study in big booty, america's weird beauty standard
ok so the gta 6 trailer came out and the protagonist, lucia, has the build u actually see in latin america - big hip, small waist, natural proportion, not an instagram proportion. and i gotta say, good on rockstar. they used the real thing.
GTA VI
I've seen it in cartel execution videos - u know the ones, where a woman in tiny denim shorts gets led out, and the camera always catches the view from behind. i've seen it in twerking videos where the proportions look like someone put a cartoon renderer on a real woman. it's everywhere. it's the standard latina body. so i did what any normal american does: i blew two weeks pretending to research something.
Thick latina
because here's the thing: that body is everywhere down south. bus stops. taco stands. reggaeton videos. it's not a fetish, it's a default. it comes from africa, actually - the san people in southern africa were painting it on rocks thousands of years ago, there's even a scientific name for it, steatopygia, fat deposits on the butt. when starvation kills u, stored fat is survival, and survival is fertility. an insurance policy. then the atlantic slave trade carried it to latin america, dance culture kept it alive, and it became a celebration. u cant dance samba or reggaeton without one.
Twerking
then america saw it. and u know what we did.
what america did with it
1800s: a south african woman named sarah baartman was exhibited in london and paris. they called her "the hottentot venus," charged tourists to stare, and when she died they dissected her, kept her remains in a museum until 1974, and only returned them to south africa in 2002. that was the way it started.
Sarah Baartman
fast forward. rap normalized it - sir mix-a-lot was number one in 1992 with a song about exactly this. j.lo put it on the red carpet. kim kardashian - armenian-american reality tv personality, not of this bloodline at all - put a champagne glass on her butt for a 2014 magazine cover and the internet broke. and then an industry. the brazilian butt lift became the fastest growing cosmetic procedure in the us - they vacuum fat out of your stomach and inject it into your butt - and it's also one of the deadliest, the fat can reach your lungs, people have died, people still pay fifty grand. kim's underwear company skims launched 2019, now valued at 5 billion dollars. for underwear.
Kim Kardashian broke the internet with her butt
and here's the ugly bit. black women spent decades being excluded from pageants and mocked for these exact bodies, their grandmothers were literally on display in freak shows, and now american women pay surgeons to acquire the shape. look, i'm not gonna moralize, i'm just gonna say it out loud: that's not a celebration. that's the heist part.
the cycle
2024-2025: mass reversal. lip filler being dissolved, implants coming out, patients deflating. press called it the "de-kardashian-ification of america." the new hot surgery is one that lifts the butt without adding volume, the "miami thong lift." and ozempic made skinny the look again. nobody learned anything, they just switched products. u paid for the big butt, now u pay to un-big it. the surgeons banked what's in between.
so back to lucia
now the funniest part of this. gta 6 fans spent a whole month arguing whether lucia's butt is too big. frame by frame math. on a character. like it's a court case. and that's not a comment on the game - rockstar did the right thing using a real body - it's a comment on us. a virtual character with an actual latina build makes people feel uncomfortable because it's not the version we're used to. we're so used to the manufactured standard that the authentic one looks wrong.
france, fun fact, commissioned a literal government study of the butt in 2010 - they asked what it contributes to civilization, the answer was basically "a lot." france studied the butt, america industrialized it, rockstar put the real one in a game, and half the internet measured it like it was a hand grenade.
and honestly? good on them for being accurate. i just wish the rest of us still knew what accurate looks like.