Selter can be thought of as a cultural successor to Kim Kardashian. This September, the New York Times profiled Jen Selter, whose “belfies” (butt selfies) have earned her more Instagram followers than Barack Obama. In July, documentarian Kurt Williams released Bottoms Up, which tracks America’s cultural obsession with large asses and the butt implant industry that has emerged in its wake. This year, the cover of Sports Illustrated’s annual swimsuit issue, which has traditionally featured women photographed from the front, focused on the bottoms of models Nina Agdal, Lily Aldridge and Chrissy Teigen. Whereas previous songs on the topic, such as “Baby Got Back” or “Bootylicious,” felt more like isolated hits, these ass anthems came together to form their own musical movement. For much of the summer, the airwaves were battlefields on which competing odes to the power of asses-“Anaconda,” “Booty,” “All About That Bass,” “Wiggle”-fought for supremacy. This form of objectification, like most others, is overwhelmingly directed at female bodies. On Reddit, there’s a thread dedicated to identifying videogame characters based solely on images of their asses. They are fodder for lists like The Top-10 Booty Babes in Gaming or The Top 5 Butts in Video Games. Yet asses in videogames are rarely taken seriously. Within a frame, the prominence of an object’s position is usually correlated with its importance-and in a third-person game, the protagonist’s ass is always on display. In his study of 35,000 MMORPG players, Ubisoft researcher Nick Yee found that men often choose to play as female characters in third-person games because they “prefer to stare at a female body rather than a male body.” The omnipresence of asses affects how players interact with games. Not necessarily leering, but definitely looking. This vantage point allows you to observe a scene while also participating in it.Īll of this is a roundabout way of noting that a year spent playing videogames is a year spent looking at asses. You are off-screen, a few steps back, taking in the whole scene. You control her movements but your body isn’t hers. In order to see the world through a character’s eyes, you often stand behind her. I’ve stood behind quarterbacks as they dropped back to avoid oncoming rushers I’ve followed the undead through the land of Drangelic I’ve watched a ranger clamber over fences and towers throughout Mordor. Trevor isn’t the only character I’ve followed this year. He wouldn’t like to be followed and, based on everything I’ve learned about him, he would be particularly displeased that I can now tell you what his ass looks like. Trevor has the gait of a man who is permanently irked, always trundling off to settle one more score. I don’t think he knows that I’m following him. If we’re being fully honest, I’ve been following him for a few days now and seen him commit all manner of crimes. It’s a Thursday night and I am following Trevor Philips around Los Santos.
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