You just can’t say enough about Leisa Hart’s rear end.
But its prominence — in the public eye, as the hindquarters of the new star instructor of the “Buns of Steel” video series, as opposed to its corporeal size — demands an effort.
After Hart taught a promotional class at Bally Total Fitness at Six Corners, on the Northwest Side, admirers at the health club attempted to define the noteworthy qualities of Hart’s heinie:
“Very firm,” said Jenny Diaz, 33.
“Symmetrical,” offered Bob Sargus, 49.
“It is just the ideal butt,” said Carmen Flores, 26. “Toned and firm. When she moves, it just stays there. It stays!”
“Well-shaped, firm, and yet she’s able to move perfectly,” remarked Ramon Roman, 22. “It’s not the drop kind, not the high kind — just in the middle. It goes out about three inches, then it goes smoothly right into her thigh. It’s a 10.”
So impressive is Hart’s fanny that when she appeared on Mancow Muller’s WRCX-FM radio show earlier in the day, he asked if he could bounce a quarter off it.
“I bet you could,” replied Hart, who knows a valuable marketing tool when she sits on one. She agreeably turned the famous keister in his direction.
Mancow could not bring himself to actually toss coinage at her rump. But he was unstinting in his praise.
“That ass is awesome,” he said. “It’s too bad you can’t do a Linda Blair and walk down the street backward.”
Hart, 28, an easygoing and upbeat Dallas aerobics instructor who took over from chief “Buns of Steel” bun-meister Tamilee Webb in 1994, has grown accustomed to the public’s interest in her bottom line.
“When . . . I have to walk away, I can just feel their eyes burning a hole in my butt,” she said. “And that’s OK. That’s my job.”
She is not even nonplussed when they ask to actually touch the Buns of Steel, just to see if they really are.
“I let them take one finger and touch,” said Hart.
The interest is less prurient than admiring and openly envious.
“I would like to have her buns,” said Jenny Diaz, 33, who took Hart’s class at Bally in hopes of getting a leg, or something, up on the task.
“We want to kill her,” said Jenn Wachala, 25, a special education teacher and part of a group of awestruck aerobics instructors from a nearby YMCA who attended the class.
Buns have solid competition from abdominals, which in fact have overtaken buns in recent years as an object of desire. Billboard magazine’s five top-selling exercise videos of 1995 were all “Buns of Steel” products, but the top three were “Abs of Steel,” “Abs of Steel 2” and “Abs of Steel 3.”
But buns remain a source of widespread dismay, and a standard in the pantheon of body-part exercise videos. If you don’t want Hart to show you how to work your buns, fitness expert Denise Austin or supermodel Claudia Schiffer will be happy to.
What is it about buns that inspires such admiration, covetousness and devotion to a regimen of lunges and squats?
To Hart, the butt is the human equivalent of brilliant feathers in a peacock.
“Abs and buns are a close race, but 99 percent of the time, if you ask a man or woman what they look at on the opposite sex, it’s buns,” she said.
“You don’t say, `Nice abs!’ You say, `Nice set of buns!’ It’s a status thing.”
Those who took her class agreed.
“Let’s face it; most men are leg-and-butt-men,” said Sargus, a Chicago police officer.
“Women too,” countered aerobics instructor Carol Guy, 44. “When you walk away, I’m going to be checking you out.”
The original bunmaster-general, aerobics instructor Greg Smithey, who made the first “Buns of Steel” video and trademarked the name, regards buns as playing an integral role in our physical and social lives.
“The bun is probably one of the most important parts of the body,” he said. “You sit on your buns. When you’re walking, if people are going to check you out, they’re going to check your backside out.”
Moreover, he said, the butt enjoys considerable visibility in culture, as well as in some of our jeans.
“If you get into trouble, you say you `got your butt kicked,’ ” he said. “You `get your butt in gear.’ There are so many little sayings that utilize that part of your anatomy.”
Indeed, consider references to the “seat of government,” “Rump Parliament” and “butt-inskies.”
But for Smithey, who has earned more than $1 million from the original video and subsequent trademark royalties, the booty also has great personal resonance.
He recalled seeing ads for buttock-pads for men in his father’s magazines during the 1950s. And then there was his Uncle Ervin. Smithey has no idea why, but his nickname was “Uncle Bun.”
“So `bun’ was in the back of my mind,” he said. “In my mind, I was always conscious of my rear end.”
It seemed like fate, then, when a woman remarked after one of his classes that her butt felt as hard as steel. That prompted Smithey to utter the deathless phrase, which reduced bystanders, he recalls, to “a moment of silence.”
It turned out that a lot of people are also conscious of their rear ends.
The lower torso, home of the hips, thighs and buttocks, is the seat of enormous discontent, especially among women.
Contrary to popular belief, women are not substantially more unhappy than men with their overall appearance, according to research by Thomas Cash, a psychologist at Old Dominion University who specializes in the psychology of physical appearance.
In a 1985 survey of 30,000 readers of Psychology Today, he found high levels of dissatisfaction among both sexes. Thirty-four percent of men said they disliked their overall appearance, compared with 38 percent of women.
Although women were somewhat more unhappy with their weight and muscle tone, the differences were not striking. And there were no major differences between men and women in their unhappiness with their height, face, upper torso and mid torso.
But the lower torso was another story. Only 21 percent of men said they disliked that part of their bodies; a whopping 50 percent of women said they did.
To experts who argue that women hate their bodies more than men do, this is no chance quirk but a reaction by women to society’s hostility to the natural female form.
Large hips, thighs and buttocks are part of the physical definition of womanliness: In anticipation of childbearing, women are genetically programmed to accumulate fat there.
