Kim Kardashian's Backside - a Dubious Cultural Icon?

To get over the morose tone of my last blog post I thought I would write about something more light hearted and totally ridiculous - Kim Kardashian's backside.

The first thing we should know about Kim is she's not a real person. A recent interview in a magazine revealed she looks exactly the same in real life as she does on TV.

However. she's a bit smaller than you imagine. This does not surprise me because most celebs are. I once met Angelina Jolie and thought somebody must have shrunk her pre-interview.

Papermag said of Kim she is smaller than she appears in image "with tiny, almost doll-like ears and feet and hands." It describes her bambi-like hands, eyelashes like feather dusters and compares her to a "beautiful anime character come to life."

The exception here is probably her ass which is about the size of West Virginia. I digress.

However, Paper appeared to be saying nice things about her. Anyone would have thought she had just agreed to take off her clothes on their cover.

Kim recently appeared on the cover o revealing her famous backside although it was curiously shiny, reminding me of those conkers we would buff up back in the day before going out to do battle with other conkers in the playground. Although it would be difficult to say anything profound about Kim's over-exposed bottom, a number of media organizations did, suggesting it might be a cultural icon.

The BBC reported a discussion thus.

"Amid the jokes, there has also been a serious discussion about whether the image plays on crude stereotypes of black women. Kardashian is Armenian-American. The French photographer who took this picture, Jean-Paul Goude, is also known for his work featuring black women, including a shot from the 1970s that features a remarkably similar pose to Kardashian's photo. That has led some claim that there is a racial subtext around these images. A blog to this effect, entitled 'Kim Kardashian doesn't realise she's the butt of an old racial joke' has been liked more than 36,000 times on Facebook."

The other odd thing about Kim is it's hard to think of her as a real person. The more exposure she gets, the more you end up thinking why is she getting all of this exposure. I had a moth eaten old sofa that was more interesting ... but then I suppose I'm the one writing about her. Gah.