Dear Aunty Hilda, sorry about my scrunch-bum love
Activewear has come of age, and scrunch-bum tights are the pinnacle. Big, small or pancake-like, even 50 year-old butts can rock these tights
“I cannot stand scrunch-bums,” remarked a cousin, to universal family agreement. Conversation ensued as to the hated activewear trend. For those who have not had the pleasure, scrunch-bum leggings have a gathered seam in the middle of the backside, with the effect that the gluteals are emphasised in the tights and appear rounder. The trend has grown with the rise of the current fitness obsession – glute strength, aka booty building. We can thank Beyonce, Kim Kardashian, J Lo and South America in general for the popularity of the bubble butt. Those who can’t be bothered hip thrusting and glute bridging go under the knife for a Brazilian butt lift (BBL), which is, from what I gather, a pretty dangerous form of plastic surgery that I would never recommend to anyone, especially because, well what happens when flat butts come back in vogue?
But I digress. As conversation at the wake continued in the vein of how anyone who wears scrunch-bum leggings should be immediately fired into the sun, my partner decided to pipe up. “I hate to tell you,” he announced to the family group. “My girlfriend wears scrunch-bums.”
This was met with general disdain, with the exception of the reaction from 80-year-old Aunty Hilda. Her response went way beyond disdain. She was in disbelief, positively scandalised. This was made all the worse by our age. While the young may be forgiven for donning a scrunch-bum catsuit due to susceptibility to cultural trends, inexperience and general idiocy, a woman of almost 50 could not be excused.
So, now I have to redeem myself with Aunty Hilda. This is not likely to be easy. I figure there are two ways forward: present her with a home-baked Victoria sponge cake upon introduction, or turn up in scrunch-bums so she may be convinced as to their general merits.
I’m not ruling out the second option. If Aunty Hilda is not won over by the array of colours and designs of my leggings, perhaps I can convince her with an argument as to the importance of the scrunch-bum to general fitness motivation.
Self-evidently, I am addicted to buying activewear. Clearly it is not just important what you do in the gym, it’s important to look good while you’re there, or at least think you do. This is about fashion, yes, but it’s not about vanity. Treating activewear as a fashion show, for me, truly does enhance my motivation to work out. Feeling good in my activewear really makes me more likely to want to go to the gym. It also adds to a sense of satisfaction and achievement, because if you feel like you look half decent in the gym, it makes you feel like you’re getting somewhere, not only in terms of building strength in your muscles and bones, but also in aesthetics, which let’s face it, is a nice, if somewhat annoyingly subtle side-effect.
The thing about the scrunch-bum, however, is it really doesn’t matter the actual shape of your butt. A bit like the modern trend in young people of all posterior dimensions of gleefully wearing bikinis that ride up the butt – bikinis that might as well be labelled G-strings – butts of all shapes and sizes are celebrated by the scrunch-bum. Young people these days not only wear their up-the-bum cossies at the beach, I’ve seen them swanning down main streets of beachside suburbs wearing nothing else, their bums proudly jiggling, whether they be voluminously fleshy, or rather of the pancake variety. The youth have literally cast aside all gluteal shame. I dare say you won’t find a young woman turning this way and that in front of the mirror anymore, asking her boyfriend: does my bum look big in this? Instead, those who worship at the altar of the BBL are more likely to want to know whether their bum is growing bigger. This is known as “growing your glutes”.
I am not joking when I tell you that the intricacies of the bubble butt pursuit extend to seeking to grow a “gluteal shelf”. The “shelf” is grown by working the gluteus medius, which, if it becomes prominent enough, gives a shelf-like effect in the upper part of the backside.
I’ve never been able to achieve a shelf, but all of these trends in buttwork are not just theoretical. Having strong glutes, including the gluteus maximus, medius and minimus, is extremely good for your health and physicality. It guards against, or even cures, back pain, it protects the knees, it supports the hips, and it’s excellent for your posture, helping you to move well when walking and mitigating against the “dead bum” effect of too much sitting – that is when your glutes go to sleep and stop activating.
The nice thing is that if you work on your glutes in the gym, or even at home through bodyweight exercises or with exercise bands, they will look a bit better. I’m not going to say my rear end will ever look like J. Lo’s, far from it, but look, given all of the sweat and tears involved in hip thrusting, step-up-ing, deadlifting, cable kickbacking, and abduction machine-ing, you’d better believe I’m going to shove my mediocre backside assets into a pair of scrunch-bum tights. Taking my cue from the young bare-butt bather gang, why the hell not?
I hope my arguments find some resonance with Aunty Hilda. Because sponge cake sure isn’t my specialty.
My partner was at the funeral of an elderly aunt recently, and managed to ruin my reputation with his family irreparably. At the wake, a conversation was taking place in relation to activewear. To wit: scrunch-bum leggings.