The Most Normal Girl in Cleveland with Heather Radke

This week, Heather Radke brings us a tale of pageants, eugenics, and butts.

You can find Heather online here.

You can see Norma/Norman here.

More on the Better Babies Pageants. 

Support You're Wrong About:

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Where else to find us:

Sarah's other show, You Are Good
[YWA co-founder] Mike's other show, Maintenance Phase

Links:

http://www.heatherradke.com/
http://patreon.com/yourewrongabout
https://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-about
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpod
https://www.podpage.com/you-are-good
http://maintenancephase.com

Transcript

Sarah: Oh, okay. Yeah, it's like when you're a eugenist, but you have a live, laugh, love poster up and you're like, well.

I'm Sarah Marshall, and today we are telling you all about how to be normal or how that might be impossible. We are joined today by Heather Radke, author of Butts: A Backstory. And if you have a butt or love someone who does, then this is a fun book for you to check out. And we will give you a taste of the butt in our episode today.

Over in our bonus episodes, we just put out an episode where I got to talk about Flowers in the Attic with Carmen Maria Machado, which is something a lot of you have requested over the years, and which was really lovely to do. You know how much I love a paperback. And our next bonus content for people subscribing on Patreon or Apple+ is going to be a little concert video that we did of one of our live shows at Brooklyn's Bell House Theater. So you might have been there that night, and maybe it'll look a little bit familiar to you. Or maybe you just had to settle for being there in spirit at the time.  And now you get to see it with your own eyeballs. And in it, you will see some bimbo history, some classic You're Wrong About topics, some hot dogs. And the show is so special to me because it contains the talents of our frequent co-host, Jamie Loftus, who joined us on the tour, and also of our producer and in house musical genius, Carolyn Kendrick, who held the whole show together with music. So yes, you will have feelings. It's a feelings forward offering, but that's what you expect from us.

Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for making it through another August with us. Let's talk about some butts with Heather.

 Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where sometimes we just talk about butts and all their accompanying topics. And I know that because we are talking today with Heather Radke, author of Butts. That's the book.  How are you, Heather? 

Heather: I'm good. I'm good. How are you? 

Sarah: I'm so great. I have been looking forward to this conversation. And I have this marked in my calendar as, ‘the most normal girl in Cleveland’. And I really think we're going to get to the bottom of some stuff.

Heather: Me too. I love the pun. Get to the bottom. Also, the most normal girl in Cleveland is a good little teaser, I think, for this conversation. I'm so thrilled to be here. I'm such a big fan. And I'm really grateful that you had me on. 

Sarah: Ah, I'm so happy that you wanted to come on. You have a bunch of different things that you're doing in the world and topics that you're working with. But I would love for you to tell us all about your book to start. 

Heather: Yeah. Butts is a cultural history of women's butts, basically, and the scope is quite big. It goes back to, in some ways, the dawn of humankind, but then it skips ahead to 1800 so we miss a big chunk in there, but then I look at two centuries of art history and feminism and the construction of race and fashion and music and look at all the things that the butt has meant, probably not nearly all the things, but some of the things the butt has meant.

Sarah: All the things it supported, including that champagne glass. 

Heather: Exactly. Yeah, that champagne glass is very crucial to the story of the butt. But today I think we're going to talk just about a little slice, and it's a very fun slice, my favorite part of the book. 

Sarah: A little slice of the butt.

Heather: Exactly.  

Sarah: And something you point out in the opening pages of this book is that there isn't a clinical term for butts that normal people use.

Heather: Totally, yeah. So there's no correct term for butts. Basically everyone, no matter what they're saying, is some kind of euphemism for this body part. And that's so interesting, right? Because it's like turtles all the way down, there's no kind of stable word. And I think that it says so much about how we see them and how we feel about them. Because if you can't even quite name it properly, what does that say about what else we're not taking seriously or being interested in or even able to talk about? 

Obviously, I've had so many conversations about butts over the last five years. And there's always a part of the conversation where we're laughing, there's joking around, which I love, I don't want to make butts unfunny at all. But it is interesting that if you were doing a book about breasts, you wouldn't necessarily have to make a bunch of boob jokes before you can talk about how they're serious and important, so it's interesting that there's this body part that is so important and holds so much symbolic meaning, but also we don't even have a correct word for it. If you went to the doctor because you had a weird thing on your butt, it's not you would probably say, I have a weird thing on my butt. Whereas if you had a weird thing on your breast or I don't know, any other body part, you would use a more science-y word.

Sarah: Very few people go to the doctor and are like, Doctor, there's a lump in my tit. 

Heather: Yeah, exactly. 

Sarah: Some of us do. But not nearly as many. And I feel like it's absolutely the backbone of the show to take very seriously things that people have not taken seriously over the years. Let's get into your little slice. 

Heather: Let's get into it. Yeah, so I'm going to tell you today about a Statue or really a couple of statues that are called Norma and Norman. So Norm Man is spelled N O R M A N, so all one word. And you maybe already get…

Sarah: Norman. He's a Norm Corps display model. He's dressed like Jerry Seinfeld. 

Heather: If only. He's not dressed at all, in fact.  He's a statue. These are two statues that were probably created in 1943. They were first displayed in 1945 at the American Museum of Natural History. So that's the one in New York that has the whale and all the dinosaurs. 

Sarah: The fun one. The fun museum. 

Heather: The fun. Although talk about a deep, dark past. 

Sarah: Oh boy. Yeah.

Heather: That is a haven of eugenics right there. As so many of them were, to be fair to that particular one. Yeah. So these statues were created by a gynecologist and sculptor who had-

Sarah: We're off to a strong start. 

