You're Wrong About - The Most Normal Girl in Cleveland with Heather Radke

Episode Date: August 21, 2023

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:Bonus Episodes on PatreonBuy cute merchWhere else to find us:Sarah's other show, You Are Good[YWA co-founder] Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseLinks:http://www.heatherradke.com/http://patreon.com/yourewrongabouthttps://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-abouthttps://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpodhttps://www.podpage.com/you-are-goodhttp://maintenancephase.comSupport the show

Oh, okay. Yeah, it's like a Winnie or Eugenicist, but you have a live laugh, love poster up, and you're like, well... Welcome to You Wrong About. 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 but or love someone who does, then this is a fun but free to check out. And we will give you a taste of the but 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, really lovely to do. You know how much I love a paperback.

And our next bonus content for people subscribing on Patreon or Apple Plus is going to be a little concert video that we did of one of our spring live shows at Brooklyn's Bellhouse Theatre. 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 then you will see some bimbo history, some classic year-round 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, he 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 were talking today with Heather Ratke, author of butts. That's the book. How are you Heather? I'm good. I'm good. How are you? I'm so great. I have been looking forward to this conversation. 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. Me too. I love the pun. Get to the bottom. Yeah. And 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.

Ah, I'm so happy that you wanted to come on and I would love for you to... I mean, 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. Yeah, so butts is a cultural history of women's butts basically. It's the scope is quite big. It goes back to, in some ways, the dawn of humankind, but that it skips ahead to like 1800. ahead to like 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 or maybe not nearly all the things, but some of the things the butt has meant. All the things that supported, including that champagne glass.

Exactly. Yeah, that champagne glass is very crucial to this story. But today I think we're going to talk just about a little slice, and it's a very fun slice, a favorite part of the book. A little slice of the butt. Exactly. And something you point out in kind of the opening pages of this book is that there isn't a clinical term for butts that normal people use.

Totally, yeah. So there's sort of no correct term for butts. Basically, like, everyone, no matter what they're saying, they're saying some kind of euphemism for this body part. Right. And that's so interesting, right? Because it sort of like turtles all the way down. You know, there's no kind of like stable word.

And I think that it says so much about how we see them and how we feel about them. Because like if you can't even quite name it properly, like what does that say about like what else we're not taking seriously or being interested in or even like able to talk about it. Like obviously I've had so many conversations about butts over the last five years

and there's always a part of the conversation where it's like 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, you would probably

say, I have a weird thing on my butt, whereas if you had a weird thing on your breast or on, I don't know, any other body part you would use a more sciencey word. Right, you like very few people go to the doctor and are like, doctor, there's a lump in my tit. Yeah, exactly. Some of us do, but not nearly as many. Exactly.

So, well, I feel like it's absolutely like the kind of backbone of the show to take very seriously things that people have not taken seriously over the years. And yeah, let's get into your little slice. 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 Norm Man. So Norm Man is spelled N-O-R-M-M-A-N. So all one word.

And you kind of maybe already get the Norm Man. Yes, he's wearing a Norm Quarry display model. He's dressed like Jerry Seinfeld. Yes, well, if only he's not dressed at all, in fact. He's a statue. These are two statues that were created. And probably the creation started about 1943. They were sort of 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. The fun one, the fun museum, the fun. Although talk about a deep dark past. Oh boy. Well yeah. 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 kind of... We're off to a strong start, I know. It's a fun combo. They should all get paired up.

