I want to write today about a sorely neglected topic on zombiekim.com, something that I hold near and dear to my heart: country music.
You think I’m joking. I’m not. I love country songs, from the dusty boots to the cowboy hats to the down-home cookin’ to the beat-up trucks. (This is probably a result of, rather than in spite of, my being an avocado-enriched Californian.) Still, I’m no stranger to the faults of good ol’ boy tunes. Case in point, even a song that I like includes the lines, “Nobody but me gonna love you like you ought to be loved on/Nobody but me gonna cry if you up ‘n’ leave.” Yeah. More egregiously, the other day, I was listening to my country station on Pandora radio when what should my horrified ears behold but Trace Adkins’s, “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk.”*
*If you're thinking, "Kim, this song came out in 2005--I daresay it is old hat," then I have news for you. Most of my musical references stop at 1991. So, I didn't hear this song until a few weeks ago, nor did I Wiki it until I'd written this whole article. Damn it. So, if you want current musical references, go suck it with MTV. If you want the kind of charming cluelessness that comes with believing Quantum Leap and Tommy Tutone are still culturally relevant, then brothers and sisters, you've come to the right place.
Bask in it. Revel in the glow of its almighty crassness, of its absolute disregard for the beauty of the English language and the purity of slang cultural confines. Tear off your clothes and roll around in the wet, caking filth that is, “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk.” Sorry, I may be getting carried away. I do that sometimes when I talk about weighty topics, like punctuation, Cosmopolisuck Magazine, and plain-faced, no-talent Jennifer Anisuck. But you see my point.
And while we’re still sort of on the topic of the “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk” video: 1. fly girls in shiny pants are not country; 2. that is not a honky tonk; and 3. I do not think that this is how Donkey Kong had it “going on.” I think Donkey Kong was more into punching Marios than dressing like a slut--but then I haven't played the Wii. (Let’s ignore the fact that most of the girls in that video have nothing to brag about in the ass department, anyway. Please. Stick Stickly could fake a badonkadonk, too, if you dressed him in those hot pants and had him stick (no pun intended) his ass out at that scoliosis-inducing angle. Now, why you would want to do that, is really beyond the scope of this article. You creep.)
As much as I love to hate this song, I have to admit that it makes sense that there would be a country song about chicks’ butts. For some reason, people really love singing about them. There aren’t really any hit songs about flat abs or big boobs, and Z.Z. Top’s “Legs” is the only notable anthem for, well, legs. Yet on the rear end of things, we have Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back,” Sisqo’s “The Thong Song,” and now, this, “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk.” Maybe it’s me; maybe, because the good Lord did not see fit to bless me with a mess of junk in my trizzunk, I just don’t “get it.” (I was once forcibly banned from singing along with everyone else to Queen’s “Fat-Bottomed Girls” at a party. We’ll see who has the last laugh when George Michael produces the song I wrote, “Hot Valedictorians.”)
But I have a theory that doesn’t rely on the assumption that having a small butt proportionally decreases one’s brain size: it’s a primitive thing. We’re just not as sophisticated a species as we’d like to believe. At night we herd into dark caves where we drink fermented fruit juice and move rhythmically to drums and chants that praise a symbol of fertility, a woman’s full posterior. We might as well sacrifice some virgins to our Sun God (or is that what those tan-happy Abercrombie & Fitch brats are really up to?). But who am I to spoil the fun of those women who would actually want to be identified as “fat-bottomed”? After all, the current female ideal in the media is beyond thin—or, to use the scientific term, the type is “skinny bitch-ass twig whore.” So maybe a song or two about booty shouldn’t be discouraged.
Furthermore, a lot of people want there to be a more “realistic” body image presented in the media—realistic in the sense of reflecting that we are consciously shortening our life spans with food. (I should say, a lot of women want a new body image for women. In men they still want muscled jock-types, or lithe pretty-boys, who are straight. Sounds reasonable, right?) I don’t mean realistic in the sense that it’s a realistic goal, because it’s not. The media present what we’re more-or-less already attracted to. Most of us prefer real people to plastic doll-monsters, of course, but there is still something about the Tila Tequilas and Scarlett Johanssons and Johnny Depps of the world that sells, sells, sells. And--realistically--you just can’t make someone lust you on moral grounds. You know what they say, you can suck the fat out of your buttcheeks and inject it into your lips, but you can’t make the hot mailman want to have sex with you.
