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SPEAKER_01: Listener supported. WNYC Studios. This week on The New Yorker Radio Hour, the novelist Jennifer Egan on how we could end the enormous problem of homelessness if we had the will to do it. That's The New Yorker Radio Hour. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_07: Oh, wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radiolab.
SPEAKER_00: Radiolab. From WNYC. So do you want to start? Do you want to wait?
SPEAKER_07: Hold on, I'm just, Lulu has a whole idea here. Oh, where is she? Hey, I'm Lutef Nasser. I'm
SPEAKER_05: Lulu Miller. She's just texting me. Who was running late? This is Radiolab. Well, the
SPEAKER_05: question Lulu wanted me to ask you to start actually is what do you think butts are for? What do I think butts are for? Um, I mean, I, I think they're a, it's a portable cushion
SPEAKER_07: to sit on, right? Huh? The cheeks, I'm thinking the cheeks are like a portable. Okay. So today on Radiolab, we're going to share with you all a conversation that we had with our contributing editor, Heather Radke. Yeah. Over the last few years, Heather has been putting her blood,
SPEAKER_04: her sweat, her tears, her back into a book all about butts. Specifically the butt cheeks.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, the cheeks. The junk in the trunk, the booty in the back. Straight up. It's a book
SPEAKER_05: about the cheeks, not the hole. So if you're looking for butt hole stuff, it's not here.
SPEAKER_07: It's not happening. No. But Heather's book, it's called Butts, a Backstory is it's pretty hefty and cheeky and juicy. But no, seriously, it is a deep thing on something that we don't
SPEAKER_04: usually think that deeply about the gluteus maximus, which is the butt muscle. It's one
SPEAKER_05: of like three butt muscles. It goes into the why and how of the butt muscle. Yeah, there's
SPEAKER_06: like a little bit of a debate is the butt for running or is it more for like jumping? Not for cushions, apparently. But also, there's this other part, which is actually the part
SPEAKER_05: that's like way more complicated and fraught, which is the fat part. Because Heather explained
SPEAKER_07: it's the fat that makes the butt the thing that society obsesses over. And that's why
SPEAKER_05: like the Brazilian butt lift is one of the most popular cosmetic surgery procedures in America today. Brazilian butt lift. I've never heard of such a thing. Oh my God, what if?
SPEAKER_05: You're gonna learn so much when you read my book.
SPEAKER_07: Okay, great. I'm so excited. What's up?
SPEAKER_04: Oh, hi. I'm so sorry I'm late. I've been so excited for this for weeks. So just keep going and I will orient as you go. Okay, so I guess that just the like to finish this thought lots of it's like, so butts are
SPEAKER_05: also highly sexualized. So there's a question that becomes like is part of the reason they look the way they do is because of sexual selection, not just natural selection.
SPEAKER_04: And I guess your book kind of looks at how even just in a few different eras, which are pretty close to one another, just how much the the in vogue, but in a certain society changes, right, that becomes the question. Yeah, because, you know, like elbows, for example, we don't
SPEAKER_05: put a lot of meaning into how elbows look. But what a butt looks like is like, it's a sign of beauty, it's a sign of disgust, it's been highly racialized, it's like was used to put people into hierarchies. And there's a real question of like, why have butts come to mean so much when they could just mean nothing. And so a lot of the book is sort of an exploration of, of all the things they've come to mean and why they've come to mean that.
SPEAKER_04: Well, yeah, I mean, so what is the one?
SPEAKER_07: So we talked about butts from every possible angle. But the part of the conversation we want to play for you today pretty much straight through actually, was about more than just the butt.
SPEAKER_04: Because at a certain point in Heather's reporting, she uncovered this moment in time where the ideal that so many of us measure our bodies up against, not just our butts, our whole bodies, became concrete in a way that even today still haunts us. Yeah.
SPEAKER_07: All right, go for it.
SPEAKER_05: So I want to tell you about two statues that were made in the late 1930s, the early 1940s. They were created by these two artists, or actually one guy was a gynecologist and one guy was an artist Dickinson and Belsky. A classic gyno art duo. So Belsky is the artist Dickinson's the gynecologist. And these guys were trying to make these statues, one was of a man and one was a woman and they were called Norma and Norman and Norman is spelled N O R M M A N. So it's like Norma man. Norma man. Okay.