Heather: I know. It's a fun combo. They should all get paired up. So previously they had made a series of sculptures called the birthing series, which showed a woman's body gestating a baby, it's something you probably have seen many times now, where you see like different modes of fetal development, but it was probably one of the earliest representations of that for a mass audience. Although you could see that kind of thing in like a science anomaly museum or in the back corridors of a natural history museum. It wasn't something the public had seen much of. So they were in this world of trying to help the public see things that they felt were important. So they did this thing called the birthing series. And then they started in on these statues called Norma and Norman. 

Sarah: And before we get to the statues, I feel like it's so interesting to me that depicting the human body has historically been pretty controversial, not just in terms of nudity, the laws against human dissection for so much of recent history. And I remember being struck as a kid, I think kids especially are fascinated by images of gestation, or at least I was, I don't know, it happened to you pretty recently. It's like how I feel about grad school today. 

And, being fascinated by the fact that I think Da Vinci was forbidden to actually be depicting dissections, people of a certain age who grew up in Oregon will very likely remember. And it's still there though. I think it's called the Hall of Life, but if you remember going to see it as a kid, you remember it as ‘the babies’ because they have a full half circle of babies being gestated from the embryonic through the full development of the fetus. And there is almost a rite of passage also for kids growing up to realize that these are in fact preserved fetuses. These are actual fetuses that at one time were on their way to full development, or some of them actually are. I don't know. 

And I feel like I remember that when we had these photos of fetal development in the 1960s, that were huge news at the time that it was exciting and also distressing to people, because I feel like there is something about attending to the realities of the human body that is once we accept that we know what it looks like for a baby to be developing, we now take it for granted, but it feels like there was a time when that information rocked us like a hurricane in a really interesting way.

Heather:  Yeah, totally. It's quite a wild thing to have figured out because I think, this is a little outside my primary area of expertise here, but just having done some research about miscarriage, actually, there's some interesting stuff, they hadn't looked into it very much about what was going on inside women when they were pregnant until the 19th century, and then when they started to really realize that it obviously has tons of implications. Now the images of a developing fetus are such a hallmark of the anti-abortion people are those pictures. 

Sarah: Oh, yeah. Or the pictures of a fetus with a quarter for scale. And wow, when I was thinking about reproductive justice, I never thought about how big a quarter is and all this.

Heather: But I think the ability to see that I think was huge for so many people. And there's that philology ontology, something where the development of the fetus echoes the development of human life, the sort of evolutionary development of human life. I forget what the phrase is. It's very famous. 

Sarah: But that we all start off as cute little fish and then things take a turn.

Heather: Yeah, exactly. And then there's like little gills in there and then they go away. Yeah. Yeah. 

Sarah: But yeah, I guess I don't know. All that's to say that I think I can already see that this is going to be a fraught story because we feel very fraught about looking at the human body despite all having them. That's probably why we're stressed out about it, actually. I answered my own question. 

Heather: Yeah, totally. And also there's another way to think about it, which is that the sculptures that we're going to talk about in some ways just look like representations of the outside of a human body. And that too has this really interesting history, the history of sculpture, the history of Venus, the sort of Greek man, what are we trying to depict when we depict the human form? And these people had a very specific thing they were trying to do, but all sculpture does to some extent. 

Because like you're saying, representing the human body in any form is fraught. You're making a set of choices about race and gender expression and beauty. And even the pose you put a body in, it's you're trying to communicate something. So definitely these people were, but I think they're also working inside of a tradition of both like anatomy stuff, the birthing series, but also more traditional artistic sculpture and they're interestingly merging the two, which is cool, but also weird. 

Sarah: Ah, I can't wait to hear about it. Yeah. And this is a totally uneventful time in American history. Otherwise, I'm sure there won't be any resonances. 

Heather: Yes, exactly. Okay, so these two guys, they're men, not shocking, but they are, decide that they're going to make these statues. And what they're trying to do is make statues that are the most normal quote unquote, which is the word to dissect and interrogate here, American people. They have an agenda. It's a very of its time agenda, which is that they're trying to sell an idea of what a good body is to people who might look like this and then procreate and make more people look like this. 

So they're eugenicists. This is another way of saying their eugenicists, but they're working in a kind of category of eugenics that some people call positive eugenics, which is to say rather than working on the project of sterilizing the bad people, they're like the quote unquote bad people, they're working on the project of spurring the procreation of the so-called good people. 

Sarah: Oh, okay. Yeah. It's like when you're a eugenicist, but you have a live, laugh, love poster up and you're like, well.

Heather: Totally. They're like, we're not the ones sterilizing, although I’m sure they probably were also perfectly fine with the sterilization that was rampant during this period of time. The kind of most famous positive eugenics project that a lot of them were doing was this thing called the Better Baby Contest. 

Sarah: Oh my god. 

Heather: Have you heard of those?

Sarah: God, maybe, but there's so many weird baby contests. Yeah, tell me about these babies. 

Heather: So this is a thing where like at state fairs, particularly interestingly in the Midwest because the eugenicists thought that Midwestern people who were farmers would respond to this type of good breeding vibes they were trying to get at these things.

Sarah: And they're like, well they love livestock, so it makes sense. And then you go to the state fair, and you hear the call of, “Sooooii” baby. 

Heather: You got it. And basically it is like the top pig, but the top baby. So it's the most eugenic baby. So people brought their babies, and they were judged and the best baby, who was the best according to the principles of eugenics. So white and fit and robust and capable of making more babies basically. It's very weird. That's the winner. 

