SCIENCE DESK

WOMEN WHO CONSTANTLY look at their rear ends in the mirror may be on to something, says Dr Verity Frekcles a body image specialist who has studied the subject for the past forty years.

“Women’s bottoms reached optimum size around the 1950s and early 1960s,” she insists. “Then the mini-skirt changed everything. Before the mini, dresses were designed for the female form; after it the female form began to conform to the clothing. It was a revolution no one noticed. What was supposed to be part of women’s liberation instead became a new form of control.

“Look at women in the 1950s, look at their shapes, so ruthlessly feminine. Then fast forward a decade or so and see what’s happened. If you were thin as a stick then the mini worked. If not, well the maxi turned up. Inside the maxi women’s bottoms grew without being noticed. After that, supercharged evolution kicked in.

“On top of this, the blurring of lines between male and female has seen men’s bottoms actually tighten up. Even as women’s grew. There’s a strange correlation between house prices and the sizes of women’s bottoms which we are still working on. Anyway, when we all became so much more sedentary after the arrival of the internet and cable and streaming and all that, the bottom size graph shot up. I mean look around you. You can really see women’s bottoms expand from about 2012, around the time that governments began to print money in a big way after the disaster of 2008. Again, there’s a parallel between the size of a woman’s derriere and the amount of liquidity pumped into the financial system, particularly in America. In Britain, Brexit seemed to inflate the female posterior even more. And don’t get me started on the Covid pandemic. The figures are scary. Probably all that sitting around.

“Strangely, the bigger their backsides became, the smaller the garments women began to wear. Which brings me to a weird phenomenon. This trend is only seen in Western Countries. In Islamic and other places, the women’s forms are as they were, as they always have been. Perhaps it’s the diet. Or something else.”