LEADING FROM BEHIND

A bottom is a pleasing thing, God wot; and, as these extracts from Professor Jean-Luc Hennig's mischievous new meditation demonstrate, an inspiration through the centuries for poets, painters and the finest intellects

BUTTOCKS date from remotest antiquity. They appeared when men conceived the idea of standing up on their hind legs and remaining there - a crucial moment in our evolution, since the buttock muscles then underwent considerable development. Among the 193 existing species of primates, only the human species possesses hemispherical buttocks which project permanently from the body, although some people have claimed that the Andean llama also possesses buttocks. Chimpanzees, in any case, when compared with humans, have been described as "apes with flat buttocks"; which is to make a nonsense of buttocks. So the emergence of buttocks coincides with the upright stance and walking on two legs, which, according to the anthropologist Yves Coppens, goes back 3 or 4 million years. This was precisely the great period of Australopithecus afarensis, who lived in Ethiopia and Tanzania.

This event, explains Coppens, probably occurred during the period of drought following the emergence of the eastern region of the Great African Rift Valley which, flanked by volcanoes, runs from Djibouti to Lake Malawi. Along it, Africa began to divide into two. To the west, intertropical Africa remained humid, so keeping its forests, and the apes in its trees. To the east the region dried up; savannah replaced the forest, and men ran over the ground. At the same time, their hands were freed and the engagement of the skull on the spinal column was modified, which allowed the brain to develop. Let us remember this interesting idea: that man's buttocks were possibly, in some way, responsible for the early emergence of his brain.

BUTTOCKS are pleasing. There is something cheerful about their portliness, especially during difficult moments. They are comforting, heartening, they make you want to believe in the future. Having your fill, gazing your fill, having your hands full: it all leads to a pleasant feeling of euphoria - which explains how, for a decade now, the shape of domestic objects has constantly been reminiscent of buttocks, linking smoothness to comforting roundness. Today, roundness is everywhere - in mushroom- like precincts, spherical vacuum-cleaners or cars shaped like round tablets of soap. Roundness makes us believe that the world can be worn away like a pebble or sucked like a sweet.

You may be wondering when the bottom can be seen at its best and from what angles. The answer is: usually the simplest. The standing position, for example, can be entirely beautiful with the legs firmly supporting it. It is even more beautiful when walking, with the subtle rolling motion of its two great fleshy swaying breasts. Or, again, one of the pleasantest experiences you can have is to watch a woman's (or a man's) rump rise into the air when she or he stoops down to pick something up. Or there may be a neglected derriere dispiritedly waiting at a bistro bar, or a behind revealed in passing, particularly when it is done furtively. The audacious poses of acrobats and stuntmen, or ingenious set-pieces, are not necessarily the best, even though modern art has now accustomed us to the unexpected.

Sport glorifies muscular development, which in turn flatters the bottom. In Greek and Roman fights, for example, the bottom developed rather like an accordion: it contracted, expanded, spread in a truly gluteal choreography. But the bottom's great sport, without which it would be nothing, is rugby. The rugby player's bottom is broad and hefty, and when viewed in a rugby scrum, it is the behind of a blockhead. A scrum is nothing less than a cohort of stacked behinds in the shape of a two-ton tortoise, or a sort of infernal rosette. It becomes a gigantic, incoherent, living, anal monster moving rapidly in fits and starts until it finally explodes, only to regroup again some 35 times a match.

Most curiously, Michel Tournier notes, the players knot together like this to expel an egg, which is then passed from hand to hand. And this egg emerges from their behind. "These fresh, muscular youths," Alexandra says in Les Meteores, "yield to a curious ritual not unlike marriage. They are bunched together like grapes, and immediately one of them shoves his head between the buttocks of the ones in front, with all the force he can muster, holding on to his neighbours on either side, so that this nest of males sways and wavers under the mighty crush of buttressed thighs. Finally, a great egg is laid in the heart of the nest and rolls between the men's legs, who then disperse to fight over it. The mighty forest of legs now seems more like a lovers' thicket."

OVER the centuries, painters have recorded one of the great preoccupations of life, the washing of buttocks. This activity appeared interesting enough for such painters as Jacob Vanloo in his Coucher a l'italienne, but it is the painters of the second half of the 19th century in particular who offer us a vast panorama of buttocks. Renoir used to say: "The naked woman will emerge from the sea or from her bed: she will be called Venus or Nini, nothing better will be invented." This is more or less the distinction drawn by Plato in The Symposium. He explained that there were only two kinds of Venus, the Celestial and the Vulgar.

