Are Curves an "Ethnic" Women Thing?

"Curves" has, annoyingly, become one of those meaningless magazine copy buzzwords that's thrown around endlessly, like "dieting" or "relationship advice." Nevermind that the women lady mags actually describe with the term can be anyone who is slightly overweight, plus-size, or even stick thin with a large body part or two. Even more annoying, though, is the idea that having a curvy body is some sort of aberration or only an ethnic thing.

Take Kim Kardashian, who graces the cover of Shape magazine with the cover line, "I'll never be one of those skinny girls." She is a famous half-white, half-Armenian woman with a slightly larger than normal (for celebrities) waist-to-hip ratio and a relatively large butt. This shouldn't be cause for anything: alarm, celebration, nothing. It's just her body. Lots of women have similar frames, including famous women like Halle Berry and Beyonce. The fact that Kardashian's body more closely resembles famous black women than famous white women is part of her shtick, which she capitalizes on at every turn.

As Irin Carmon pointed out over at Jezebel, Kardashian can't seem to separate her body from her half-Armenian heritage. "I don't get why everyone is always going on about my butt. I'm Armenian. It's normal," said Kardashian recently. But her two sisters don't share her booty type; moreover Kardashian herself seems to relish the attention that her body affords her. (Just try to find a red carpet picture of her posed face-forward. You'll be in for a hunt.)

Of course, the attention isn't on her butt, per se, it's on her "ethnic butt" juxtaposition with her non-ethnic background. Michelle Obama has a similar build, as do Erykah Badu and Janet Jackson, but their "curves" don't warrant the same attention, because it's expected. In fact, the reverse often happens when a black or Latina woman is in the spotlight: She's pressured to slim down or mask her build. Maybe this was why Jennifer Lopez's butt had such a glorified role in her career.

Carmon argues in her piece that women like Kardashian may cling to the ethnic parts of their heritage when talking about their bodies because curves are seen as a feature of that culture, as opposed to white culture. Carmon herself, who is Israeli, acknowledges that her butt gets "more attention than anything else about me, ever." Admittedly, in the celeb world the non-ethnic women lack any back curvature. But in the real world white women aren't all that unlikely to naturally have hips and butts.

All this talk of curves — who has them, who doesn't, when they're normal or not — seems like another way to define what's within the "normal" realm of female beauty. It also creates a silly division between "those skinny girls" and ... those other skinny girls who have a few curves thrown in.

Photo credit: David Shankbone