So they had previously, they had made a series of sculptures called the birthing series, which were sort of showed woman's body gestating a baby in various, you know, like, you know, it's something you probably have seen many times now, like 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, like, you know, you could see that kind of thing in kind of like a science anomaly museum or in, like, the back of like a science anomaly museum or in like the back corridors of a natural history museum. It wasn't something the public had seen much of, so

they were kind of like in this world of trying to like help the public see things that they felt like were important. So they did this thing called the birthing series and then they started in on these statues called Norma and Norman. 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, but the laws against human dissection for so much of recent history. And I remember being struck as a kid, like I think kids especially are fascinated by images of gestation or at least I was because it's like,

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 DaVinci was forbidden to actually be depicting dissections. And people of a certain age who grew up in Oregon will very likely remember. And it's still there, though, like, 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 there, though, like, 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 like a full half circle of babies being Just stated from the embryonic through the full development of the fetus and there is like almost kind of a right 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 to full development or some of them, some of them actually are. Right. I don't know. And I feel like I remember that, you know, that when we had these photos of fetal development in the 1960s that were like huge news at the time that it was like exciting and also distressing

to people because I feel like there is something about, I don't know, attending to the realities of the human body that is like once we accept that we know what it looks like for a baby to be developing, then like we now kind of take it for granted, but it feels like there is a time when that information rocked us like a hurricane in a really interesting way. Yeah, totally. I mean, it's really quite a wild thing to have figured out, because I think, I mean, this is like a little outside my primary area of expertise here, but just having done some research about miscarriage, actually. There's like some interesting stuff about, you know, of course, 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. I mean, now the images of a developing fetus are such, you know, it's like the hallmark of the anti-abortion people or those pictures. Oh yeah. Or pictures, you know, with a fetus with a quarter for scale. And it's like, wow, I never thought when I was thinking about reproductive justice, I never thought about how big a quarter is in all this. I know, I know. But I think it's like, yeah, the ability to see that I think was huge for so many people. And there's that like famous phrase, like philology, anthology, something, something where it's like

the development of the fetus sort of echoes the development of human life, like the sort of evolutionary development of human life. Oh, right, yeah. I forget what the phrase is, it's very famous. But that we all start off as cute little fish and then things take a turn. Yeah, exactly.

And then there's like little gills in there and then they go, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And then there's little gills in there and they go, yeah. Yeah, but yeah, I guess I don't know. All that's to say that I think I can already, I can see that this is gonna 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.

Yeah, totally. Well, and also there's another way to think about it, which is this sculpture that we're gonna talk about are in some ways they're just relatively, they're 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 the history of the Venus,

the 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 you're saying, representing the human body in any form is kind of 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 sort of, you're trying to communicate something. So I think, right, definitely these people were, but I think they're also kind of working inside of a tradition of both like anatomy stuff, like the birthing series, but also like more traditional artistic sculpture. And they're kind of interestingly merging the two, which is kind of cool.

Yeah. But also weird. I can't wait to hear about it. Yeah. And this is totally an eventful time in American history, otherwise I'm sure there won't be any resonances. Yes, yes, exactly. Okay, so these two guys, they're men not talking,, but they are. Decide that they're gonna make these statues. And what they're trying to do is make statues that are the most normal quote unquote, which is like the word to dissect and interrogate here. American people. They have an agenda, it's a very, you know,

of its time agenda, which is that they're, they're sort of 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 kind of, I mean, they're eugenicists, this is another way of saying they're eugenicists, but they're also, they're working in a kind of category of eugenics that some people call positive eugenics, which is rather than working on the project of like sterilizing the bad people, they're like the quote unquote bad people. They're working on the project of like spurring

the procreation of the so-called good people. Oh, okay, yeah. It's like a one-year eugenicist but you have a live laugh love poster up and you're like, totally. They're like, we're not the ones there. Although I'm sure they probably were also like, 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 the thing called the better baby contest. Oh my God, have you heard of those? God, maybe, but like, there's so many weird baby that I'm not. I'm not.

So yeah, tell me about these babies. So this is a thing we're like at state fairs, particularly interestingly in the Midwest because they were the, you just just thought that Midwestern people who were farmers would kind of respond to this type of good breeding vibes. They were trying to get at these things. 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 sui. Baby, baby, baby. 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. Yeah, wow. That's the winner. Oh, wow. Okay, is there a preference for eye color when they want Aryan babies? It's interesting.

I actually don't know that for sure. I wouldn't be surprised, but eugenicists, I think it sort of depends on which moment in the eugenics movement, like their preference for Aryan specifically as opposed to like, tutonic or whatever. The way that they're willing to kind of split whiteness into its little minuscule parts, knows no bounds.