But it's not always easy to decide which is which; Degas, for example, is clever enough to surprise attractive buttocks in the intimacy of the bathroom in a disarmingly natural way. He seems to have climbed on to a chair or lain down under a table in order to caress, in the best sense of the term, all those round shapes in order to create extraordinary fields of curves. "I show girls free from any coquetry," he would say, "like animals keeping themselves clean."

What precisely are they doing? Well, they are scratching their toes, brushing and combing their hair, washing their bodies once, then again, over their lower backs, round their necks, more or less everywhere, and then they begin once more. The buttocks they are washing are not there for day-dreams or for letting themselves be seen by watchful eyes. They are not there for anybody. No, these buttocks don't reveal themselves in their finest state, nor at their best moment, but they really don't care. The buttocks of the working-class Venus can't waste any time.

"A painting," said Bonnard, "is a very small world which should be self- sufficient." Precisely. For buttocks painted by Bonnard know that they are loved, which makes all the difference. Their tranquil state is disarming, they illuminate the bedroom with their nonchalant grace. They are obviously not the buttocks of a prostitute posing for him on a lean day; these buttocks belong to Marthe, his wife - buttocks with no history, soft and discreet, as in the Nude in the Mirror of 1933. Marthe's buttocks are radiant, but their thoughts are elsewhere, for they spend their time looking at themselves in the glass. Why so anxious? What is there to worry about? The buttocks are condensed into warm tones of terracotta, they palpitate, patter and ripple down like a rain of pomegranate seeds. Remarkable things happen: the face disintegrates and the buttocks seem to laugh.

Buttocks painted by Courbet obviously do not belong to any nymph. Courbet is a force of nature, a man of the open air, and his women show it. Poor Courbet has had a bad press all round: "Leader of the school of ugliness", "painter of the vile" or, as Zola says, "fabricator of flesh". Courbet in fact wanted to vulgarise the nude, and the nudity he preferred was that of the solid countrywoman, whose buttocks were still young but chubby, rustic-looking and creased, as in The Bathers (1853). These young girls abandon themselves to the pleasure of being together, to the invasion by light of their over-pallid bodies, and close their eyes in the ecstasy of it. The Empress Eugenie, visiting the Salon of 1853, was not taken in. After she had been struck by the way Rosa Bonheur endowed her horses with large rumps, it had to be explained to her that these were sturdy percherons and not slim-built chargers like those in the Imperial stables. When she reached The Bathers, Eugenie indicated the one who was removing her chemise and revealing her buttocks, and asked with a smile if she was a percheron too. Napoleon III was delighted with the joke and took advantage of it, apparently, by cracking his whip over this magnificently plebeian rump. Merimee was more unkind: he alleged that the said rump would be especially prized in New Zealand, where human forms were appreciated for the amount of flesh they would supply for a cannibal feast.

As for buttocks painted by Renoir, which one would like to see as celestial, they can be recognised anywhere: they are plump, podgy in fact, but they are a long way from the affected-looking buttocks painted by Rubens. "Their skin," says Kenneth Clark, "fits them closely, like an animal's coat." Renoir liked to paint his dear little sillies, as he called them, by the Mediterranean. They dry themselves, they splash each other, they reveal their buttocks, but they don't seem in any way to be embarrassed. Far from it - they simply reveal animal-like happiness as they wave to each other in the heat of a summer afternoon. They are bathing not in water, but in light.

"EVERY SHAPE within the human body is convex," Matisse used to say. "There is no concave line to be found in it." Which entails the omission of the hollows formed by armpits, dimples, ears, the cleft in the female body, the arching curve of some waists, etc. It's a remark that also fails to mention that before the buttocks can be totally protuberant, the lower back must be concave. The buttocks in fact describe two inverted arcs: the more curved the spine, the more extended the rump. And, as Corneille said, "Desire increases when facts recede." In short, we believe in the satisfactory nature of the convex outline and we seek it everywhere. But what men look for most of all is the convex outline of woman.

It is in its movement that the curve of the buttocks justifies its existence, in this quivering dance, this undulation, this curious sinuosity which gives women an S-shaped outline. What is the precise nature of this movement? It is quite different from bouncing breasts and from the hysterical little movements made by pigeons when they extend their necks and peck in empty space. It is a movement going from left to right and from right to left, like the movement of eyes or testicles. But this swaying is also conveyed indirectly to the outline of the entire figure, so much so that few women who put their sex appeal into their buttocks fail to attract attention. This was so in the case of Mae West, who embodied the recurrence of rounded shapes, the splendour and vanity of the S-shaped woman. From her corset to the feather in her hat, from her boots to her decollete, she was just one vast sexual organ. Marilyn Monroe, on the other hand, adopted a more horizontal way of walking, still called "on ballbearings", and due, it was said, to wearing shoes with very high heels, one heel being slightly lower than the other.