A common argument against the current thin-is-in fashion is that it is just a fashion; culturally defined, not inherently beautiful. After all, Renaissance women were voluptuous, because being full-figured meant having enough to eat, which meant having wealth. That’s true as far as it goes, and I’m all for historical perspective. But that doesn’t mean you can transpose those same values onto our time. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t have both modern medicine, agricultural expansion, and a higher standard of living, and still have a beauty ideal that prizes one’s ability to survive famine conditions. It now costs a lot more money to stay slim than it does to gain weight, so of course it’s stylish to be small. But don’t fret, historical-accuracy abusers. Worldwide there are still plenty of semi-feudal states that lack basic modern amenities, much like in premodern Europe. Why don’t you go there? Spend a few months bathing in a sewage-filled river and waving tsetse flies out of your eyes, then come back and tell us how sexy you feel.
Not that I’m supporting our current twig fetish, in spite of the fact that it makes assets of my evolutionarily-deficient inability to gain weight and my creepy grasshopper legs. Just as with those hefty Renaissance femme fatales, the whole point of our current ideal (skinny, white, and young) seems to be to mock the poor. “Haha! You eat 3,000% of the RDA of sodium because you buy all your food from the Dollar Menu and the 99-cent store. Haha!” I don’t want to help the rich any more than I already do just by paying taxes. The rich suck. And I'm really not a fan of those (usually rich) freaks who hit the Trifecta of Attractiveness, the Trifectattractiveness: fit, blond, and tan. I was once driven to tears by a Hollister store. Seriously. I worked up my nerve to go in, looking for a Christmas scarf for Sean. The place was like an Orwellian re-education center with shades of the Stepford Wives: dark, sensory-deprivation lighting; choking clouds of cologne; loud, cacophonous music; and eerily similar, beautiful young people. I burst out of that nightmare within thirty seconds, made a beeline for Pretzel Time ("I'm going full ugly," I thought, shoveling the doughy mess into my face in the least ladylike way possible), and then five minutes later, I was crying in a Banana Republic. It's funny now, and it was even funny then, but now you see how deep my anxiety goes.
So, if we're not going to bolster the ideologies of the rich with our fashions, how about poor as sexy? We can style our perms with Dep hair gel, buy lipstick that leaves a rash and nail polish that chips off in twenty minutes, and wear hot pink tee shirts for 10K charity runs that our cousin’s ex-girlfriend ran back in 1993. Stirrup pants and stained, puffy FUBU jackets will be the new spring look. The fashionable Friday night hotspots will be Wal-Mart, Teddy’s Topless Bar ‘n’ Titties, and the unemployment office. Just wait. A few more years of this recession and we’ll all be swept up in a national craze for hot Taco Bell cashiers and smokin' field workers.
Heck, I’m even sick of the super-skinny thing for purely selfish reasons. For one, low-rise pants. For two, if I never hear another joke about how women go to fancy restaurants and order salad with a Diet Coke, it will be too soon. And for three, supermodels are terrifying. Not like, “Oh, she’s so skinny, it’s scary!” but more along the lines of, “She has soulless, undead eyes, and she could get away with murdering me in front of the Attorney General and then burying me next to the White House pool.” I know, that’s ludicrous; like anyone would ever let a supermodel do the manual labor involved in burying a body.
Speaking of realism, it can’t be easy trying to be an attractive male. The current ideal requires women to diet and all, but it also requires men to work out—a lot. I know that you’re supposed to at least pretend to love sports. Sweat! Blood! Gatorade! Hairy-chest pounding and hairier-ass slapping! I get it. But be honest: sometimes getting and staying in shape is just a pain in the (hairy) ass. You get all tired and hot, you have to buy a wardrobe of clothes just for dirtying up, and worst of all, that restraining order banned you from all Curves locations, not just the one at Southdale Mall where you caused a scene. And now there’s metrosexualism. It’s not enough to be fit and virile; now you also have to wear designer tee-shirts and use things mysteriously called “product” on your face. Well, everyone knows that men are only being forced into metrosexualism because there are such high standards for women’s grooming and fashion. That’s why I avoid makeup, brushing my hair, and clothes that reveal anything above the ankle or below the neck: so that one day you men won’t ever be expected to wax your chest hair. Sorry, fellas, I’m taken.
The problem is that it’s ultimately our media, yours and mine; how many of us saw Fantastic Four just for the Human Torch or the Invisible Woman (I really hope no one watched it for any other reason)? We're incorrigibly shallow, so, what are we really going to do? Aside from rail against that creepy "Disaronno on the rocks” commercial in our freshmen year women’s studies classes, of course. Beauty standards will change, but when they do, it will be because of the price of grain in Argentina or because of lead poisoning in China-produced makeup or maybe even research from the Mayo clinic, or, well, who knows. But it won’t be because we all got indignant really hard. Listen, I may know very little about what men find attractive—aside from Scott Bakula in a dress—but I do know that whining ain’t it.