They're very interested in hierarchies and so-called scientific organization. And they love to come up with fake categories and then stick to them. But then a few years later, change their fake categories. So of course, well that keeps it interesting. Yeah, there's really, I don't know. I want a Ken Burns documentary about the Better Baby Contest.

Oh my god, yeah. Well, there's some good books about it. You might like them. Oh, good. Okay. And I think the idea there was real, you know, it was both to show people that there were hierarchies and better, I mean, the name says it, right? That there's better babies and worse babies and better people and worse people. They should have the worst baby contest. I know it's so sad. They're just little babies trying to live their little baby lives and just leave them alone. I know. They're like in the winner of the worst baby, Collekey Collin, a blue ribbon.

Yeah. Collekey Collin was probably also like Jewish. You know, that's really the things that they're trying to. They're like, this baby's head shape clearly proves he's destined to be a criminal. You've got the ticket. That's the kind of stuff that they're trying to do. I'm sure there was like a chronology booth right next to the better baby booth at these places. Yeah, and for people who haven't had this joy for anology crops up, I mean, my understanding is that it's the idea that like 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 like crops up everywhere once you know to look for it. And it's like really present in Jane air Like there's so much for knowledge in Jane air. I'm not kidding She's always like mr. Rochester's face shape was so romantic Right, isn't this the thing when they say that they have like a beautiful brow Which is something you read a lot in 19th century novels that that's what they're referring to I think I think so

His brow proved to me that he was not going to be a criminal. Well, he was kind of a criminal, though actually. He locked his- Yeah, the brow line didn't it, Jane? Yeah, it did. Well, it also just, you know, so the world of chronology, the thing is 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.

I mean 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, you know, issues you had because of your various body shape stuff. So like, obviously like a big butted woman was, big buttedness was, was linked with hypersexuality and there were these really kind of

upsetting studies done on sex workers, white sex workers and black sex workers that sort of quote unquote proved that big butted women were more, more sexually, you know, available. Wow. Yeah, and so that's all part of this kind of bigger project of codifying the big-budded black woman, which this starts in the 18th century as this hypersexual kind of stereotype that we still live with today. Right, and it feels like, you know, not to get too far afield,

but does it seem like a theme in this topic for you that like, 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 like yet another convenient tactic of dehumanization. Absolutely. I mean, it's like almost, I mean, every scholar I talk to, plus it's just so clear in the historical record

that the reason they're doing this consciously or unconsciously is to justify raping and slaved women in the Americas. Like, it's like a way to kind of, yeah, to make it so, like these white men and white women, too, 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 US does too, in the US 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 like really double down on the stereotype of the hypersexual black woman. So, and I mean that's just, there's like very important scholars who have woman. So, and I mean, that's just, there's like very important scholars who have have made that very clear over the last 50 years. So, yeah, it's very sad. And I think it's like important to see how like all these things kind of layer up on top of each other.

Like, the better baby's contest, like you can, we can joke about it. It's totally funny and weird. But then it's like, you just keep peeling back the layers and you realize how, you know, really what we're talking about are some of the like the biggest atrocities in human history, right? You know? And that deciding what a body means and kind of the metaphors and qualities that we attribute to people with different bodies, which I think we all kind of do consciously, unconsciously, inadvertently a lot of the time. I think when we do that, we are actually kind of participating in some level in this kind of centuries-old ideas about

bodies that we kind of don't even really think about that much when we do it. You know, like ideas about fatness, like there's great books about that, there's ideas about big breastedness, but big buttedness, like all these kinds of ideas that people with certain kinds of bodies are more feminine, more sexual, more beautiful, smarter, you know, that you're immediately in this world of phonology and racial science and justifying these kind of atrocities of the 18th and 19th century. 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 like everything splashes out and splashes everywhere,

right? So you can look at the better baby contest. And it's like, it's funny, but like it's also like you're saying, like a point of entry to all of the rest of it, all of the rot that is consuming, you know, the American brain, totally, and how the way we see bodies and the destiny of different bodies,

you know, 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. Yeah.

