Let’s Study Derrières

I remember when I was young, my grandma and her old ladies friends telling me that when I grow up, I should pick a woman with a large pelvic bone because it will bring me good fortune. In fact, the exact words they used were: “She will bear you many boys!”

At the time I didn’t understand the concept of how children are born let alone the correlation between bottoms and bearing children. I do remember, however, after that incident while taking a walk with my parents, I instinctively pointed at a nearby woman’s bottom and said: “She has a big bum. She is good to bear children!”

To my parents horror, they apologised to the lady profusely and immediately scolded me, but after knowing the grandma’s story, they just laughed it off.

What can I say? Kids say the darndest things...This is just one of the anecdotes I inherited, courtesy of my Chinese heritage.

All jokes aside, in Swansea, Wales, an artist called Sue Williams of Swansea Metropolitan University’s Dynevor Centre for Art, Design and Media got £20,000 grant from Arts Council of Wales to study women’s bottoms.

When interviewed by Thisiswales.co.uk, she says that part of her study requires making casts of women’s bottoms but that was only a small part of her research. She did not, however, offer more explanation on what her study involves.

One thing she did mention was that while working in Africa, her work (casts of women’s bottoms) was, “censored by the African government” and that bottoms were “treated with respect while in the West was seen as trivial, sensational and sexual.”

Notice that Africa is a continent and not a country. Not sure what is the meaning of “African government” (singular, not plural). Africa is a vast piece of land with many nations, cultures and religions. Some are Christians and others are Muslims and even Jewish (Ethiopia), not to mention the different pagan religions.

With such a vast array of cultures and religions there are bound to have differences in how local people view certain parts of human anatomy, specially when these parts can have a certain sexual connotation. To apply a generalization view of African nations as a sole entity seems politically incorrect.

One of the questions raised by Thisiswales.co.uk, and rightly so, is why in such times of economic crisis, one artist was awarded £20,000 to study a part of a human anatomy, to which in her own words, it is seen as “sexual and trivial” in this Western society. Surely...if it's so trivial it shouldn't merit a look-over.

Another argument raised by Thisiswales.co.uk is that while the private sector is fighting for every penny and offloading employees to cut costs, the public sector seems to be spending extravagantly during crisis.

However, some economists would argue that it is precisely during times of economic crisis, when the private sector seems reluctant to spend that public sector is obliged to keep spending and even embark on national projects to create more jobs and keep the economy going, until it picks up again.

Both are valid points and offer good arguments, sadly for this particular case, one will find hard to argue that Sue Williams’ study qualifies for the latter argument.