to the podcast).
Heather Radke actually caught my attention at the time about this on Radiolab, but full disclosure Radiolab’s more virtuous than thou tone is too offputting most of the time to tolerate. The Butts episode strayed from their signal-based preaching style, which was a win for listeners. Here on Sarah Marshall’s thoughtful cultural autopsuy table, the matter and the conversation around it teem with nuance and connection. Excellent.
That’s the end of my momentary attention span. Go listen to the podcast it is good yay.