And obviously also with eugenics, like so there's this positive eugenics thing going on. And positive, like as one scholar very rightly pointed out to like suggest that there's like some kind of strong delineation between the people who are, you know, running these institutions that are sterilizing disabled people and gay people and poor people and people who, you know, supposedly have low IQs, that there's a distinction between

those people doing that work and then these better babies people or, you know, the people I'm about to describe, they're all kind of one and the same. And, but I also think it's important to just point out quickly that, like, eugenics and these ideas about categorizing bodies were, it was just like an immensely popular way of thinking. Like, I don't know what is it like 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, how do eugenics department, like these are not fringe theories,

like 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 it was also, you know, in some ways, like we all would have been implicated in it

if we had lived then. So I think that's worth pointing out, too. 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, totally. Yeah. And these poor statues, I know, right? So they're just, okay, so these guys,

Belzky 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 sort of trying to show the public who they think should procreate more or less. What a body should look like. That's 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 like very interested in statistics and numbers. And so you know, they're not like 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 they're had recently been a war. They actually use the statistics from World War One, the draft and from a few other places. So the Chicago World's Fair had this booth where they like 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 in episode about now. 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 uniform, so they can kind of make nor man 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's 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 kind of live and find a home. So, that was true in the US government. It was true at most universities. And there were a lot of really

interesting and important home economists. Ruth O'Brien was kind of a fraught home, home-ek lady. She got this job with the 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. So she's, you know, at this point, there is some ready to wear fashion

and basically like there's no can standardize clothing sizes. And to the extent that those sizes do exist, like nobody can find anything that fits them. So she's like, this is a problem for data to solve. Let's go solve it. I'm gonna 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. I like how anytime you put a woman to work before 1950, or you were like, give her a little outfit, an acute name and she'll enjoy it. You gotta make it fun for the girls. I know. Although I was my job, gave me a cute name and she'll enjoy it. You gotta make it fun for the girls. I know. Although I wish my job gave me a cute name and an outfit,

but I don't get those things. I know. Podcast Polly's. There you go. I know. I know. So the measuring squads, they would go out and find women, and they would have them like stand on a little like pedestal.

They'd wear like cotton shorts and a little bando bra. Is that what we call that thing? That's just kind of like a tube that's around your chest. Yeah, I think so. The tiny tube, 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 all to different parts of America. This seems useful, right? Like, I feel like I'm pro at this point in the story. Yeah, at this point, you're like, boy, that's a lot of data. They seem to be traveling far and wide. I mean, not that I'm a statistician, but this seems promising. We're talking about surveying more than a dozen people.

I'm thrilled. Yeah, exactly. So here's the thing, though, is our friend, maybe not so good of a friend, Ruth, she decides to throw out 5,000 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 like Italians and Jewish women also. But basically she had these people go out and measure out 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, many reasons. I mean, 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 so simple and almost unjustified.

When I talked to archivist about it, I was like, but what did she say was the reason? That's a bonkers thing to do. Did she have some kind of wacky justification? It was like, no, she was just a racist. I was like, oh yeah, okay. Right, that's just how it was. Right, because you're trying to figure out you're like, what, she was just a racist. And I was like, oh, yeah, okay. Right, like that's just how it was. Right, because you're trying to figure out,

you're like, what's the logic here? And it's like the logic is that this person was racist. And you're like, oh yeah. And it's not at a time when she has to kind of maneuver her racism. You know what I mean? She doesn't have to come up with some kind of like frosting over it.

She's just kind of being like, no, obviously we only want the white woman. So of course, when our friends Dickinson and Belzki 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, you know,

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 dataset to create norma. And then there we have them, norma and norma 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 I don't know, do we call it normal? Isn't exactly like the highest praise you could get, you know? But it was a time when normalness and averageness was seen as something that was, you know, a lot of people were striving for and that the kind of needle that this group of people were trying to thread was to sort of offer up average and normal as this kind of like, zenith rather than a middle, if that makes sense.

