Heather Radke
Appearances
Radiolab
Everybody's Got One
As the mother's blood starts rushing into the placenta, the fetus just starts growing and growing. It's the size of a grapefruit by week 15, a pineapple by 24, a watermelon by 36.
Radiolab
Everybody's Got One
And all the while, the placenta is gobbling up more and more of the mother's blood.
Radiolab
Everybody's Got One
Preeclampsia is very, very scary. And it's basically when the mother's blood pressure spikes so high that she can actually die. Whoa. And it's really serious. It's one of the leading causes of maternal death. And I think it's easy to sort of think, like, high blood pressure, you know, not such a big deal.
Radiolab
Everybody's Got One
But it's actually the placenta, you know, sucking so much blood out of the mother's body that she can't. continue to survive.
Radiolab
Everybody's Got One
But the placenta is still in there. And so the placenta actually also kind of has to be born. I'm getting the sense that the placenta may be underneath this blue cover. Is that right?
Radiolab
Everybody's Got One
So we didn't actually see anyone give birth to a placenta. But Harvey did show us one in his lab.
Radiolab
Everybody's Got One
So I'm going to pick it up and see how heavy it is. So I grabbed the placenta. It's kind of heavy. Like what?
Radiolab
Everybody's Got One
About as wide as a volleyball. It's really weird. Okay, first of all, it's cold. Maybe slimy is the word. And it's got a lot of texture when you're in the beefy part. You can feel what I imagine are the veins. And it has like, it's not all one texture. It's like hard in spots and soft in spots. It feels sort of like crazy.
Radiolab
Everybody's Got One
And what's kind of cool is it leaves no scar. It's like one of the only things like this in the body, maybe the only thing like this, where something sort of gets sheared off and there's no, like no mark remains there.
Radiolab
Everybody's Got One
This is Tina Delisle. She's a professor of history at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, and she's writing a book about the placenta. Indigenous people were understanding the placenta for a long time. She explained to us that this dawning we were having, that the placenta is kind of like a parent.
Radiolab
Everybody's Got One
Well, I think I can... You take it. Okay. I was thinking about getting pregnant, and I started to do a bunch of research about And, you know, pregnancy is this thing, at least for me, where I was like, I know about that. You know, I took like 14 years of sex ed in my public high school.
Radiolab
Everybody's Got One
It's something that a lot of people had already been thinking about the placenta for a really long time.
Radiolab
Everybody's Got One
Okay, so you're saying that the placenta isn't just looking after the well-being of the child when it's in the womb, but also into adulthood? Yes.
Radiolab
Everybody's Got One
But things have changed some since Tina gave birth in 2006. In states like Hawaii and Texas and Oregon, now you can legally take your baby's placenta home with you.
Radiolab
Everybody's Got One
But I'll just say the more I learn about it, the more I realize how little I know and maybe like how little anyone knows about pregnancy. Yeah. And one of the very first things I discovered was that when you're pregnant, you don't just grow a baby. You grow an entirely new organ.
Radiolab
Everybody's Got One
Your whole life, you've got your heart, your lungs, your bone, your skin, your eyes, etc. So this is the main hospital. But then all of a sudden during pregnancy...
Radiolab
Everybody's Got One
I had heard of the placenta before, but I really didn't know anything about it.
Radiolab
Everybody's Got One
I think I thought a thing a lot of people think, which is that the baby grows inside the placenta.
Radiolab
Everybody's Got One
So it's actually grown by the fetus, which means that every single one of us has had a placenta.
Radiolab
Everybody's Got One
I'm interested in how you got interested in the placenta. Presumably it wasn't because you got pregnant. Serendipity.
Radiolab
Everybody's Got One
Eventually he figured out that what he was looking at were stem cells, placental stem cells. And over the next few decades, he and a bunch of other scientists would start to piece together the story of the placenta.
Radiolab
Everybody's Got One
So before we start, we just want to say a note on the word mother. Not everyone who gets pregnant or has a baby identifies as a mother, but it's a word a lot of people use when talking about pregnancy, including some of our sources. And so we're using it in addition to more inclusive language like pregnant person and parent. Got it.
Radiolab
Everybody's Got One
By the time it gets to about 32... The cluster of cells sort of forms into two layers.