Sarah: Ugh. Wow. Okay. Is there a preference for eye color? Do they want Aryan babies? 

Heather: It's interesting. I actually don't know that for sure. I wouldn't be surprised, but eugenicists, I think it depends on which moment in the eugenics movement their preference for Aryan specifically, as opposed to Teutonic or whatever. The way that they're willing to split whiteness into its little minuscule parts knows no bounds. They're very interested in hierarchies and so-called scientific organizations, and they love to come up with fake categories and then stick to them, but then a few years later, change their fake categories. 

Sarah: Of course. That keeps it interesting. I want a Ken Burns documentary about the Better Baby Contest. 

Heather: Oh my god, yeah. There are some good books about it. You might like them. 

Sarah: Oh, good. Okay. 

Heather: And I think the idea there was really to show people that there were hierarchies and as the name says, that there's better babies and worse babies and better people and worse people. 

Sarah: They should have the worst baby contest. 

Heather: I know. I know. It's so sad. They're just little babies trying to live their little baby lives. Just leave them alone.

Sarah:  I know. And they're like, in the winter of the worst baby, Colic-y Colin, a blue ribbon. 

Heather: ribbon. Yeah, Colic-y Colin was probably also like Jewish, that's really what they’re focused on.

Sarah: They're like, this baby's head shape clearly proves he's destined to be a criminal. 

Heather: You've got the ticket. That's the kind of stuff that they're trying to do. I'm sure there was like a phrenology booth right next to the Better Baby booth at these places.

Sarah: And for people who haven't had this joy, phrenology crops up, my understanding is that it's the idea that the shape of your skull and your face and your physical characteristics determine your character, which obviously plugs in pretty nicely to anti Semitism and really any kind of racism, but it crops up everywhere once to look for it. And it's really present in Jane Eyre, there's so much phrenology in Jane Eyre. I'm not kidding. She's always, “Mr. Rochester's face shape was so romantic.” 

Heather: Isn't this the thing when they say that they have a beautiful brow, which is something you read a lot in 19th century novels, that's what they're referring to? 

Sarah: I think so. His brow proved to me that he was not going to be a criminal. 

Heather: He was a criminal, though, actually. 

Sarah: Yeah, the brow lied, didn't it, Jane? 

Heather: It did. And the world of phrenology, the thing that's interesting about that is in the 19th century, there was this interesting shift from trying to create racial categories, not only from skin color, but from things like head shape and nose shape and body shape. And interestingly, the butt actually comes into that where one of the ways that these kind of so called racial scientists who were not scientists in the way that we think of them now, some of them actually were, it's a little complicated, but people who are doing this kind of categorization, they also included butt shape and size of butt as one of the ways that they like determined what racial category you were in and then also what kind of moral issues you had because of your various body shape stuff. 

So obviously a big, butted woman was linked with hypersexuality and there were these really upsetting studies done on sex workers, white sex workers and black sex workers that quote unquote proved that big butted women were more, more sexually, available. And so that's all part of this kind of bigger project of codifying the big butted black woman, which starts in the 18th century as this hypersexual kind of stereotype that we still live with today. 

Sarah: And it feels, not to get too far afield, but does it seem like a theme in this topic for you that if you're oppressing someone and one of your tools of oppression is sexual violence, then viewing them as hypersexual to the point of consent being irrelevant is yet another convenient tactic of dehumanization.

Heather: Absolutely. Every scholar I talk to, plus it's just so clear on the historical record that the reason they're doing this consciously or unconsciously is to justify raping enslaved women in the Americas. It's a way to make it so these white men and white women and white women are very complicit in this. They don't have to deal with all the problems that have come because of the transatlantic slave trade and also the end of the transatlantic slave trade because in the 19th century, after Britain bans the slave trade, and then eventually the U.S. does too, in the U.S. there's still this need to continue to create more slaves. 

And so this is like part of why it's very convenient to create and then really double down on the stereotype of the hypersexual black woman. And there's like very important scholars who have made that very clear over the last 50 years. It's very sad and I think it's important to see how all these things layer up on top of each other. The better babies contest, we can joke about it, it’s totally funny and weird, but then you just keep peeling back the layers and you realize how you know Really what we're talking about are some of the biggest atrocities in human history. And deciding what a body means and the metaphors and qualities that we attribute to people with different bodies, which I think we all do consciously, unconsciously, inadvertently, a lot of the time. 

I think when we do that, we are actually participating on some level in this kind of centuries old ideas about bodies that we don't even really think about that much when we do it, ideas about fatness. There are great books about that. There are ideas about big breasted-ness, but big butted-ness, like all these kinds of ideas that people with certain kinds of bodies are more feminine, more sexual, more beautiful, smarter, that you're immediately in this world of phrenology and racial science and justifying these kind of atrocities of the 18th and 19th century.

Sarah: Yeah, and I think that one of the things that is apparent in what you're saying and in our ability to understand the culture around us is that everything splashes out and splashes everywhere, right? So you can look at the Better Baby contest and it's funny, but it's also a point of entry to all of the rest of it, all of the rot that is consuming the American brain and how the way we see bodies and the destiny of different bodies, allows us to ignore the humanity of the people that they are and that are inside of them. Because I think we have a body, but we also are a body and the soul lives in the body and the body is the garden of the soul, to quote Tony Kushner.

Heather: Yeah, and obviously also with eugenics, there's this positive eugenics thing going on and as one scholar very rightly pointed out to suggest that there's some kind of strong delineation between the people who are running these institutions that are sterilizing disabled people and gay people and poor people and people who supposedly have low IQs, that there's a distinction between those people doing that work and then these better babies people or, the people I'm about to describe, they're all kind of one in the same. 

