Oh yes oh yes!! This is a blog about butts! Sometimes I wish someone would pay me to write this blog, and, at other times, like this one, I don’t mind a bit because I get to write about exactly what I please.
The story of how I ended up with Lady Chatterley’s Lover as one of my bedtime reads on my current training trip is a little too long and convoluted for my purposes here, but it’s with me in LA on my bedside table, wrapped carefully in one of those pretentious “classics” covers. I’m about 90% through the book, and decided to start watching the 2022 film adaptation in concert with my read, to see what the current take is on a book so scandalous that it launched an obscenity trial.
While the book does indeed contain some quite graphic scenes and language, what caught my attention has been the descriptions of Lady Chatterley’s body. D.H. Lawrence takes pages and pages to communicate to us what a ruddy, “heavy” and “round” figure Lady Chatterley has. Her lover admires the “beautiful, curving drop of her haunches,” (Haunches! What a great word!) and pronounces about her rear end: “It’s a bottom as could hold the world up, it is.”
In the film adaptation, Lady Chatterley is played by a lovely Emma Corrin. They are every bit the English lady caught up in a torrid love affair, and do the whole thing rather nicely. However, their butt would certainly not hold up the world. Their butt would hold up Connecticut, at best. I just couldn’t stop a confusing feeling coming up during the sex scenes (of which there are many), when Lady Chatterley is divested of her flimsy period drama garments. She is so skinny I felt like I was being transported from England to Avatar, or she was about to sprout wings and devour her lover like some sort of banshee bird. I could see every one of her ribs, and her tiny waist barely flared to bony hips and a barely there rear end.
Of course there is nothing wrong, inherently, with being incredibly thin. I’m sure the person in this film (whether it is Emma Corrin or a lovely body double) works very hard to have a body that looks the way it does. I’ve just spent so many years ingesting media that features women, and people in general, who have butts that could hold up the world, that when I see someone so waif-like and fragile, it throws me for a loop. My Instagram algorithm has figured out I would rather see someone with thick thighs throwing a hammer than a starved model, and rather see someone farming than dieting.
As athletes, as women, we are told many things about our bodies. Something I’ve always wondered about is the empowering line of thought that goes something like “don’t love your body for what it looks like, love it for what it is capable of.” If that’s empowering for you, amazing! It has been for me, at times: I love what my body can do. But I think it also has the underlying message that strong or fat or thick or jiggly bodies are not lovable without a higher purpose. That if I have an actual butt, it better be good for something!
There are a lot of issues with Lady Chatterley’s Lover read about a century down the road, but something I appreciate is the object of all the Lover-ing is a woman with some haunches on her. And in the film adaptation, the filmmakers have cheated us a bit by saying that thick haunches are not what is required in the role of the lovable lady. Lady Chatterley, as Mr. Lawrence wrote her, is a solid and strong woman, even though pretty much the only thing she does in the book is wander around and have sex! She doesn’t throw any hammers or play rugby or squat huge amounts of weight in the gym. She just exists, and that in and of itself is lovable. Part of Lawrence’s aim in writing this book, he says, is to catch the mind up to the wild capacities of our bodies: to release us from the shame of our desires and the magic of our physical selves.
Seems like we still have some work to do.
All of our bodies deserve to be loved, by others and us, just as they are, and for doing little else other than existing. Love is not a reward for exemplary performance, but something that should be freely given to people just as they are: not as we wish them to be. Our bodies are the same. They deserve to be loved exactly as they are, not as we might wish them to be.
So anyway. Give yourself a little tenderness today and appreciate your body, haunches and all, and thank you for reading this slightly strange edition of my blog.
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Written by Skyler Espinoza
Em[Power] 