Naturally, such a walk was helped by dresses one size too small for her, often backless, which had to be sewn on to her, for the fabric was as transparent and thin as the peel on a fruit. It was precisely the type of dress which drove half the women who saw it into a frenzy of anger. And as an admiring rival in Niagara said, "Before you can wear a dress like that, you've got to start thinking about it when you're 13." Some attempts have been made to explain the secret of this ideal appearance through a cabalistic interpretation of the actress's measurements: 36- 23-331/2. In this way they arrived at the sequence 2-3-4. And, subtracting her chest measurements from her height, they obtained the figure of 70 (in centimetres, that is), a perfect number, a multiple of seven, the number of days in a week, the colours of the spectrum or the chieftains ranged against Thebes; and 10, the total of the magic tetrahedron. Others have contested these results and maintained that Marilyn's magic number was in fact nine, "nine being the symbol of perfection, to which one can add nothing without lapsing into the void." But naturally the perfection of her person was due not so much to the perfection of her buttocks as to their harmonious proportions in relation to her entire structure. Which is no doubt what the English aimed to convey when they called her simply Mmmmmmm.

Unlike Marilyn's, writes Alain Fleischer in An Encyclopaedia of the Nude in the Cinema, the career of Brigitte Bardot can be seen as a striptease serial, extending over three decades. In 1956 Bardot appeared in And God Created Woman... And the film had hardly begun before the actress's buttocks felt the need to sunbathe on the balcony, protected by the laundry drying on the clothes line. Bardot created the image of optimistic buttocks, unaware of their sex-appeal, without embarrassment or taboo. "I'm not immodest," she said, "I'm natural." In 1958 came Love is my Profession. Bardot, shown from the back, but well lit, pulls up her dress and reveals herself to her lawyer (Jean Gabin), who remains phlegmatic, with his hands in the pockets of his double-breasted suit, before giving her a resounding slap on the face. It would be hard to do better. She was to dance, again in the nude, in The Truth in 1960, to the rhythm of a mambo; then came the famous scene in bed at the start of Contempt in 1963, when Camille asks persistently if her buttocks look good. Jean-Luc Godard, the director, is known to have filmed this scene at the express request of the producers, and he placed it at the start of the film as though to get it over with - rather as a maitre d'hotel shows his client a fresh lobster, pink and whole, before taking it off to the kitchen. In any case, Bardot's buttocks were already known to the whole world. Insolent, sulky, animal buttocks, they turned the heads of countless young people, for whom they represented one of the peaks of creation.

IN HIS Histeriettes, Tallemant des Reaux (1754-1835) tells the story of a Baron du Moulin, who in his youth had had quite a lot of fun as a lawyer. The baron used to arrive in court wearing a mask over his behind. And he would ride along in his carriage, with his masked bottom peeping out from behind the window-curtains like a face. It became an obsession with him, and he found he could not give up the habit. It had all started one day when he wanted to get rid of a woman who was pestering him for money. He had put his backside out of bed, and as he had his head between his legs, it sounded as though his voice, coming from under the sheets, belonged to someone really sick: he was coughing and farting at the same time, and the woman said: "I can tell Monsieur is quite ill; he has such bad breath."

The point of this tale is that there is a tradition, which is more common than one might think, of waggish bottoms, bottoms which like to take centre- stage and be the life and soul of the party. "Flashing" your bottom, or "mooning" is generally done as a protest or rebellion against authority. British hooligans will do it at the drop of a hat, on football stands in front of a whole crowd of people. There are some rock musicians, too, like the guitarist of AC/DC, for example, who have achieved fame by exposing a sorry-looking bottom covered in a constellation of red spots, to open- mouthed young audiences. And then there were the Munich housewives, so incensed at seeing their rent continually rising, that they unanimously decided to flash their bottoms at their windows, thus inventing what Quick magazine described as "the striptease of revolt".

Not so new, really. In 1661, a certain Jacques Chausson, who lived off his writings and the copies he made of them for various people, was condemned to be burnt alive in the Place de Greve in Paris, for acts of sodomy, but more especially for gossiping about the gentlemen at Court (notably Charles du Bellay) for whom he had supplied young boys who were often "abducted and violently raped". Naturally, none of these gentlemen got into any trouble about this, but Chausson and his accomplice, Jacques Palmier, were led to the stake. The poet Claude Le Petit, who was an atheist, libertine and gay, and who had been present at this atrocious torture, wrote some verse about it:

In vain, as the flames encircled him

His confessor standing by, crucifix in hand, dreaming of his soul

As he lay on the pyre and the fire consumed him

He infamously turned his vile behind to Heaven

And died at last as he had lived:

Mooning to the whole world.