But I also think it's important to just point out quickly that like eugenics and these ideas about categorizing bodies, it was just like an immensely popular way of thinking. I don't know, the first five or six American presidents of the 20th century were all committed eugenicists, every President of every major university was a eugenicist. Most science departments had a eugenics department. These are not fringe theories, most people thought them. And I think that's important because I just always think it's important to not separate ourselves too far from the past. It's easy to look back and be like, this is horrific. And it is horrific, but also we all would have been implicated in it if we had lived then. So I think that's worth pointing out, too. 

Sarah: Right. And I feel like this is a big part of understanding how to function in America today, that genocide has never quite been the fringy belief that we like to think that it's been among Americans. And these poor statues. 

Heather: So these guys, Belskie and Dickinson, they created the birthing series. Then they created these statues. And like I said, the statues are depictions of the most normal American man and the most normal American woman, according to these two guys. And it's basically like the Better Babies contest, but for adults. They're trying to show the public who they think should procreate, more or less, you know what a body should look like that's like the quote unquote best body. But they're also scientists of their type so one thing about this period of time is it's a time that's very interested in statistics and numbers. 

And they're not just reaching into their imagination and being like this is what the most normal American man looks like, they want to use data to prove it. So For Norman, that's actually relatively easy because there had recently been a war, they actually used the statistics from World War I, the draft, and from a few other places, so the Chicago World's Fair had this booth where they measured men as they walked by but didn’t measure women, so they have all of those numbers and then they have the early numbers from the Ivy League posture studies, which are their own weird thing that you should probably do an episode about. Okay, so they have all this data about men's bodies because whatever, when you go to the army, they measure you, you got to wear a uniform. They can make Norman relatively easily. 

But Norma proves quite difficult because there's no similar data set for American women. But then they find one. They look all around, and they find this kind of amazing data set that' so interesting and so important. It was done by a woman named Ruth O'Brien in the 30s as part of the WPA. So she was a home economist, another thing that I love to talk about, but I'll try not to talk about for too long. So home economics was one of the only fields in the first part of the 20th century where women scientists could live and find a home. So that was true in the U.S. government. And it was true at most universities. And there were a lot of really interesting and important home economists. 

Ruth O'Brien was a fraught home ec lady. She got this job with WPA, and she goes out and she decides that there's a problem that she wants to solve. And it's a problem that sort of continues to haunt us today, which is that clothing sizes don't really work for women. At this point there is some ready to wear fashion and basically there's no standardized clothing sizes and to the extent that those sizes do exist, nobody can find anything that fits them. So she sees this as a problem for data to solve. Let's go solve it. I'm going to hire people through the WPA to go out and measure the women of America. So she hires these women all over the country, they're called measuring squads. It's very like fun early 20th century vibes.

Sarah: I like how anytime you put a woman to work before 1950, you were like, give her a little outfit and a cute name, and she'll enjoy it. You got to make it fun for the girls. 

Heather: I know, although I wish my job gave me a cute name and an outfit, but I don't get those things. 

Sarah: I know. Podcast Polly’s. There you go. 

Heather: So the measuring squads, they would go out and find women and they would have them stand on a little pedestal. They'd wear Cotton shorts and a little bandeau bra. Is that what we call that thing? That's just like a tube that's around your chest?

Sarah: Yeah, I think so. The tiny tube.

Heather: Yeah. They took 58 measurements of these women. And they also weighed them. They did 15, 000 surveys. So that's a lot. They go all over the place to different parts of America. This seems useful, right? I feel like I'm pro at this point in the story.

Sarah: Yeah, at this point, you're like, boy, that's a lot of data. They seem to be traveling far and wide, not that I'm a statistician, but this seems promising. We're talking about surveying more than a dozen people. I'm thrilled. 

Heather: Exactly. So here's the thing, though, is our friend, maybe not so good of a friend, Ruth, she decides to throw out 5000 of the 15, 000 surveys because they are surveys of non-white women. So we don't know a lot about what she meant by non-white women. It was at a time where that might have included Italians and Jewish women also. But basically, she had these people go out and measure everybody. 

And then her quote is, “when it was found necessary for the sake of good feelings within a group to measure a few women other than the Caucasian race, this fact was entered under the remarks, and then the schedule was later discarded.” So basically, she only wanted the measurements of white women, which is not so good. It's not good for many reasons. For her purposes, it's not good because she is throwing out a third of her data for this reason. 

And of course, non-white women are going to buy clothes too. But it really speaks to the racial politics of the time that it was simple and almost unjustified. When I talked to the archivist about it, I was like, but what did she say was the reason? Cause that's a bonkers thing to do. Did she have some kind of wacky justification? And the lady was like, no, she was just a racist.  And I was like, oh, yeah, okay. That's just how it was. 

Sarah: Because you're trying to figure out you're like, what's the logic here? And the logic is that this person was racist. And you're like, oh, yeah.

Heather: And it's not at a time when she has to maneuver her racism. You know what I mean? She doesn't have to come up with some kind of frosting over it. She's just being like, no, obviously we only want the white women. So of course when our friends Dickinson and Belskie find this data set, they are thrilled because not only has this woman provided them a data set to create Norma, but it's actually the exact kind of data set they want. They want to show what the most American, the most average, the most normal white woman looks like, not really what the average American looks like. 

So they use this data set to create Norma. And then there we have them, Norma and Norman. And they stand next to each other in the halls of the American Museum of Natural History. And this guy, Harry Shapiro, who's the head kind of curator of this exhibit and of anthropology in general at that museum. He writes this kind of glowing article in the museum's magazine that, where he talks about how what these statues are offering is this kind of perfection of the average, the sort of harmony of the normal.