Really, someone will always be left hurt and alone by any standard of beauty. A standard, by definition, is a measure by which to exclude. Maybe it’s just one of the drawbacks of our species' higher brain functions; after all, the drab-feathered peacock doesn’t know that it’s his plumage—his badonkadonk, if you will—that comes up short. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t try to have a healthier and more inclusive beauty ideal, because of course we should. I will say this, though: it’s a good thing that our standards for attractiveness have nothing to do with inner beauty, because man, if they did, we’d all be screwed.
Hmm.
No. No, I’d rather close with this: Honky Tonk. Badonk. A. Donk.
"ICE CUBES NOMNOMNOMNOM!"
Pass the pleasure--go back to BRAINS
think Donkey Kong was more into punching Marios than dressing like a slut--but then I haven't played the Wii. (Let’s ignore the fact that most of the girls in that video have nothing to brag about in the ass department, anyway. Please. Stick Stickly could fake a badonkadonk, too, if you dressed him in those hot pants and had him stick (no pun intended) his ass out at that scoliosis-inducing angle. Now, why you would want to do that, is really beyond the scope of this article. You creep.)
But I have a theory that doesn’t rely on the assumption that having a small butt proportionally decreases one’s brain size: it’s a primitive thing. We’re just not as sophisticated a species as we’d like to believe. At night we herd into dark caves where we drink fermented fruit juice and move rhythmically to drums and chants that praise a symbol of fertility, a woman’s full posterior. We might as well sacrifice some virgins to our Sun God (or is that what those tan-happy Abercrombie & Fitch brats are really up to?). But who am I to spoil the fun of those women who would actually want to be identified as “fat-bottomed”? After all, the current female ideal in the media is beyond thin—or, to use the scientific term, the type is “skinny bitch-ass twig whore.” So maybe a song or two about booty shouldn’t be discouraged.
A common argument against the current thin-is-in fashion is that it is just a fashion; culturally defined, not inherently beautiful. After all, Renaissance women were voluptuous, because being full-figured meant having enough to eat, which meant having wealth. That’s true as far as it goes, and I’m all for historical perspective. But that doesn’t mean you can transpose those same values onto our time. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t have both modern medicine, agricultural expansion, and a higher standard of living, and still have a beauty ideal that prizes one’s ability to survive famine conditions. It now costs a lot more money to stay slim than it does to gain weight, so of course it’s stylish to be small. But don’t fret, historical-accuracy abusers. Worldwide there are still plenty of semi-feudal states that lack basic modern amenities, much like in premodern Europe. Why don’t you go there? Spend a few months bathing in a sewage-filled river and waving tsetse flies out of your eyes, then come back and tell us how sexy you feel.
Not that I’m supporting our current twig fetish, in spite of the fact that it makes assets of my evolutionarily-deficient inability to gain weight and my creepy grasshopper legs. Just as with those hefty Renaissance femme fatales, the whole point of our current ideal (skinny, white, and young) seems to be to mock the poor. “Haha! You eat 3,000% of the RDA of sodium because you buy all your food from the Dollar Menu and the 99-cent store. Haha!” I don’t want to help the rich any more than I already do just by paying taxes. The rich suck. And I'm really not a fan of those (usually rich) freaks who hit the Trifecta of Attractiveness, the Trifectattractiveness: fit, blond, and tan. I was once driven to tears by a Hollister store. Seriously. I worked up my nerve to go in, looking for a Christmas scarf for Sean. The place was like an Orwellian re-education center with shades of the Stepford Wives: dark, sensory-deprivation lighting; choking clouds of cologne; loud, cacophonous music; and eerily similar, beautiful young people. I burst out of that nightmare within thirty seconds, made a beeline for Pretzel Time ("I'm going full ugly," I thought, shoveling the doughy mess into my face in the least ladylike way possible), and then five minutes later, I was crying in a Banana Republic. It's funny now, and it was even funny then, but now you see how deep my anxiety goes.
Heck, I’m even sick of the super-skinny thing for purely selfish reasons. For one, 
The problem is that it’s ultimately our media, yours and mine; how many of us saw Fantastic Four just for the Human Torch or the Invisible Woman (I really hope no one watched it for any other reason)? We're incorrigibly shallow, so, what are we really going to do? Aside from rail against that creepy "Disaronno on the rocks” commercial in our freshmen year women’s studies classes, of course. Beauty standards will change, but when they do, it will be because of the price of grain in Argentina or because of lead poisoning in China-produced makeup or maybe even research from the Mayo clinic, or, well, who knows. But it won’t be because we all got indignant really hard. Listen, I may know very little about what men find attractive—aside from Scott Bakula in a dress—but I do know that whining ain’t it.