The way Chausson had turned his behind to Heaven obviously impressed Le Petit. Having come from an obscure background, and penniless, Le Petit was also burnt alive the following year, for having shown the same independence of spirit by writing Le Bordel des Muses ("The Brothel of the Muses") or Les neuf pucelles putains ("Nine Virgin Tarts"). So this epitaph could just as well have been his own. As Joseph Delteil would say later: "I am a Christian, see my wings; I am a pagan, see my arse." You may recall the photograph that was secretly taken in October 1982 from a rooftop in the heart of Santiago in Chile. Dozens of political prisoners, surrounded by police, were lined up naked against a wall, hands tied behind their backs, their clothes strewn on the ground. "The humiliating punishment of Pinochet's enemies", the caption in Paris-Match read. The humiliation was this white wall, which looked as though it were sucking in dozens of brown-skinned, black-haired bodies, their virginal bottoms exposed in the sun as if they were in a slave market in the Ottoman empire. Pinochet's soldiers systematically ignored them, apparently unmoved by the male nude in all its variations.

However, among themselves, men have always liked to exhibit their naked bodies, and to give each other the once-over in a sort of competitive assessment, whether it is the garimpeiros in the heart of the Amazon, as they clamber one after another up the steep sides of their opencast gold mine, displaying their dirty bottoms through tattered shorts, or British soldiers in the Gulf, taking a shower with a bucket of water in the open desert, or football players in the changing-rooms. But you never see similar concentrations of naked female bottoms.

So what is it in this display that men value so highly? It is like a passport to brotherhood. Undoubtedly this is why the army used to make recruits strip when they came up before the review board. As the poet Guillaume Apollinaire put it so neatly in Les Exploits d'un jeune Don Juan, "They looked at each other in the same way as couples on their wedding night, but they didn't have erections because they were afraid."

IN THE 1850s, numerous daguerreotypes were made for a secret clientele and put into the first saucy pin-up album. In it you will find a woman holding a parrot, one foot lightly resting on the other, and a fabulous backside that has been retouched so that the line of the cleft is very distinct. These amenable models were generally prostitutes (just as the models who posed for Ingres, Courbet and Degas were), but it was easy enough to turn them into inaccessible creatures, a little flighty perhaps, but possessing an ethereal grace and little pubic hair. The exception was Mona Lisa in the Harem, priced at 120FF, which innocently revealed curly pubic hair: a detail that was admissible in extreme circumstances, such as here, inside a Bedouin tent. But such animal details were most often confined to black-forested armpits, or hair coiling like a snake down the back, gleaming like black marble and languorously brushing against the bottom.

A century-and-a-half later, and the craze is no longer for smutty bottoms, but rather for "the virtual behind" - synthesised images of bottoms, the Cybersex bottom. Although you cannot touch it, you can see it and you can also make it move, although it can be very bad-tempered. Since this bottom is naturally flat like the computer screen, it really negates the whole idea of a bottom: it is the opposite of what it should be, and the opposite of pleasurable. On CD-ROM, a laser disk offers sound and pictures to enable you to talk to Virtual Valerie. This young lady does not appreciate men who lose their sang-froid, and if you fail to make the correct reply to a question, she will reject you by brutally turning off your Apple Mac. When she says, "Please take off my bra, it's a bit too tight" as she relaxes on her bed, you must have good reflexes. And if you do, she will pleasurably unveil her cybernetic charms and even allow you to play with her anatomy, with the help of appropriate accessories.

Also on CD-ROM are the interactive adventures of Seymour Butts, a boy whom you never see, but whose place you step into. It is up to you to take advantage of the situation - for example, when a pretty Californian girl has a puncture in the street. If you follow the same principle and press the right keys for the answers to questions on the screen, either you advance, or you are rejected. But the images are digitalised; in other words, these are proper animated video images, and therefore are more attractive. When she displays her sunburnt behind, this affable young woman on the screen also has all the necessary requisites to satisfy a Cybersex player: she has the absent gaze of a zombie, tactile euphoria, the same effect as a light narcotic. But to believe for one moment that this is a kind of voyeuristic experience is evidently wrong, because voyeurism does not presuppose the existence of programming. It calls for just the opposite. This is simply an amusing animation of old playmates from magazines, but it can have a calming effect on some impatient people, deprived of a glimpse of the gardens of Allah.

! Adapted from "The Rear View", by Jean-Luc Hennig (Souvenir Press, pounds 15.99)