And it's really interesting because I think, at least for me, I think we live in a time now where to be called normal isn't exactly the highest praise you could get, but it was a time when normalness and averageness was seen as something that a lot of people were striving for, and that the kind of needle that this group of people were trying to thread was to offer up average and normal as this kind of zenith rather than a middle, if that makes sense.

Sarah: Totally. And honestly, secretly in my heart of hearts, all I want is to be normal. And I know that I'm not. And I think that the desire for normalcy, which I'm sure we'll really talk about throughout, it feels connected to the idea that normalcy is something that exists in terms of this impossible just over the horizon thing of not dealing with all the emotional and mental and physical and material problems that all actual people deal with in one way or another.

Heather: Totally. Totally. A thing I started to think about a lot when I was working on this section is how, when I say the word normal, I have a set of ideas about what that is. A normal person would be able to shoot a basket into a hoop. So I feel abnormal that I can't. But then I'm like, if I actually were thinking about it in some kind of statistical way, is it true that the average human can shoot a basketball into a hoop? I'm not sure that's true. So the idea of normal is this ever-shifting thing that is reflecting what American culture is deciding is tolerable or correct. And I think it's so important to unpack that and to understand that what these people are trying to sell is this idea of normal, according to them. And even as they're obsessed with these averages, and they're taking these statistical means of all these measurements by Ruth O'Brien, they're not actually interested in the statistically average American person, that's very clear. 

They're throwing out this data, Ruth O'Brien threw out that data, and they're so pleased to use that study. And they're dismissing huge parts of the population of America, and they don't even consider those people American, because they're immigrants or they're first or second-generation immigrants, or they're not white, right? I just think one of the kinds of opportunities of thinking about Norma and Norman is to think about what we mean when we say normal or average and what it offers and what it leaves out. 

Sarah: And I feel like the word normal in this case and still today feels like it's code for desirable, right? And the idea that we're only using data from white women because white women are the only women that are supposed to exist in America. And it reminds me of the skew of positive eugenics, where we're not focusing on sterilizing people. Lord, no! We just want better babies, but by implication, the better babies are going to force out the other babies. And I think in kind of an equally insidious way, the collecting only data from white women, therefore means that we're not going to kill the other women, we're just going to ignore them to death. 

Heather: Exactly. Totally. We're going to make sure they don't have any clothes that take their bodies into account. Because there's also an implication that non-white women's bodies are profoundly different, which isn't true either.

Sarah: White women have a row of spines protruding out of our vertebrae. 

Heather: Exactly. But I think they also thought about this themselves. So Harry Shapiro, this curator guy, there's a couple of quotes that I think are worth bringing into the four from him. So he says, “Norma and Norman, although they were designed to conform with the average adult before the onset of the ravages of age.”

Sarah: Nice.

Heather: “Exhibit a harmony of proportion that seems far indeed from the usual or the average. Let us state it this way. The average American figure approaches a kind of perfection of bodily form and proportion. The average is excessively rare.” 

So you see how he's situating it as the average is the perfect. The normal is the ideal, which is a little bit paradoxical, but I think it's like what you were just saying. It's how ‘the normal’ is the sort of desired. That's ultimately what we're trying to say. The most normal person is in the thing that we covet. with a body that we would want to have for ourselves. 

Sarah: Yeah. And it seems very possible that they could have gotten all this data and been like the average woman has stretch marks and then been like, absolutely not. We are not including stretch marks.

Heather: Yeah, exactly. Because the average woman probably has experienced the ravages of age, a bit. Because the average woman isn't 20 years old, probably.

Sarah: But right, it's like the icon of the normal, the saint normal.

Heather: Exactly. So that is the sort of point of the statues, right? So Norma's up there next to Norman. She's white, she's straight. I guess I assume she's straight because I always feel like there's something a little defensive about putting these two nude statues next to each other. They're going to have sex and babies, everybody.

Sarah: And they do every night when we leave the museum. 

Heather: Exactly. They're able bodied, which is really important to say in this time, because if there's anything that eugenicists are very anxious about, it's disability.

Sarah: We're in our second world war in 30 years, the number of disabled people being coming home who are disabled specifically because of service to their country, which is now, also on the page of them not deserving to exist, I'm sure that it's not really any lower today but the irony is so present.

Heather: Yeah. And they're probably less worried about those war injuries and much more worried about what they perceive to be genetic disability because that's what they're trying to prevent through sterilization. But it's also important to remember we're not talking about 1925, we're talking about 1945. This is pretty late. It's later than most people think eugenics is as popular as it really was at this point in time. But, also, I just want to say these statues look really weird. I think they're really weird statues, because first of all, Norma's breasts are like somebody designed a statue of breasts and had never seen breasts before. They're just stuck on her little body. It's very strange. 

Sarah: Okay, I'm going to need you to show me these statues now. 

Heather: I think you can probably Google them. 

Sarah: Okay. Norman. Wow, yeah, this is before the invention of breast implants, but you really would not guess that because it's like they constructed her entire body and then we're like, Oh my God, we forgot breasts and then just stuck them on there.

Heather: And they don't have pubic hair. Well, weirdly he does, and she doesn't.

Sarah: Of course. 

Heather: Then there's the facial expression, I don't know, these pictures, for the listener, I feel like they look like they're right out of Atlas Shrugged or something. 