SPEAKER_04: Norma man. He's normal. Well, you kind of get what they were probably up to. They weren't trying to be coy, I think.
SPEAKER_05: So they were kind of a kind of eugenicist push in the 1930s to show people what like a good body is. So the people. Yeah.
SPEAKER_07: No, no, no. Just one thing that just popped to mind when you first said it before you went into the eugenics route, were these statues supposed to be like, oh, this is the average person or was it like, this is the exemplary person? Well, I mean, Lassa, if you hit on it right there, it's the, so one of the things that's
SPEAKER_05: so interesting about these statues is, and this time is that the normal is the exemplary. So okay, first of all, the purpose of them was they were going to go into the American Museum of Natural History in New York. They were going to be put on display there to show the everyday New York person what like a normal American body should look like. Yeah. Right. And the 30s in America and the 30s across the world were a time when people were trying to optimize humans. It was a time obsessed with data and like new data was available. And what they were actually doing was they were like, we're going to make statues of the perfectly average, the perfectly normal American. So it turns out if you want, if
SPEAKER_05: it's 1939 or eight or whatever, and you want to make the average American man, it's very easy because of the military. Wait, why? So you know, when you go into the military, they measure you. So they had all that from World War I, but they actually had no data for women. They looked and looked and looked. The data wasn't as easy to come by. And then they found a data set. And it's a pretty exciting data set for many reasons.
SPEAKER_07: This is where Heather's story about eugenics and the birth of Norma, the perfectly average woman, crosses paths with another notable arc in our history starting back in the 1800s, which is the way we make the clothes we wear.
SPEAKER_05: We're talking about the 19th century. We're talking about the rise of the garment industry. Now you should be thinking like sweatshops, New York City, like the cotton is coming up from the south, they're turning it into clothes for an increasingly large white collar male workforce. So a huge amount of money is going into garment manufacturing. And in order to make money, you're always trying to lower costs of production, right? So if you can have a machine that cuts everything, you know, it's like, let's say you have like, ideally, you have three sizes, small, medium, large, you have one machine that's cutting small, one machine that's cutting medium, one machine that's cutting large, right? So if you have 100 sizes, all of a sudden, it costs you a lot more, right?
SPEAKER_04: So the more nuanced, the less profitable.
SPEAKER_05: Exactly. And there had been a sizing system for men, but half the population is still having to make all of their own clothes or hiring someone to make all of their own clothes.
SPEAKER_07: Because of economics or because they can't afford it? No, the half is women.
SPEAKER_05: Oh, half is women.
SPEAKER_04: So there aren't sizes really at all? For women?
SPEAKER_05: Or they're just, yeah. Not really. I mean, they're trying because they realize, because the men's size is like going like gangbusters. It's like really helpful. And catalog shopping had become this really big thing. You know, it's like Sears catalog is like, everyone's buying out of the Sears catalog, but people, women were sending back all these clothes because they didn't fit. But then in the 30s, this woman named Ruth O'Brien comes along, and she's at the Bureau of Home Economics. Which was a bureau?
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, a bureau of the government.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah. Ruth decided that she's going to try to tackle the problem of coming up with the
SPEAKER_05: standard set of clothing sizes for women. And oddly enough, she actually ends up confronting the same problem that Dickinson and Belsky had when they're trying to create Norma, which is that they don't have enough data.
SPEAKER_04: Like what is a woman's body actually look like? And so like, if you're going to, I mean, it makes sense, right? If you and I, if the three
SPEAKER_05: of us were like, let's figure out a sizing system, it feels like the first thing we'd want to do is be like, all right, so what are the different sizes of bodies? And it's the 30s. So the WPA hires women across the country to go out into little towns and whatever, they're called measuring squads. And they just like measure their neighbors?
SPEAKER_05: Well, it's like they have these little measuring parties kind of and they like, when I gather, they put on these kind of government issued bras that are like, you know, those like bando bras, like that are just like boob covers. And cotton undies. I think there's like 26 different measurements. So it's like elbow to their wrist, their thigh girth, their heel length, these kinds of things. So they're measured a gajillion different ways. And the idea was to try to find like as many different kinds of American women but like, let's put a special large asterisk there. So how did they? Okay, so there were some problems with this as you might guess. One is that older women didn't want to do this. So a lot of the data skewed younger and they had to adjust for that. The other thing was that Ruth O'Brien erased all the data from non white women. Whoa, what was that about? But they didn't get but if they had to erase it, you had to get some right?
SPEAKER_04: Well, okay, so imagine it this way. It's like, I'm like, Suzy Q measure and I'm like, okay,
SPEAKER_05: I'm going to put an ad in the newspaper in Cleveland or Cincinnati or whatever and say, come to this place. Maybe you ever everyone gets a cracker or they get some money or something. And some of the people who come are not white. And especially let's just remember, this is a time when white is also like, Italians probably weren't considered white, Eastern Europeans, Jewish women, these people were probably not considered white. So, you know, some maybe a Jewish woman, maybe a black woman shows up. So Ruth O'Brien actually says in her materials that we should still measure these women so as to not create bad feelings amongst the group. But then we will throw out the data.
SPEAKER_04: Whoa. So we're getting this data, but I don't care. I know it's so weird. It's so weird.
SPEAKER_05: And you would also think, oh, sorry, go. Well, yes, you would also think women who are not white buy clothes. And so maybe it would be useful to know. Correct. That's what I was about to say, that it's in their financial best interest. It's
SPEAKER_07: in the garment industry's financial best interest to have this be as representative of as many people as possible.
SPEAKER_05: I mean, I think I guess a thought I've had about it and this just is like further racist, just more specifically racist is, you know, at this point in history, race wasn't just being codified based on skin color, but also based on morphological difference, invented or not. And so probably she was thinking something like, well, if we have black women and Italian women and Jewish women, the clothes won't fit white women.
SPEAKER_07: And did it seem to, even though it was only for white women, did it seem to like, did women clump to the sizes? Like, like was there like a like an obvious small, medium, large or was it like, just like.
SPEAKER_05: So we're going to talk about that. And it's a whole complicated answer. But let me I'm just going to first let's talk about Dickinson and Belsky and what happened with the statues, Norma and Norman. OK, great. They found Ruth's data and they were like super psyched because as we have discussed, it was a time of data. And they I mean, for sure, they thought that thing about the her throwing out all the nonwhite people was a feature, not a bug, you know, and they made these statues and then they were first displayed at the American Museum of Natural History as part of like one of those eugenics congresses. And people could come and see them, you know, just like they go see the T. Rex now.
SPEAKER_04: Can we take a second to all look at Norma and Norman together? OK, yeah, for sure.
SPEAKER_07: OK, I just found one. You probably have one. You want to just shoot it in the slack.
SPEAKER_04: Well, I'll send there's this there was a cat here. I'll put it in.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, put it in the slack.
SPEAKER_04: OK, let's see. Where's the chat? Oh, that's Norm. Oh, Norm.
SPEAKER_05: Oh, yeah. Wait, this this is a good one, too. This is.
SPEAKER_06: Oh.
SPEAKER_04: It is weird looking at these statues, these white alabaster visions of the eugenicist brain and the eugenicist vision like it. It feels almost like looking at something evil to look at them.
SPEAKER_07: I mean, it does it does it does do that. It also there's also something about it, though, that is feels ridiculous a little bit.
SPEAKER_05: Like when I look at Norma, first of all, she has no body hair, which is I find weird, although Norma man. Oh my God, you're right. Oh, Norma man does. Like how messed up. I also think her breasts are so strange. Like it's like somebody who had never seen breasts. Sculpted breasts. They put two grapefruits on a torso. Yeah. So he's got so they're naked. You're right.
SPEAKER_04: So Norma, Norma man has like a pubic hair and she does not. Yes. Yes, she does not.
SPEAKER_05: And I think I mean, I have a picture. It took me a long time to actually get a picture of her from behind, which I mean, it's very it's very normal. Like exactly the butt you immeasured on the other side. It's, it's like not that big.
SPEAKER_05: It's not that flat. It's sort of a little bit strong. It's kind of pert. It doesn't seem like it would like fill out a pair of pants completely. But seeing them in this, there's this one picture here with them side by side and they
SPEAKER_04: look like robots. They're standing stick straight. And they're just these like specimens of
SPEAKER_07: like Stepford wives or something. Yeah, there you go. It's like a Stepford wife and husband that are just like,
SPEAKER_04: One of the things about them is like, they're not artistic. Like there's like, like they're
SPEAKER_05: so like you're saying they're like ramrod straight. It's like, it's not meant to evoke something emotional. It's meant to invoke something intellectual maybe. Yeah, it's just like, here is normal. Come behold.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, come behold normal. And you know, okay, so normal is a very exciting idea at this
SPEAKER_05: moment in history for reasons that I think we can be critical of and also sympathetic towards like it's as you know, World War Two is happening in this era. Like the other headlines in the newspaper are like Hiroshima bombed. And it's like a big moment where like people are like, I'd really like for my person who's fighting in the war to come home and maybe like we just get married and have like a pretty simple, straightforward life. Like you can sort of see why in this moment, normal and Norman and Norma is an appealing idea. Like even in even though we can be kind of critical of it. I also think it's like, like I'm saying it's kind of a reasonable thing. Okay, okay. And so then after they were displayed at the American Museum of Natural History, they were bought by this hygiene museum in Cleveland. And hygiene museums are a very eugenicist project. They're like the guy who
SPEAKER_05: ran this museum he was, he had, his thing is like, I want people to want to be normal. And when I say normal, I want them to be like, properly white, etc, etc, all the stuff that we've been talking about. So he decides that he's going to have a contest to find the most normal girl in Cleveland.
SPEAKER_04: And like, was it truly a contest? It was like, Yes. So this is like, big news in Cleveland, like it's in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. So
SPEAKER_05: they're, what they're encouraging women to do is measure themselves and send in their measurements.
SPEAKER_02: This gets better and better. So all these women are sending in their measurements, like your ankle width, and your
SPEAKER_05: like, knee to hip ratio. It's not just like, you know, like when you venture for clothes, you measure like three or four things. This is 10 or 12 things and you're sending this in. All told 3864 women enter this contest. Yeah, how many, like how many winners are there in this contest? Do you think? None. I don't think any are like, exactly Norma. That's my guess.
SPEAKER_07: I think there's one winner. Well, you're sort of both right. None of them are Norma's measurements. But they had to
SPEAKER_05: choose a winner because they did all this stuff. So they choose this woman named Martha Skidmore, who's the most normal girl in Cleveland, and she apparently is the closest and she also like just so perfectly fits the story of the time. She's the ticket taker at the local movie theater. She has recently quit her job as like a gauge grinder at a factory so that like the boys coming home can have the job back. And this is the quote from the newspaper. She likes to swim, dance and bowl and thought she was an average individual in her taste and nothing out of the ordinary had ever happened to her until the Norma search came along. Until the act of being chosen herself as the norm most normal made her not normal
SPEAKER_07: anymore. Wow. And then I tried to track her down. I like really tried. She's dead. But I tried to
SPEAKER_05: find some people who had knew her or something. I found her obituary and you know, we can't know how the rest of her life planned out. But she, you know, the obituary suggests she did have a pretty like quote unquote normal life for the rest of her life. She had a couple of kids. She never left Ohio. And that's all we know about Martha Skidmore.
SPEAKER_07: Okay, we're gonna take a quick break. When we come back, we're gonna hear how Norm Man and Norma are still haunting us and all of our bodies today. And we will actually hear about a living, breathing, modern day flesh and blood Norma. Lulu here if you ever heard the classic Radiolab episode sometimes behave so strangely,
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SPEAKER_04: Lulu. Latif. Radiolab. We are back with our contributing editor Heather Radke talking about her new book, Butts, a backstory. And when we left off, she told us the story about how this one data set of women, almost entirely white women planted the seed for this statue Norma, who was supposed to be the perfectly average woman back in the 1930s. And now we're going to take it from the museum
SPEAKER_07: where the statues are to the dressing room, how that same data set was part of a giant manufacturing puzzle. It is part of what for many is kind of just a personal hell of trying to find a piece of clothing that actually fits your body. Okay, so we talked about Ruth O'Brien's study.