Women are unhappy with their most womanly parts, said psychologist Rita Freedman, author of “Bodylove: Learning to Like Our Looks and Ourselves” (Harper & Row, 1988), because they have been demeaned by popular culture as “different,” and are reacting by emulating the slim-hipped group in power.
Dislike of buns is “an extension of women’s general self-hatred,” she said.
Jane Hirschmann and Carol Munter, co-directors of the National Center for Overcoming Overeating, contend that behind women’s dissatisfaction with their bodies lies unhappiness with their lives and the pressures of a thinness-crazed society.
At workshops throughout the country, they asked women to “decode” their hatred of their hindquarters, among other parts. In “When Women Stop Hating Their Bodies; Freeing Yourself From Food and Weight Obsessions” (Ballantine Books, 1995), they offer examples:
“I have a big rear end” means “I feel like I take up too much space.”
“I have a big ass” means “I feel like I make an ass of myself. I grew up in a family where girls were teased and the butt of many jokes.”
Hirschmann and Munter urge women to ask themselves what’s so wrong with a big butt anyway.
It’s not unhealthy, said David Schlundt, a psychologist at Vanderbilt University who studies body image and weight control.
“The risk of high blood pressure, heart disease and diabetes is mostly for people who carry weight above the waist,” he said. “Carrying weight below the waist does not really harm your health.”
And it’s not even universally considered unattractive. There are very different ideals of gluteal beauty, for example, between blacks and whites.
“The African-American woman is considered more beautiful when she is more voluptuous, when she has more curves on her,” said Anthony Mark Hankins, a prominent clothing designer who is black.
So restaurateur Nick Nickolas, owner of Nick’s Fishmarket, found out when he served as one of four judges of a Best Butt contest some 15 years ago in a Loop shoe store.
Racial tensions flared when the judges, three of whom were white, chose three white women with fairly compact rears as the winners.
Some of the more ample black contestants took vehement exception to the judges’ standards.
“I got chased down the street by a group of black girls calling me names, saying I wouldn’t know a good butt if I saw one,” Nickolas said.
“They said, `That skinny-ass white broad? Now HERE is a butt!’
“It just goes to show there’s a difference of opinion,” he concluded.
There have been enormous differences of opinion through time, Schlundt pointed out.
“If you go back to the 19th Century, the ideal figure was this gigantic bottom with a very, very thin waist, an hourglass figure,” he said. “That changed in the 1920s with the Flapper, where you went to a very straight, almost boyish look.”
With the choice of Hart, the “Buns of Steel” spokes-buns have shrunk. Hart’s predecessor, Webb, now 37, is a solid, visibly muscled woman with a self-described “bubble butt.”
“I can stand in one room and my butt would be in another,” said a cheerful Webb, who starred in 21 “Buns” videos before leaving to make her own line of videos. She continues to make videos for “Buns of Steel” under her own name.
Hart is 5 feet 5 inches tall and weighs 115 pounds. Though her buns are clearly rounded, she has narrow, boyish hips and wears a size 1 or 3.
Webb sees Hart as a “younger, softer version” who appeals to women intimidated by Webb’s muscles.
“Leisa is built like a little boy,” she said. “I am built like an hourglass. I think that’s why a lot of women can relate to me. They say, `I like the fact you’re built like a woman. You have hips.’ “
Hart was chosen by “Buns of Steel” producers who saw her on ESPN competing in a Fitness America pageant.
Her choice was not a deliberate move to a smaller instructor model, said Melissa McNeese, senior director of marketing-fitness for WarnerVision Entertainment, which produces and distributes “Buns of Steel.”
“It had nothing to do with the size of her hips,” she said.
“We didn’t hire her for her buns. We really hired her for her brains. She had a very nice audition tape. We were very impressed with both her ability and her professionalism.”
Hart has written a “Buns of Steel” cookbook and an “Abs of Steel” exercise workbook. She helped develop an exercise device called the “Bunsworker,” has her own line of nutritional supplements coming out and hopes to open a health club in Dallas.
Hart, who was reared, as it were, in Dallas as the youngest of 10 children, has taken to the visibility of her bum with aplomb.
Her friends call her Buns or Bunzo and recently urged her to replace her long leather coat with a short one that reveals her assets.
“They said, `How would anyone recognize you?’ ” said Hart, who took their advice.
Her boyfriend, a bodybuilder whose own rear could probably stop a speeding car, thinks her buns are too small.
Hart thinks that’s too bad for him.
“I said, `I have worked damn hard for these buns, and I’m keeping them.’ “
BIG BEHINDS TAKE BACK SEAT TO NO ONE
A word of warning to exercise fiends trying to shrink their seats: When it comes to singing the praises of the posterior, the musical nod goes to big buttocks, hands down.
I’m tired of Magazines
saying flat butts are the thing
take the average Black man and ask him that
she’s gotta pack much back
. . . So your girlfriend rolls a Honda
Playin’ workout tapes by Fonda
but Fonda ain’t got a motor in the back of her Honda
my Anaconda
don’t want none
unless you got buns hun
You can do side bends or sit ups
but please don’t lose that butt.
— “Baby Got Back,” Sir Mix-A-Lot
Brenda got a big ole butt.
I know I told you I’d be true.
Brenda got a big ole butt,
So I’m leaving you.
— “Big Ole Butt,” L.L. Cool J
Fat bottomed girls, you make the rockin’ world go ’round.
— “Fat Bottomed Girls,” Queen
Big bottom, big bottom
Talk about bum cakes, my girl’s got ’em
Big bottom, drive me out of my mind
How could I leave this behind?
— “Big Bottom,” Spinal Tap, from “This is Spinal Tap”
