Booty Pop

 

Celebs like Nicki Minaj, JLo, Beyonce and Kim Kardashian have given bodacious booties a big boost.  Enter Booty Pop, a purveyor of padded panties.  Booty Pop wants to be at the top of the bottom industry. Sales are up 47%, and customers are agitating for even more bountiful booty.  Booty Pop hears them, and this month will start selling booties that are 25% bigger.  And bigger booty means bigger bucks.

Not to be outdone by Booty Pop, Feel Foxy, another maker of padded panties, says 2014 has been its best year since launching nearly a decade ago. Sales are up 40 percent from a year ago.  Feel Foxy is butting into Booty Pop’s boon.

“The Nicki Minaj song gave women the idea to pay attention to their rear end,” says Jessica Asmar, co-owner of Feel Foxy.

The era of the Big Butt has arrived. While big booty in some areas has always been popular, it has now gone mainstream. In addition to pop stars influencing the pop in booty, psychology adds its two cents to the onset of the booty boom:  “In uncertain times, people look for security. Men are attracted to women’s hips and buttocks for security and reassurance. Women respond to this. It’s deeply psychological.”

Life in the Boomer Lane has personally been aware for over four decades that she is not in possession of anything that can be identified as  booty.  In college and for several years thereafter, she could only wear men’s jeans, and she had an especially tough time with two-piece bathing suits. On at least one occasion, the bottom half came off in the ocean. After LBL graduated to women’s jeans, beloved daughter always yelled, “Mom, your jeans are sagging in the back!”

LBL believed that not having a posterior would serve her well when she attained an age when gravity reached most women’s bums.  She believed that if she had nothing to fall, nothing would fall.  She has since learned that this thinking, as with most of her understanding of physics, was seriously flawed.  What never existed, still managed to fall. LBL’s butt was somehow connected to quantum physics and the theory of gravity being the strongest force in the universe, stronger even than reality.

About ten years ago, in order to remedy this situation, LBL visited a Fredericks of Hollywood emporium.  She made her way past the crotchless panties, the garters, the feathers, the sequins, the pasties.  She asked the salesperson if Fredericks sold butts. “Ah, you want the chicken cutlets,” she was told. She was handed a box of what appeared to be actual large chicken breasts. “You’ll need special underpants for these,” the sales clerk added.  The total was more than LBL had intended to spend, but the result, she was sure, would change her life.

LBL put them on and looked in the mirror.  What she saw was not so much a curvaceous butt, but rather a strange-looking new body part made up of her old saggy non-butt and the perky new chicken cutlets. She put the rest of her cloths on, hoping the irregular shape of her fake backside would be disguised by her clothing.

She went to a singles dance. About one minute after she entered the room, a male friend came up and, instead of hugging her like he usually did, he gently swatted her you-know-what. His hand bounced off. Her evening was ruined. She tried wearing her chicken cutlets one more time, this time to the wedding of a friend of Beloved Daughter.  Although no one patted her rear, she  spent the entire evening feeling like she was carrying a pappoose on the wrong part of her body. She never wore the chicken cutlets again.

This time around, LBL will not buy anything from Booty Pop or  Feel Foxy.  She will not sign up for the increasingly popular booty- building exercises classes that are popping up all over. She will make do with her non-butt. Men will pass her on the street and will not feel secure or reassured. She will continue hiking up her jeans as she goes throughout her day. And she will look forward to pop culture discovering another body part to revere, preferably one she actually owns.

 

 

 

Kaufmann also suggests economic reasons are at play: