The media has been all over itself lately following Jen Selter, a young woman of no particular distinction other than having a nearly perfect butt. As the New York Post reported today, “The ample-curved Long Island native was working at a gym in March 2012 when she started taking photographs of herself working out. Since then, Selter’s gathered 2 million Instagram followers, more than half a million Facebook fans and 200,000 Twitter followers.” She recently signed a sports management deal with The Legacy Agency. “We believe she can be the next Jillian Michaels,” said TLA agent Andrew Witlieb, even though Selter, 20, has no formal fitness or broadcasting training.
Whether Selter has talent talent seems almost beside the point: when the public discovers an ass on a young woman, everything else disappears. Kim Kardashian used her butt to reestablish her family’s fortune; Jennifer Lopez used her shapely ass as the cornerstone of a lengthy show business career. This kind of sensational fascination extends at least back to the story of Saartjie Baartman, the so-called Hottentot Venus. Baartman–perhaps not her real name–worked as a nursemaid in Cape Town. According to African Queen: the Real Life of the Hottentot Venus, by Rachel Holmes, in 1810, when Baartman’s owners ran into financial difficulties, they decided to display Baartman in Europe, where curiosity about Africa was high. Writes Holmes, “a pretty maidservant with notable buttocks and a spotty giraffe skin were a winning combination on which to stake their future.” In other words, like Selter, JLo and Kardashian, she entered show business.
A trader named Pieter Willem Cesars bought Baartman and took her to Georgian London, where freak shows were a Piccadilly staple. Six days a week, Baartmen was displayed as a kind of “scantily clad totem goddess,” the Hottentot Venus, sex incarnate. She performed suggestive dances while wearing a flesh-colored silk costume that fit her like a second skin. She was a hit. Wrote the London Morning Post, “her contour and formation certainly surpass any thing [sic] of the kind ever seen in Europe, or perhaps ever produced on Earth.” Although British abolitionists helped her achieve freedom, Baartman’s life ended sadly: she and Cesars moved to Paris, where she became an alcoholic and a prostitute, and died at 26, a victim of sexual and racial exploitation. Thankfully, when such things happen today, agents are involved.