Tina Fey Sums Up What's Really Behind America's Kim Kardashian Butt Obsession

Impact

The news: For the past couple of days, it's been near impossible to visit any blog or news website without reading about Kim Kardashian's recent, infamous photo shoot. Kardashian's flaunting of her much-scrutinized curves has inspired memes and think pieces galore, as well as a debate about whether these photos are objectifying or liberating for women.

But the frenzy over Kardashian's butt and the set of impossible beauty standards women often face are nothing new. As it happens, someone wrote an eerily prescient and on-point essay about this scandal years before it happened: Tina Fey. As you can see in this excerpt from Fey's 2011 memoir Bossypants, Kardashian represents the kind of manufactured beauty that most women have a hard time attaining:

"Now every girl is expected to have Caucasian blue eyes, full Spanish lips, a classic button nose, hairless Asian skin with a California tan, a Jamaican dance hall ass, long Swedish legs, small Japanese feet, the abs of a lesbian gym owner, the hips of a nine-year-old boy, the arms of Michelle Obama, and doll tits," Fey wrote. "The person closest to actually achieving this look is Kim Kardashian, who, as we know, was made by Russian scientists to sabotage our athletes," Fey writes.

She's right. As much as certain sections of the Internet may love to revile Kardashian, there is a reason why she is who she is: She sells her image, and we go crazy over it. That's why she can release a couple of nude photos and "break the Internet." And while that might mean more attention and success for the Kardashian clan, for other women, it sets up yet another impossible beauty standard they must aspire to.

h/t: Time