Sarah: Yes, they have very intense gazes. They're looking out from under suspicious brows. And also it’s worth pointing out that Norma is pretty muscular. She's not super skinny, but on the other hand, she has visible ribs, which I truly cannot imagine was an aspect of any kind of statistical average at this time, or ever. 

Heather:  No, most of what you were seeing is artistic imagination. Because even if her proportions were average, which I guess we're just assuming that's true, breast placement, perkiness, facial expression, muscularity. 

Sarah: No, the average woman looks concerned. I do actually believe that one. Yeah, but they got their shoulders back. They look like they're doing the part of being in the army where you get yelled at. 

Heather: Yeah, exactly. They're in boot camp or something.

Sarah: Yeah, I don't have a lot of military knowledge. 

Heather: Yeah, they look like they're at boot camp and then I feel like his little hairdo, I don't even know what to do with that. It looks very like Nazi youth to me, but I might just be reading that into i.t Maybe it was a very popular haircut of the time.

Sarah: Yeah, maybe everyone in 1945 looked like a Nazi if you think about it.

Heather: So I don't know. These are the statues, and they were up at the American Museum of Natural History for a couple of months and then they took a little turn, and they went to the Cleveland Health Museum. So they head to the Midwest and this museum is the first health and hygiene museum in America, and this kind of becomes a more popular form of museum over the next 20 or 30 years. A lot of these end up turning into science museums eventually, but the guy who runs this museum, his name is Bruno Gebhardt. 

And Mr. Gebhardt was in fact a Nazi, and he came over to Cleveland from Germany. Now, I'm not sure why this feels important, but my fact checker figured it out, so I feel like it's worth pointing out. He was definitely a member of the Nazi party, but he did leave actually, because he felt like they had gone too far. So I feel like once you're on the Nazi train, there's really no use in splitting hairs. But I do think probably if he had been part of the inner circle of Hitler's world, he probably wouldn't have gotten a job in the Cleveland Museum of Health in 1945. But he was just a minimal enough Nazi to be employed in this capacity. 

So he's pretty jazzed about Norma and Norman, I will say. He sees these things as an important part of what he's trying to do in his new job. I just feel like you're starting to maybe get the vibe here a little bit. These are popular statues that a lot of people come and look at. And also the people who are doing the behind the scenes work of these statues are pretty not great. It's not great how in bed with the eugenicists and Nazis they are. 

Sarah: It does feel very connected with kind of everything I know about this period and also, something about when you read Early 20th century literature, early to mid, really any of it, but really early to mid-20th century, like the great Gatsby, you're happily reading along and they're like blinking out ‘damn’ and ‘hell’ and then there's a page full of the worst racial slurs imaginable and you're like, huh. This is a time in America where we're like we're hiring, this guy used to be a Nazi, but he wasn't an important Nazi and it's like, oh, okay. 

Heather: Exactly. And it's like we're fighting a war. I don't know, they're fighting a war against Germany. I know he was in exile and it's maybe I'm maybe painting with too broad of a brush or something. But I do think it's like you're saying, it shows how these lines that I think when we look at the past can sometimes feel really stark are actually much more blurry. The biggest sterilization project in the world before the Holocaust was in California. The way that the Nazis did their sterilization project was based on the California model. So it's not to say it's the same or any kind of thing like that, but just that there is this kind of closeness that can feel uncomfortable, but I think is worth exposing. 

And the way that it's also all a little jolly, which I'm about to tell you a little bit more about, too. I think there's a way you at least want it to feel like they knew they were doing something really bad, but I don't think that's what they thought they were doing. Okay, so Norma and Norman come to Cleveland and Bruno Gebhardt, he's got this new job. He's really excited to get these statues and he wants to make a big deal about this acquisition. 

And so he decides to approach the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which is the big newspaper in Cleveland, and have a contest where they're going to try to find the most normal girl in Cleveland. They're going to try to find a woman who most closely matches or is Norma, that basically has the same measurements as Norma. And he thinks this will be a fun promotional opportunity for his statues and his museum and also you can see how it might start to fulfill the kind of intellectual and political interests of these eugenicists who are trying to show people like, you too can be Norma, if you're like Norma, we want more of you.

Sarah: Nazism is a good idea if you don't take it too far.

Heather: So if they can encourage all these Normas of Cleveland to think well of themselves and to feel lauded and part of this sort of Americanness that the statues are trying to promote, that's great for them. That's the point in some ways of Norma. So Gebhardt has come up with what is actually like a very ingenious scheme for promoting his ideas about bodies and women and hierarchies. So for 10 days in September of 1945, this one reporter, Josephine Robertson, who I ended up kind of feeling bad for her because as far as I could tell, she was the only woman on staff and they of course gave her the Norma beat, oh boy. She writes So many articles about this and it's just blanketing the newspaper for these 10 days in September where she interviews a priest to be like, “What do you think about Norma?” Or a physical fitness instructor to be like, “How can people get bodies more like Norma?” 

You know what else was happening in September of 1945? The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That's happening in August and September. And basically between those bombings is when this is all going on, which it's just intense. Just to think about how the Plain Dealer is using all these column inches for this contest and why that might've been appealing to people at this time when they're probably very sick of the war and they don't even understand what horrors their government is inflicting. And it's this really stark juxtaposition on just on the front of the newspaper where bombs dropped. Here's the take of Mr. Gym Teacher from Cleveland High School. I don't even know what to say about that. I think that's to some extent how it all works. On any given newspaper day, there's always a section that's like, here's a fun recipe to cook. Also, everything is horrible. And that's just what it is to live in the world to some extent.

Sarah: That's what newspapers are. 

