Finally Figured Out, Why Men Like Big Butts

Butts are definitely having a moment, and now science might actually have an answer to why we’re all about that bass.

Researchers at Bilkent University in Turkey showed 300 men silhouettes of women’s bodies and asked them to rank them in order of preference. They found that the men were most attracted to women whose spines curved exactly 45 degrees above the top of their butts, but that the men were actually more attracted to the spinal curve — known as vertebral wedging than the butts themselves. Why? The researchers say that having “extra mass around the buttocks” enhanced the appearance of the curvature.

Dr. David Lewis, one of the researchers on the study, told Daily Mail that vertebral wedging developed out of necessity. “[It] would have enabled ancestral women to shift their center of mass back over their hips during pregnancy, a time during which there is a dramatic forward shift of their center of mass,” he said. “This benefit is critical: Without being able to do this, women would experience a dramatic increase in hip torque, subjecting them to risk of muscular fatigue and injury.”

Subsequently, women who developed this vertebral wedging were able to “forage longer” for food during pregnancy and carry multiple pregnancies with a lower risk of injury, which Dr. Lewis says would have been “sexually attractive” to men because of the evolutionary advantage it provided.

However, the researchers noted that the study isn’t conclusive and that more research is needed to really understand the preferences for either a big butt or a pronounced spinal curve.

I think this is the more important takeaway: The next time a guy tells you he’s an ass man, you can go ahead and tell him he’s actually a spine man. (I know — baby got vertebral wedging just doesn’t have the same ring to it.)