SPEAKER_05: And I kind of love this and also hate it because it's like in a very practical way, this would be a good problem to have solved at some point. Out of her data, she creates like 26 or 27 different sizes. That's too many. Clearly too many, right.
SPEAKER_05: We still kind of use a version of this. So the garment industry sort of takes her 26 sizes and then turns it into like this version of the sizing system we have now for women, which is like two, four, six, eight, 10, 12. There's not 26 sizes. Even if you had the 26 sizes, it probably still wouldn't work because human bodies are diverse enough that they're consistently resisting the standardization of sizing. There's no odd number sizes?
SPEAKER_06: No. Does it work? Do men have the same sizes?
SPEAKER_04: No. Oh, they don't? No. They don't have, wait, you live your whole life without two, four, six, eight, 10, 12? Lulu, you know how men's sizes work? I know what I am. I don't know what anybody else is.
SPEAKER_07: What are you? Okay, so for my pants, let's say, right? I'm like sometimes a 28, sometimes a 29.
SPEAKER_04: Oh, because that's the actual inches. That's the thing. Oh, that's different. That's not a size. Different thing. No, no, no, no. That's why it's smart. Wait, men don't have like size pants? They just have, well, oh my God, we're in different shopping realities. They're just, they make sense. It's like the 29 is, it's like 29 inch waist.
SPEAKER_05: It's 29 inches or whatever.
SPEAKER_07: Right. A size eight has no meaning of any kind.
SPEAKER_05: Yes.
SPEAKER_07: So weird. Okay. I just need a moment from that, my mind being blown at that,
SPEAKER_04: like men don't go to their Forever 21 section and have like sizes as well. Okay. But in the story, after Ruth gets a decent data set and then messes it up by throwing away anyone who's a person of color, apparently, does that literally then turn into sizes? It does. It's not just like, here's a recommendation. It's like that is our sizes. No, no, no. It's a recommendation.
SPEAKER_05: And then it becomes standard. She recommends 26 sizes.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah. And then they're like, that's, we're not doing that.
SPEAKER_05: That's undoable, but we'll do 10. And then they come up with a different set. Right. And based on her data. Based on her data. Then that sizing system, they keep it for a while as like the rule, if that makes any sense. Like that's like, like this is how it's supposed to be. Then it becomes optional. By the seventies, it's optional. By the seventies, it's optional. By the eighties, it's like completely arbitrary. Like a company, if they had their own schema that they wanted to use, they could use it.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And also basically it means that like a size eight is no longer standardized.
SPEAKER_05: Right. Which seems stupid.
SPEAKER_06: So what happens is like, okay, I work at H&M or whatever, Levi's or one of these companies.
SPEAKER_05: And I'm like, okay, I'm going to make a pair of jeans. First, I design the pair of jeans on a mannequin. So a mannequin is like pretty far from human. It's hard and immobile. And these things actually kind of start to matter in a way like I hadn't actually thought that much about like,
SPEAKER_04: Doesn't have digestion. It's not like I need the expandable waistband if you ate the plate of nachos. Right.
SPEAKER_05: All right. So they design it on the mannequin. The next step after that is they get their fit model to come in and try it on. A fit model? Yeah. Because there is one person who every garment fits.
SPEAKER_07: What? It's a fit model. So like the king, the king's foot? Yeah, basically, except it's like a woman named Natasha, whose butt is the butt that
SPEAKER_05: jeans companies use to make the jeans fit. Even different companies.
SPEAKER_07: I would have imagined that there was one king for each company, but there's one king for even multiple companies. She's the king for like seven or eight companies.
SPEAKER_05: And it's like, she's like got the butt du jour. She got like the sort of body du jour for the... Who chose her?