Heather: So I don't mean to make too big of a deal about it, but I find it to be stark. And also it just helps to remind us about what time we're talking about and why maybe the idea of normal is actually so appealing. This was a time when things for a lot of years, for decades, had been really troubled, people had lived through the Depression, they'd lived through World War I, they'd lived through the Spanish Flu, they'd lived through World War II, and maybe the idea of something kind of stable and normal that they're being sold is actually quite appealing in a way that isn't true at every moment in history. 

Sarah: Yeah. And I think that the story of American news is also the story of the weird stories that we chose to fixate on in times of crisis or times when our government was committing atrocities, and that's also part of the way we consume information. I would love to see a history of the 20th century in terms of the weird little stories that people fixated on in periods like this.

Heather: People sitting on flagpoles. And yeah, it's very human to need to not only look at the bombing of Hiroshima, but to also wonder if you're the most normal girl in Cleveland, that's, we can't psychically live in that. 

Sarah: Or how close to normal are you?  In times of destruction beyond our control or comprehension, what do we do now? We go off and buy a new ice cube tray or something.

Heather: Yeah. Because to some extent, what else can you do? Anyway, so there's this contest, there's this 10 days of coverage. The idea was that women across the city in the sort of Cuyahoga zone could send in their measurements and it wasn't 38, it wasn't quite as many as were in that original study, or 58 that were in that original study, it was just a handful, it was about 12. But 3,864 women submitted their measurements. A thousand of them came the day before the end of the contest to the YWCA. They came and went to a fun measuring extravaganza, and they had their measurements taken. That's a lot of people. It's like almost 4,000 people entered this contest to see if they were the most normal girl in Cleveland.

Sarah: A surprising number of people are willing to be measured in public, is something we can learn from this. 

Heather: Yeah, although one of the things that was interesting about that Ruth O'Brien study studies that she had to skew it because older women wouldn't come to get measured. She had to weigh the data, which I really get. I feel like the older I get, the less likely I would be to let some random ass person measure me in public.

Sarah: Yeah, I think that's a good, that's a good sign.

Heather: No need to get measured in public, but all these women did. And then the 40 closest, they came to get measured again in public, and to parade around in front of a panel of judges that included a reporter, a gym teacher, and a professor of anatomy. Weirdly, Josephine Robertson, who knew so much about it, didn't get to be the reporter on the panel. So I always felt bad for her. I was like, just let her do something. 

Sarah: Ah, Josephine, yeah.

Heather: Yeah, so they're all trying to decide who's the most normal girl in Cleveland and who's the closest to Norma? And I don't know, I guess I wonder what do you think unfolded? Do you think they could find a Norma who fit the exact specifications?

Sarah:  No, because Norma is imaginary. I feel like even with a few thousand people, you would end up with somebody close to Norma. But I feel like you couldn't get it because Norma is, as you said, like a sort of fantasy sculpture.

Heather: Yeah. Exactly. So they do not get a Norma. And they seem, just based on these newspaper articles, they seem a little bit surprised. 

Sarah: What? It's so funny that they thought they would find her out there. They're like, we invented this person so we're sure she exists. It's practical magic rules. It's how Machine Gun Kelly was created. 

Heather: I know. They do seem surprised. And it is funny because it's their own little thing that it's like, the normal is excessively rare, but they're like, we were so disappointed we couldn't find our Norma. But they do find somebody who wins the contest, and her name is Martha Skidmore. And she's 23 years old. And she sells tickets at the movie theater. And she's just quit her job as a gauge grinder. She's a Rosie the Riveter. She's married, she's white. She likes to swim and dance and bowl. Those are her things. And then the description she gives of herself is that she's an average individual in all of her tastes and that nothing out of the ordinary has ever happened to her until the Norma search came along.

Sarah: That's very cute.

Heather: So she's just like aggressively normal for the time. And I tried to find her, actually. I worked really hard to try to find her and I found an obituary of the woman who I think was her and I couldn't track down any of her kids. She had quite a few kids, but I was really hoping that something really cool or interesting or, not to minimize her life in any way, but that her normalness could be complicated in some way. And probably it could have been if I had talked to her. Cause nobody's actually that normal when it comes down to it. 

Sarah: It's a fun thing to print in the paper.  I'm sure that our concept at this time anyway of normal is a lack of trauma, which I feel like we know now is nuts or maybe it wasn't, because I wasn't around at the time, but it feels like there's a recognition that bad things can happen, but that if you are affected by them, then that is abnormal of you.

Heather: Yeah that's true. That's a really good point. And so many bad things were happening as we have been alluding to this whole time. There's a major war and her husband had just come back from war and who knows what was going on with him and they had all lived through these atrocities of the early 20th century. So I guess maybe she was at least during this contest able to pretend that she was not psychically affected by those things. She was the most normal girl in Cleveland and she won the contest. 

Sarah: Congratulations, Martha. 

Heather: I know. I got interested in the story because I was so sure when I started doing my butts research that eugenicists must have had something to say about butts because they just had so much to say about all kinds of bodies. And I talked to a woman who's a historian of eugenics and who's doing really important research about sterilization in Michigan, actually. And she pointed me to these statues. And so the statues aren't specifically about butts, although I will say it was very hard, it took a lot of doing to get a picture of the butts because they always were photographed from the front side, but eventually I found the reverse side. 

But I think that the idea here is that Norma's butt, just like every other part of her body, was the eugenicist ideal of what a woman's body should look like and for them the ideal was the ideal person to procreate and continue on the American mythos of femininity. So they weren't particularly interested in butts, the eugenicist, but they were really invested in these ideas of femininity and kind of female form. 