Totally. Well, and honestly, like, secretly in my heart of hearts, like, I secretly all I want is to be normal. And I know that I'm not. And I think that, like, 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, like, you know, this, this, like, impossible just over the horizon thing of not dealing with the all the emotional and mental and physical and material problems that all actual people deal with in one way or another.

Totally. Totally. And I mean, it's also like a thing I started to think about a lot when I was working on the section is how when I say the word normal, I think, I guess, I have a set of ideas about what that is. Like, a normal person would be able to shoot a basket into a hoop. So that's, I feel abnormal that I can't. But that I'm like, if I actually were like thinking about it in some kind of statistical

way, like, is it true that like average human can chew to basketball into a hoop? I'm not sure that's true. The idea of normal is this ever-shifting thing that is reflecting what American culture is deciding is tolerable or correct. I think it's so important to unpack that and to understand that what these yeah, what these people are kind of trying to sell is this idea of normal according to them. And even as they're like 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 because, I mean, that's very clear, they're throwing out this date, you know, Ruth O'Brien throughout 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 their immigrants

are their first or second generation immigrants or they're not white. Right. So I think it's, I just think one of the kind of opportunities of thinking about norma, norma is to think about what we mean when we say normal or average and what it offers and what it kind of leaves out. Right, and I feel like the word normal in this case and still today feels like it's code for like 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 everyone else, like, and it reminds me of the skew of positive eugenics where it's

like, we're not focusing on sterilizing people. Lord, no, we just want better babies. And it's like, but by implication, the better babies are going to force out the other babies. And I think in an equally insidious way, the collecting only data from white women, therefore, means that we're not gonna kill the other women. We're just going to ignore them to death. Right, exactly.

Totally. Like, we're gonna make sure they don't have any clothes that take their bodies into account. Because there's also an implication in that that non-white women's bodies are profoundly different, which isn't true either. Well, white women have a row of spines protruding out of our vertebrae, but, you know, yeah.

Exactly. But I mean, I think they also thought about this themselves. So Harry Shapiro, this curator guy, he had, there's a couple of quotes that I think are worth sort of bringing into the fore from him. So he says, Norma Norman, although they were designed to conform with the average adult before the onset of the ravages of age. It's so great. Nice. 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 kind of see here, like you see how he's situating it as like 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 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 desire. That's ultimately kind of 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. Yeah, well, right. And like it seems very possible that they could have gotten all these data and been like, well, the average woman has stretch marks and then been like, absolutely not. We are not including stretch marks. Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

I mean, because the, right, like the average woman probably has experienced the ravages of age, you know what I mean? You know, it was a bit. Yeah. I mean, because the average woman isn't 20 years old, probably. But right, it's like the icon of the normal, the saint, normal. 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 mean, I guess I assume she's straight because they, like, sort of, I always feel like there's something a little defensive about putting these two nude statues next to each other. They're like, they're gonna have sex and babies, everybody. And they do every night when we leave the museum. Exactly. They're able-bodied, which is really worth, and it's important to say in this time,

because if there's anything that you're going to you Genesis are very anxious about, it's disability. Because also, we're in a period of like, we're in our second world war in 30 years, like the number of disabled people 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 is, I'm sure that it's not really any lower today but because the irony is so present. Right, right. Yeah, and I mean,

they're probably less worried about those war injuries and much more worried about what they perceived to be genetic disability because that's what they're trying to prevent for serolization. But it's also I think important to remember we're not talking about 1925, we're talking about 1945. Like 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 wanna say these statues look really weird. I think they're really weird statues. Cause they're kind of like, like first of all, N Norma's breasts are like somebody designed a statue of breasts and had never seen breasts before like they're just kind of like stuck on her little body like it's very strange. I'm gonna need you to show me these statues now. I think you can probably Google them. Okay. No, man. Well, yeah, this is before the invention of breast implants,

