I'm not good at playing sports in general. I have never been, since the time when I was forced to participate in organized physical activities in elementary school. I hated, dreaded, and feared P.E. class all through my education. In Japan, cool/popular boys are expected to be good at sports, especially soccer, basketball, and baseball. I have an impression that you could still be popular without playing sports in the U.S. school-age culture, but that was just not a possibility as I was growing up. Since I was never good at any sports that involved balls, my masculinity was constantly being called into question, both from the outside and inside of my head. My growing self-consciousness didn't help the awkward changing times before and after P.E. classes at all.

Still, I was swimming every week. My father worked (and he still does) at a local swimming school, so it was natural that I belonged there, although my parents never forced me to. On and off, I kept swimming, or more like playing underwater, and I became an instructor when I was 15 years old. My self-imposed intense swimming practices began and lasted until I moved to San Francisco.

I have also always liked biking, which is not considered a sport in Japanese culture, unless you rode for competitions that are also gambling for the spectators. I didn't own a road bike or mountain bike, and cycling to me was rather leisure activity than a sport. After coming to San Francisco, I bought a mountain bike and I go biking a little more often than sunny days in this city.

Why am I talking about my favorite sports here? Because I wanted to write about butts.

I have shared good times with some Black guys in bed, and thanks to swimming and biking, many of them complimented on my butt by saying, "You have a nice butt for a Japanese/Korean guy."

It always made me wonder, even more than feel sexy, what was implied in this statement that was intended as a compliment. I see two general themes here:
1) East Asian men are expected to possess relatively flat buttocks; and
2) different (sub-)cultures place different values and meanings on men's (and women's) buttocks.

I remember growing up in Japan, receiving constant messages from the media that women with big butts aren't considered attractive, while I didn't hear anyone mention men's butts at all. Since I'm not very familiar with Japanese heterosexual culture, I don't know the extent to which women's buttocks are discussed among straight men. But my perception was that "You have a nice butt" in Japanese (いいケツしてるね; ii ketsu shiteru ne) sounds more degrading than complimenting to women. So my past experiences told me that bigger butts are less desirable (though perhaps attractive to some).

If you google "butt size," you will notice that there are more hits about increasing butt size than the ones about reducing it. In today's U.S. culture, some argue that voluminous buttocks, especially of Black and Brown women, are increasingly constructed and marketed as "sexy." Professor Myra Mendible wonderfully maps out the gendered, sexualized and racialized nature of booty/body politics, arguing that J. Lo made big butts popular in the mainstream U.S. pop culture. Then, I wonder what the booty politics look like in the Queer male sphere in the U.S. I would speculate that the main narrators of such booty politics are male, and they discuss from a male perspective, both heteronormative and Queer societies share similar patterns of attitudes towards men's and women's butts. This is just like the contents of gay porn and straight porn are quite similar because men are the intended consumers of pornography.

We can also note a racial component of this discussion. I specified the source of the "compliments" on my butt as Black men, not to begin generalizing, but to start asking more questions. In fact, I have never received the same kind of "compliments" from Asian guys, regardless of their preference in sexual acts. What does this mean? Are Queer Black men more likely to find butts attractive? Or Queer Asian men don't really care about butts? Is it because, as some people believe, Black and Brown folks have "nice" butts and Asian folks don't? Are the degrees of butt-appreciation generalizable to so-called Asian/Asian American culture and African American culture at large? What are the historical and social contexts surrounding this butt discussion?

What I wanted to highlight in this essay is that the compliments my butt received are found at the intersection of gender, race, and sexuality. Talking in bed about my butt in comparison to others clearly renders my body as gendered, racialized, and sexualized body. On the one hand, I feel somewhat special just as I'm supposed to; on the other hand, I feel somewhat objectified, alienated, degraded, denied, and disrespected. Can I not have a "nice" butt because I'm Japanese and Korean? My celebration of my body doesn't happen in the context of materialistic competition. Although I'm aware of the intention, all those compliments failed to show their appreciation the right way. Would I give them another chance? Well, I guess I'll see what they've got.