SPEAKER_07: How was she chosen? How was she anointed? She went, she was like, she was like in college and she went with her friend to pick up a
SPEAKER_05: check at her modeling company and the, the eight modeling agent was like, Hey, you kind of got like a good, a good butt, basically. Like maybe you want to do some fit modeling. And then these companies like her because her, basically her butt's not too small and it's not too big. Is her life just like incredible?
SPEAKER_07: And she just walks around and she has like, no problems at all. Because everything was modeled off her body. I mean, I think clothes fit her really well.
SPEAKER_05: And she's kind of, it's kind of the thing I think about is like, she's the only person they fit. I mean, unless you have her exact body, you know, in her exact measurements.
SPEAKER_04:
SPEAKER_05: I mean, she tried and you know, it's like this whole process. She tries them on several times. She like helps the, I mean, she's lovely. You know, it's like not her fault that she's like, no, sure. She makes sure that the, like the belt loops are in the right place and yeah. And she's a white lady.
SPEAKER_06: I'm guessing. White lady. Yep. In LA.
SPEAKER_04: Is it the Ruth O'Brien constructed butt though? Were they like, wow, you're exciting to us because you're so norm, quote unquote, normal. Is it like you are?
SPEAKER_05: It is a little like she's Norma. She's the new Norma.
SPEAKER_06: I mean, it's a little, there's like some ways it's different than Norma, but it's, I think
SPEAKER_05: the idea is that normal is actually this kind of ideal. It's a fantasy, just like perfect or best or, you know, most beautiful is because there's kind of no such thing. There was no such thing with Norma. I guess if we are going to call Natasha the most normal lady in the world, there is one person who fits that ideal, but like no one else does. And also like Natasha, you know, she's a relatively thin white woman. You know, I'm not sure we would quite call her average either in the sense that like the average American woman weighs surely more than her and has very different proportions than her.
SPEAKER_06: So, but at least that's a, that's like a real person who exists, who we know those, those
SPEAKER_07: proportions make sense. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah. I mean, because this is what happens. They take the thing they made for the mannequin and then they give it to Natasha and she puts it on and she's like, actually like there's a huge gape in the front or like when I pull up these pants, the belt loops are going to fall off. I kind of love this part because it's like about having an actual body, no matter how perfect your body is. Like the fact that it's like fleshy and has a digestive system and needs to like sit down. And like sweat. I mean, yeah.
SPEAKER_04: So what is the fit? Is it just like in a nice clean air conditioned room or are they like, go take them for a spin for two days and make sure you run some stressful errands so that you sweat?
SPEAKER_05: No, it's not like that, but it is like they do several rounds of this where she'll sort of try on like a, a first draft and they'll go like through several drafts. Wow.
SPEAKER_07: Interesting. And basically like they try, they make them fit her perfectly.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah. You know that. So like, let's say she's a size six, they're making hers to be the size six. Now, of course I'm not a size six. Most people aren't. So they have to make size two, four, eight, 12. And that is a matter of proportion and it's all mathematical measurement. So there's no, it's not like there's a size. There's no other, there's like a two Natasha.
SPEAKER_04: There's not a two, a four, an eight, a 12 Natasha.
SPEAKER_05: But you can sort of start to see how this might be flawed. I know. Right?
SPEAKER_06: So it is possible that no human being actually fits any of the other sizes.
SPEAKER_07: That's right. That is insane. Yeah. Cause I keep, I keep imagining, trying to imagine like analogs to in other industries. Well, I think one way I think about it is like this.
SPEAKER_05: It's like manufacturing was meant for like, if you make a car, okay, we're going to get iron ore, turn it into something that's uniform. And then we're going to turn that thing into the hood of your car. And we're going to make them all exactly the same. In this case, bodies cannot be forced into that kind of interchangeability, but we have to treat them as though they're interchangeable in order to be, I mean, in order to make clothes for them, like for cheap, basically. Like we have to treat our bodies like they're all the same, even though they are not in any way the same at all. Maybe is it because as the expectations of fashion have gotten more brutal, it's like,
SPEAKER_04: have it be, it's not, it's like, sure, a small, medium, large t-shirt could probably fit everyone, but as we want like a well tailored pant that's tight here, but loose here and has room to breathe. And like, maybe it's just that our, that fashion is getting like the tunic and the belt worked. Right. But as we want, we got too picky. We want, you know, like, I just did that. Maybe it's just that as fashion clothing in and we want every millimeter to look good. And it's not, yeah, I think that's right.