Sarah: How did you end up getting your butts picture, though? I'm so curious. 

Heather: Bless the archivists. The archivists at both the Cleveland Museum that holds the archives of what was then the Cleveland Health Museum, he dug up some old photographs of the statues that were photographed from behind. And then he also pointed me to the Harvard Science Museum archives where the statues are housed now. And those people actually took a photograph of the backside of the statues. But they just weren't photographed that much from the back. 

Sarah: That's a fun day at work. You're like, look, you got to take a picture of these statues’ butts. It's important. It's for a book. 

Heather: I know. I know it's for this book. Is it important? I think it is. Yeah.

Sarah: Gosh, it's a fascinating topic. I'm so happy there's a book about it written by you. And something that occurs to me is that I feel like a lot of people listening to this, myself included, as I get to listen to this conversation as we're having it, have had that thought for a long time at the back of their head. 

Boy, I love to research stuff. I love to be curious. I love to learn about obscure forgotten bits of history or not even obscure bits because the bits out front and the idea of writing a whole book on an object of fascination just seems like something that I feel like a lot of people listening want, maybe cautiously or determinedly or maybe they're realizing right now that it might be nice, and do you have any advice for them? 

Heather: I think you should do it. I worked in museums for a long time and I think basically every object, in some ways the smaller the better the more obscure the better, well butts aren't so obscure because they're everywhere in this one way.

Sarah: Although it is hard to see them in a way. 

Heather: That's true. And it's really hard to see your own. But they're dismissed, I guess is what I would say. I think that to me, that was really one of the things that was super interesting about them is the sort of ubiquity, but the lack of interest, if that makes any sense. Although there's quite a lot of interest, there's not a lot of earnest interest, and for better or worse, I'm a very earnest person. And I also just think that the more you research any kind of topic, and you surely have this experience all the time, it just gets so, it gets more and more interesting. There's sort of an endlessness to it that I think is very exciting. 

And then I think just as a piece of art for the world, I think people can really gravitate to that enthusiasm and the way that the obscure fact turns over and becomes this moment of rethinking something that you would never really thought about that hard or what we're doing with where we've all used the word normal a hundred times in a day but what do we really mean? And to have that opportunity to really think that through both as a maker and then as a reader I think is a really fun and important thing to do. 

And I mean there was a kind of fashion for a while, I think about 20 years ago to write books like about salt and cod and that kind of thing and I have a real fondness for that kind of book and I think that hopefully there's a new swath of that type of book that's coming to the fore that includes even more kind of investigation and from different ways of thinking about identity and history and Archives and pop culture and all kinds of things.

Sarah: Yeah, I love that. Yes, I remember the halcyon days of the salt book. It was massive, you guys. 

Heather: It was massive.

Sarah: I don't know, there's something that resonates with me about your work, specifically in terms of looking at the little things that often even get unrecorded by history, like we were talking at one point about how frustrating it is that if you want to watch like daytime talk shows, there isn't really an archive for that. There isn't really an archive for tabloids. Some of the most seen, most touched, most experienced things in human life are the things that aren't preserved because we don't realize they're worthy of preservation. 

And also the fact that I think to examine anything, any topic, any object, life, whatever, super closely is to end up with kind of an understanding of the atomic structure, metaphorically. The cultural atoms that make up so many other things, or at least the molecules. We can at least get down to that. 

Heather: Yeah, I love you putting it that way. I think that's exactly right. I think that there's also something really helpful to do it through the lens of something fun or accessible, that can be one of the best ways to find the molecular structures that are fundamental to so many things. Because then I think people can find their way into it. I often have talked about this project as the Trojan horse project, where it's about butts, but it's really about racial stereotypes and the construction of whiteness and blackness. And it's about gender identity. And it's about neoliberalism in the 80s. 

But it's also a book about butts. And it's not trying to trick you into eating your vegetables. I don't think it's just that those things are embedded in every single part of our lives. And so anything you investigate, you're going to find histories of race, gender, class, and also, human beings making decisions and trying their best. And you're going to find Martha Skidmore, who's just a lady who wanted to win a contest and worked at the movie theater and lived a life. I find that to be beautiful ultimately. 

Sarah: I love that. It's a lovely way to live. I think researching and finding kind of an understanding of your humanity and the humanity that you share with others by looking really closely at something tiny.

Heather: Totally. 

Sarah: Heather Radke, you're the author of Butts: A backstory, Butts colon a backstory, in fact, it's thematic. But where else can we find your work? What are you up to? 

Heather: So I am a contributing editor and reporter for Radiolab, which is a podcast out of WNYC. I'm on Instagram, although I'm angsty about social media, so I'm on and off of Instagram. And I often post things on my website when I publish them, because I'm also working on several writing projects right now. And my website is just heatherradke.com. 

Sarah: Amazing. I feel like there needs to be something to say In lieu of the social media plug, if you and the people you want to communicate with are feeling iffy about social media as a whole at this point. But what if we started being like, and send me a big collective burst of energy at 10 a.m. Pacific time, August 18th, I'm really going to need it, thank you.

Heather: I just heard Tom Hanks talking about how he typewrites people letters. I could take a Tom Hanks pen pal relationship. That sounds alright.

Sarah: Hey, if you're Tom Hanks, and you're listening to this.

Heather: Feel free to write me a letter. 

Sarah: Write Heather a letter.

Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for being here. Thank you to our amazing guest, Heather Radke, this week. You can read her book, Butts, anywhere that fine butt books are sold. Thank you to Miranda Zickler for editing. Thank you to Carolyn Kendrick for editing and producing. And thank you for being here. We'll see you in two weeks.