What is it about the female rear-end that drives both sexes crazy in such completely different ways?

Junk in the trunk — that’s what a guy friend of mine calls it — one of the many, many terms for a woman’s derriere (as my finishing-school teacher referred to it when she tried to teach me and my fellow 12-year-olds how to walk with a book balanced on our heads). That was her word for the gluteus maximus, those two round orbs that are the largest muscles in the human body — often with an additional layer of fat on top, if you happen to be female.

There are so many words to describe it: booty, bootylicious, shelf, moon, tookus, moneymaker, spanker, caboose, rumparoo, badonkadonk and so on. An array of terms for a body part that most women despair over because they think it’s too big — that I myself have anguished over since I first hit puberty.

Yes, I still remember that pivotal and painful moment as I tried to put on a pair of freshly dried 501 straight-leg Levi’s and discovered they no longer slipped on over my behind like they did just a year before. Gasp! What happened? Mom!!

If there’s one thing women seem to be universally obsessed about, it’s the size of their tush — either it’s too big, too flat, too wide, too something. Alison Armstrong, the relationship guru who hosts a variety of seminars aimed at helping men and women develop more satisfying relationships, decided to get to the bottom of it (so to speak).

She asked a panel of men at her “Celebrating Men and Sex” seminar what kind of female rear ends they liked. The guys happily described a wide variety of female posteriors for 10 minutes before the oldest man on the panel summed it up by saying, “No matter what the shape of your bottom, some guy is diggin’ on it.”

Could it be true?

I was recently at a trendy Italian bar and restaurant on Canon Drive in Beverly Hills. The hostess who led me to my table, an olive-skinned beauty wearing skin-tight black pants, had two perfectly spherical, halved-melon-like cheeks positioned on either side of her tailbone. Each was distinct, huge, round and apparently a good thing, judging by the appreciative looks from the men in the room.

Clearly, what we women think is ideal (the tiny butt) is no longer, or maybe never was, something that men like. I have to say, I can’t think of even one female friend who has ever said, “Mine is perfect just the way it is!” We almost always, without exception, are never satisfied with the thing that follows us everywhere we go.

That’s why I was so amazed by this lovely hostess’s bodacious booty and the way she proudly flaunted it. What a novel concept: to think that this particular part of my own body, a part I’ve agonized over ever since the estrogen kicked in, was actually fine, just as it was, the way that nature intended it to be.

Then it dawned on me that this is yet another example of how we accept old ideas as absolute truths and then allow them to dominate our lives. Like those out-dated beliefs about what it means to be single. Maybe those old ideas about what our butts are supposed to look like (runway model-like) are in the same league as those old ideas about being single!

One day, not too long ago, as I was grumbling about the junk in my trunk, my friend Rick said, “Kim, what are you talking about? We LOVE big butts! Get over it!”

Mmmm. Maybe it’s time I did!

Copyright © Kim Calvert / 2010 Singular Communications, LLC.

Check out what rap artist Sir Mix A Lot had to say about the subject in “Baby Got Back.”