Why Are Baby Butts So Compelling?
Never thought I'd... and yet, here we are, etc.
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My mom friend and I were watching our two toddlers splash around a water table in the waning days of summer, and wistfully, almost to herself, she said, “I love her body.”
I gasped in a sort of swoony relief.
“I love my daughter’s body tooooo!”
We spent the next few minutes describing all our favorite features the way teenage girls would describe a new pop song.
My daughter, naked, running around our yard, buzzing with an electric glee, fills me with a specific type of reverence. I look at her the way you’d gaze at a Rothko or an Alaskan mountain range. I’m awed by the scale, the inverse: how something so small could be so tremendous, so naked but still so opaque and full of mystery.
It’s impossible for a mother not to admire the miniature features of their child’s face and body. But there is something so beguiling about the form of a toddler. Maybe it’s their round bellies and their bubble shaped cheeks; the smallness of their shoulders and half moon fingernails. I adore all these features of my daughter.
Most of all, I lover her dumb butt??
I know. I know: baby butts are a cliche, a purity symbol, a marketing ploy. But now that I’m a mother, I can tell you that a baby’s butt has it’s own strange cosmic pull on my heart.
It’s not just me, of course, baby’s butts are strewn throughout classical art. They appear cradled in the crook of many a Madonna’s arm, they are the prototype for all the aloof angels swirling around Sistine chapel, and for generations master sculptors turned stone into pillowy orbs.
BUT WHY?? Baby toes are just as ridiculous and cute.
The rolls at their ankles and wrists just as endearing.
Meanwhile the butt itself is such an object of existential horror. The crimes our bodies commit against the senses via the butt, is a secret we all keep. We hope to never be found out. It’s what separates us from animals— our deep shame about what our butts do and how they betray our thin layer of civility. Also:
NO ONE EVEN KNOWS WHY WE HAVE BUTTS!!!
With the exception of a horse, no other mammals has the same sort of cakes that we have. Some theorize we needed such big booties due to the fact that we’re bipedal so we needed some way to comfortably sit since we couldn’t rest across all fours. And that’s just the outside part of the butt. The inside part is even more of a mystery.
We do know that baby butts are compelling enough to be a main decorative flourish of the Renaissance and Baroque movements in art.
You want to class up this dingy basilica? Here’s a garland of baby butts!
Your depiction of a greek god lacks oomph? Baby butts.
You want to be buried in eternal splendor? BABY BUTTS ON YOUR SARCOPHAGUS!!!
Interestingly enough, before Christianity’s ascendancy, naked babies in paintings were meant to symbolize passion, mischief, fertility. Naked baby (boys) were companions of Dionysius, the god of wine and ecstasy, they also joined Aphrodite as the spirits of eros (that’s how you get cupid in the buff). I assume that’s part of the overall Freudian/Jungian archetype about the primitive id.
But look, these are all adult concepts and I don’t want to use them to drag down the majesty of the baby butt. Because part of what’s so appealing about it is the freedom of pretense. To watch a toddler strut around naked, is to see a human with nothing to hide. Belly stuck out, toes stretched wide, propelled by instinct.
Baby butts are impossibly soft. They’re also comical. Proportionally speaking, the baby butt seems to be there partially for yuk-yuks. They are angelic, sure, but there’s also hint of a burlesque gag. I suppose that’s why in classical paintings naked babies are also refer to as imps. Little rolly-polly spirits of mischief and so on.
Your baby’s butt will fit in the palm of your hand and that’s also strange and magnificent. It’s the symmetry, the smallness, and for lack of a better term, the cheekiness!
Of course, before having a child I always found the baby butt to be overly sentimentalized and weird. In my early 20s I went with some friends (they were rich!) to Martha’s Vineyard and there was a small secluded beach filled with families—and their naked-ass children. I remember being a nervous weirdo about it, like, wow, rude that you would allow let your children frolic blissfully in nature instead of having them wear Toy Story trunks.
Baby butts are also over sentimentalized which leads to unhinged Etsy art like this:
This is what baby butts do! They make you loose your senses and then all of sudden you’re dipping your baby’s tuchus in cold, orange paint.
Nevertheless, this fleeting season of my life where my child’s body can simply be admired as a dollop of the sublime, free from the gaze of a gross society, is something I will cling to.
And yes, baby butts are magical!
Beautiful writing!