but you really would not guess that because they are, it's like, right, it's like her, they constructed her entire body and then we're like, oh my God, we forgot breasts. And then just kind of stuck them on there. And they don't have pubic hair. I don't know if you're, well, no, weirdly, he does. And she doesn't, of course them on there. And they don't have pubic hair. I don't know if you're, well, no, weirdly he does and she doesn't, of course. Then there's like the facial expression, which kind of, I don't know, these pictures for the listener,

they're very kind of, I feel like they look like they're right out of Atlas shrugged or something, you know what I mean? Yes, they have like very intense gazes. They're looking out from under suspicious brows. Yeah, and also worth pointing out, 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.

No, I mean, 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, it's like breast placement, perquiness, facial expression, muscularity. No, the average woman looks concerned. I do actually believe that one. Yeah, and they got their shoulders back. They look like they're doing the part of being in the army where you get yelled at.

Yeah, exactly. They're in boot camp or something. Yeah. I don't have a lot of military knowledge. Yeah, they look like they're at boot camp. And then his little, 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 it. Maybe it was very popular haircut at the time. Yeah, maybe everyone in 1945 looked like a Nazi youth, if you think about it. So yeah, 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 take a little turn and they go 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 Gebhard and Mr. Gebhard was in fact a Nazi and he came over to Cleveland from Germany. Now I would say I don't think I feel like I'm not sure why this feels important, but my fact checker figured it out. So sometimes I feel like it's worth pointing out that he was definitely a member of the Nazi party

and he was, 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, you know, a 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 minimal enough Nazi to be employed in this capacity. So he's pretty jazzed about Norman, Norman, I will say. Like he's, he sees these things as an important part of what he's trying to do in his new job. And I think it also points, you know, whatever. I just feel like you're starting to maybe get the vibe here a little bit. It's like these are popular statues that a lot of people come and look at.

And also like the people who are doing the behind the scenes work of these statues are pretty, you know, they're not great. It's not great how in bed with the eugenicists and Nazis there. It does feel very connected with kind of, I don't know, everything I know about this period. And also, you know, something about when you read early 20th century literature to early to mid,

really any of it, but like really early to mid 20th century like the great Gatsby are like happily reading along and they're like blanking out damn and hell and then there's like a page full of the worst racial slurs imaginable and you're like yes, huh, you know, but yeah, that like that this is a time in America Well, we're like well, we're hiring this guy used to be a Nazi, but he wasn't an important Nazi. And it's like, oh, okay. Right. Exactly. Yeah. And I mean, it's like, we're fighting a war. I mean, it's, I don't know, they're fighting a war against Germany.

So I feel like I know he was an exile and it's maybe I'm maybe painting with two broader 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 or actually much more blurry and like we were all like the biggest sterilization project in the world before the Holocaust was in California. I mean, the way that the Nazis did their sterilization project was based on the California model. So I just think these, 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 kind of worth exposing. Right. And also the kind of, the way that it's also all a little jolly, which I'm about to tell you a little bit more about too, because I think there's a way that's just kind of, I don't know, you sort of 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. So, okay, so the Norma, Norman come to Cleveland and Bruno Gebhard, 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 gonna try to find the most normal girl in Cleveland. They're gonna try to find a woman who most closely matches or kind of is normal,. Basically, it has the same measurements as Norma. And you know, he thinks this will be a fun, promotional opportunity for his statues in his museum. And also kind of like you can sort of see how it might

start to fulfill the kind of intellectual and political interests of these eugenicists who are trying to sort of show people like You too can be Norma, you know like we want you if you're like Norma we want more of you not see isn't as a good idea if you don't take it too far Yeah So if they can sort of encourage All these normas of Cleveland to think well of themselves and to see how they feel lauded and part of this sort of Americanness that the statues are trying to promote, that's great for them.