SPEAKER_05: Cause it's not just that we want it to look good. It's that we have imparted this idea of what it means to have something fit you. Right. Like, I mean, it's the, it's the moment in the dressing room where you're like, why, why doesn't anything fit my body? Something's wrong with my body. It means something to us when clothes fit or don't fit. And it doesn't mean something about the clothes. It means something about us. Like we, we ascribe the problem to our bodies rather than to the object.
SPEAKER_04: And you're saying like that, that humiliating feeling, feeling of not measuring up. Like, I think something many people have been told is like, oh, it's a false standard of beauty. Like normalcy isn't real, but to see it so nakedly laid out, like you finding that creation story of a norm and a norma. Like there's something that is relief that you can just be like, this is a specific concept of norm that like I can just reject. Cause I don't like their science. I don't like their mission. Like, it doesn't matter if it doesn't fit cause that's norma and that is a monster. I don't want to be haunted, but there's something empowering about you finding its Genesis story. Oh yeah, for sure.
SPEAKER_05: I think I said this last time too. It's like, I sort of love now that like the idea that bodies can't be fit into these mechanized creations like that. It's like the 20th century and the 19th century too, to some extent, it's like all these people are trying so hard to make bodies into interchangeable parts, but they can't be. And it's because like, we're all sort of specific and particular and exciting in our own ways. And I don't know, it's sort of corny maybe? Or is it like, you'll just never dream of something fitting cause you're like,
SPEAKER_04: it never will. Bodies are cooler than the fashion industry or bodies are more expansive. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05: I mean, I think that would be the ideal, but then at the same time, I mean, actually this is in the conclusion of the book. Like I, at the same time, I, you know, I go and I try on clothes and I still feel like you can't un-brainwash. Like it's like, even knowing that you can't stop projecting the like, yeah.
SPEAKER_04: Does knowledge bust shame? Does knowledge like bust your shame? Yeah.
SPEAKER_07: Does it? Or do you? No. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05: No, of course it doesn't. But it does, you know what it does is like, you can sort of go in that dressing room and you can try on your jeans and you can be like, oh dang, I wish these jeans fit me. And then you can sort of be like, but they don't, they fit Natasha. Yeah. And Norma and Martha. I can sort of tell myself a different story. Yeah. It's the story isn't, there's something wrong with my body. My butt's too big. My thighs are the wrong proportions. Whatever the story is that you're telling yourself about your body. I have like a different story, which is like the sizing can never work. Even if they wanted it to, they can't make it work. And this isn't supposed to fit, you know?
SPEAKER_05: That was our contributing editor, Heather Radke.
SPEAKER_07: Her book, But a Backstory will be out very soon. You can find a link to pre-order it on our website, radiolab.org.
SPEAKER_04: And just biggest thanks to Heather for sharing this story with us for all the years of research it took to find it and make it, it really is a special book. It's kind of a Trojan horse of a book that looks silly on the outside, but is deep on the inside. I at least came away thinking very differently about my own body and the times that it feels like it doesn't fit. So thanks.
SPEAKER_07: This episode was produced by Matt Kielty with sound and music from Matt Kielty and Jeremy Bloom and mix from Jeremy Bloom. Special thanks to Alexandra Primiani and Jordan Rodman. That's it for us. We're going to go to a watch party for our favorite sitcom, The Most Normal Girl in Cleveland. We'll see you next time.
SPEAKER_03: Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bresler, Rachel Cusick, Aketi Foster-Keys, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Pascu-Tieres, Sindhu N Arasanbandhan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sarah Khari, Anuragkwet Paz, Sarah Sandback, Ariane Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster with help from Andrew Vignale. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton.
SPEAKER_02: Hi, my name is Treza. I'm calling from Colchester in Essex, UK. Leadership support for Radiolab science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betsy Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, the Samans Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