That's kind of the point in some ways of norma. So, Gephard has come up with like what is actually like a very ingenious scheme for his promoting his ideas about bodies and women and hierarchies. So for 10 days in September of 1945, this one reporter, Josephine Robertson, who I sort of ended up kind of feeling bad for her, because as far as I can tell, she was the only woman on staff and they of course gave her the Norma beat, you know? Boy. She writes like so many articles about this, and it's just blanketing the newspaper

for these 10 days in September, whereas it's like she interviews a priest to be like, what do you think about Norma, or like a physical fitness instructor to be like, how can people get bodies more like Norma? Wow. But you know what else is happening in September of 1945? The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Oh my god. Yeah. I mean, that's happening in August and

September. So in basically between those bombings is when this is all going on, which it's just intense. I mean, just to sort of think about how the plane dealers using all this, these column inches for this contest and why that might have been appealing to people at this time when they're probably very sick of the war and they don't even understand what cores their government is inflicting and it's kind of this really stark juxtaposition on just on the front of the newspaper

where it's like bombs dropped. Here's the take of Mr. Jim Teachers from Cleveland High School. You know, it's like really, I don't even know what to say about that. I think that's into some extent how it all works. Like on any given newspaper day, there's always a section that's like,

here's a fun recipe to cook. Also, you know, everything is horrible. And that's just what it is to live in the world to some extent, but. Right, that's what newspapers are. Right, so maybe I don't mean to make too big of a deal about it, but I find it to be kind of 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. Like, this was a time when things for a lot of years, for decades, had been really troubled. You know, people had lived through the depression, they had lived through World War One, they'd lived through the Spanish flu, they'd lived through World War Two, 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. You know? Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Well, and I think that if, you know, 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, you know, and that that's also part of the way we consume information, that there's always going to be, I don't know, I would love to see like a history of the 20th century in terms of like the weird little stories that people fixated on in periods like this. Right.

Like people sitting on flag poles and yeah, just it's very human to kind of need to not only look at the bombing of Hiroshima, but to also kind of wonder if you're the most normal girl and Cleveland, you know, that that's, we can't psychically live in that. Or how close to normal are you? Right, yes, exactly. Well, that like in times of destruction

beyond our control or comprehension, like comprehension, what do we do now? We go off and buy any ice cube tray or something. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, 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 Chaeho-go 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. Wow. A thousand of them came the day before the end of the contest to the YWCA. They came and Went to like a fun measuring extravaganza and they had their measurements taken. Wow. 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 a surprising number of people are Willing to be measured in public, I guess is something we can learn from this Yeah, although one of the things that was interesting about that Ruth O'Brien's studies, that she had to like skew it because older women wouldn't come to get measured. Oh, she had to wait the data, which I kind of feel like I really get.

Like I feel like the older I get, the least less likely I would be to let some random as person measure me in public. Yeah, I think that's a good sign. 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 sort of 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 felt sort of bad for her. I was like, just let her do something. Josephine, yeah.

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, like, what do you think unfolded? Do you think they could closest to norma? And I don't know, I guess I wonder, like, what do you think unfolded? Do you think they could find a norma who fit the exact specifications? No, because norm is imaginary.

I feel like even with like a few thousand people, you would end up with like somebody close to norma, but I feel like you couldn't get. Because also norma is, as you said, like a sort of fantasy sculpture. So yeah, exactly. So they can't, they can't, they a sort of fantasy sculpture. So yeah, exactly. So they can't, they can't, they do not. They do not get a Norma.

And they seem, I mean, just based on these newspaper articles, they seem a little bit surprised. 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. I know. 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're 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 like a rosy 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 up herself is, she's an average individual in all of her tastes, and that nothing out of the ordinary has ever happened to her until the norm of search came along. That's very cute. So she's just like aggressively normal for the time.

And I tried to find her, actually. I've 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 mean, I was really hoping is that something kind of really cool or interesting or I mean, not to minimize her life in any way, but that her normalness like could be complicated in some way.

And probably it could have been if I had talked to her because nobody is actually that normal when it comes down to it. Right. It's like a fun thing to print in the paper, but you know, right, and then I'm sure that our concept at this time anyway of normal is like a lack of trauma, which I feel like we know now is not so many of you. It wasn't, you know, 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. Yeah, well, that's true, that's a really good point. And I mean, so many bad things were happening as we sort of have been alluding to this whole time, is that there's, you know, 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'd all lived through, you know, 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. Right. But yeah, so she was the most normal girl in Cleveland and she won the contest. Congratulations Martha. I know. I mean, I got interested in the story because I was so sure when I started

doing my butts research that eugenicist 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 and Michigan actually and She pointed me to these statues and so like 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 Dale were his photograph from the front side, but eventually I found the reverse side. But like, you know, I think that the idea here is that Norma's butt, just like every other part of her body, was sort of this 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 eugenicists, but they were really invested in these ideas of femininity and kind of female form. How did you end up getting your butts picture, though? I'm so curious. Well, there's, you know, 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. That's a fun day at work. You're like, you got to take a picture of these statues, but it's important. It's fair a book. I know, I know, it's for this book. Yeah, I know. It's like, is it important? I think it is, yeah. It's, gosh, it's a fascinating topic. It's, I'm so happy there's a book about it written by you.

And I, I mean, 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 kind of have had that thought for a long time at the back of their head of like, boy, I love to research stuff. I love to be curious. I love to like learn about kind of 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

is, I don't know, it 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? I mean, I think you should do it. I feel like, I mean, I worked in museums for a long time. And I think you should do it. I feel like, I mean, I was, I worked in museums for a long time. And I think basically every object and every in some ways, the smaller, the better, the more obscure, the better, or maybe really buts aren't so much obscure because they're kind of everywhere in this one way. Yeah, though, it is hard to see them in a way. That's true. And it's really hard to see your own. But they're kind of dismissed, I guess, is what I would say.

And 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. Yeah. Although there's quite a lot of interest. There's not a lot of earnest interest. And I'm a, you know, for better or worse,

I'm a very earnest person. So, and I also just think that the more you research any kind of topic and you surely have this experience all the time, it's like, it just gets so, it gets more and more interesting. It's like never, 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 kind of like, the way that the obscure fact kind of turns over and becomes this moment of

rethinking something that you would never really thought about that hard or like 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, 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 like 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. Yeah, I love that.

Yes, I remember the Halcyon days of the salt book. It was massive, you guys. It was massive. And I feel like that, you know, I don't know. There's something that resonates with me about your work, specifically in terms of like looking at the little things that often even get unrequited 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. Like 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 it's the fact that I think to examine anything, any topic, any object, you know, life, whatever super closely, is to end up with kind of an understanding of, like, the atomic structure metaphorically, like the cultural atoms that make up so many other things, or at least the molecules. We can at least get down to that. Yeah, I love you putting it that way. I think that's exactly right. And that I think that there's also something really helpful to do it through the lens of something fun or accessible,

that that can be one of the best ways to find those molecular structures that are kind of fundamental to so many things. Because then I think people can kind of find their way into it. You know, I often have talked about this project as a Trojan Horse project, where it's like 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, you know, like neoliberalism in the 80s, but it's also a book about butts and it's not like 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 know, it's like, 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. And I think that's's I find that to be kind of beautiful ultimately. Yeah, I love that. Yeah, it's a 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. Totally. Heather Ratkey, 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? So I am a contributing editor and reporter for Radio Lab, which is a podcast out of WNYC. And I'm on Instagram, although kind of my social media, I'm sort of angsty about social media, so I'm sort of 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. So then my website is just HeatherRatkey.com. Anything.

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, like what it as a whole, sorry. But what if we started being like and send me a big collective burst of energy at 10am Pacific time, August 18th. I'm really gonna need it, thank you. I just heard Tom Hanks talking about how he type rights people letters.

Like I could take a Tom Hanks pen pal relationship, that sounds alright. Hey, if you're Tom Hanks and you're listening to this, feel free to write me a letter. Write a letter. Write a letter. And that's our episode. 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 Butz anywhere that find but 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. you