Radiolab
Everybody's Got One
So from the very first few days of pregnancy, these placental cells are wrapped around what's going to become the embryo, like a little blanket. And as Harvey explained all this to us, and he walked us deeper into the story of the placenta, we started to see that pregnancy isn't a peaceful nursery rhyme kind of a story about a pregnant person nurturing a fetus until it becomes a cute little baby.
Radiolab
Everybody's Got One
It's actually more like a struggle and not like a calm college debate. It's like a cage match, like a knock-down, drag-out boxing match, or a tiny war, maybe even. On one side is the pregnant person, and on the other side is the fetus. And in the middle, or maybe not actually in the middle, more like actually in the corner, rubbing the shoulders of the fetus, is the placenta.
Radiolab
Everybody's Got One
But... Before the mother's body even has a chance to attack the embryo, the placenta blanket hides it.
Radiolab
Everybody's Got One
Mom's still at the bar. She sure is. Okay, so for the first week or so of the pregnancy, the placenta is pretty much just hiding the embryo from the mother. But then...
Radiolab
Everybody's Got One
The embryo gets hungry. And the placenta's like, I gotta feed this thing. And this is when the battle lines really start to get drawn. Because essentially this war between the placenta and the pregnant person is a war that's about food. The placenta, Harvey says, has one mission.
Radiolab
Everybody's Got One
So basically the story we told then is that before placentas, all animals that would become mammals laid eggs. And an egg is a special little thing. It's a self-contained little package where the fetus has everything it needs to eat until it's ready to hatch and all of its waste products stay inside the egg and nothing comes in and nothing goes out until the animal is ready to leave its egg.
Radiolab
Everybody's Got One
an ancient proto-mammal and changed its DNA so that eventually, many generations later, the eggshell transformed from a hard shell that exists outside the body to a sort of permeable layer that exists inside the body, which then becomes the placenta. And this was a huge advantage because it made it possible for the blood of the mother to actually feed the fetus.
Radiolab
Everybody's Got One
So it could get tons more nutrients. It wasn't limited to just like whatever yolk was inside the egg from the beginning.
Radiolab
Everybody's Got One
Geneticist Melissa Wilson again. That's mind-blowing. Because it made it possible to actually make a baby with a big, giant brain, like a human being or a dolphin. And that was great. But it also had this downside.
Radiolab
Everybody's Got One
Okay, and this is how we've ended up four weeks into what's basically a war between the mother and the placenta, with the placenta trying to suck blood out of the mother, and the mother basically trying to box it out. And this fight...
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
There's no science that I know of that suggests that there's a universally attractive butt. And even that science that suggests there's a universally attractive face, I think, is something to kind of look a little bit closer at.
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
I think that there's faces that a lot of us find attractive and there's butts that a lot of us find attractive, but part of that is because there's a kind of cultural mechanism that's helping us to find them that way, if that makes any sense.
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
And it's really hard to separate out what is biologically attractive versus what is culturally attractive because you can never really separate people out from the culture that they live in in order to ask that question. And I think with butts in particular, though, there's so much variation.
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
And also like we see what is attractive as far as a butt culturally come in and out so much and change so dramatically over the course of 10, 20, 30, 40 years that we really start to see that anything that sort of smacks of universals, you have to really start to question. Like how could it be that there's a butt that's fundamentally attractive if like what we think is attractive isn't?
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
in 1995 is really different than in 2015.
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
When I very first started this project, I had to really put some limits on it because if I were going to write about all butts, this would have been like, you know, 10 volumes long. But so I didn't do a Part of the reason I didn't is there's actually quite a lot already written about it. And there's been some great research, especially about like butts in the classical time.
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
Like you can think of like classical statuary where the, an ideal of men's beauty was, you know, there was a very clearly a kind of butt that was like a very good kind of men's butt. And a lot of men, as far as I know, wanted to have that kind of butt. And I think that there's still a lot of men who seek out, um,
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
know work out and try to like have different kinds of clothes that make their butt look good now i will totally agree with you that i think it's much more common for women to to try to buy and wear clothes that make their butt look a certain kind of way and some women want their butts to be bigger and some women want their butts to be smaller so yeah i think it's totally different for men and women or maybe not totally different but i think it can be quite different but i think people across the board do think about their butts
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
Yeah, well, I do think so. Butts are like breasts. They are a place where human females, women, they store fat in that part of their body. And one of the questions I had was, you know, why basically, why do women store fat in their butts? And I talked to a few different people about that. And one of the answers might just be because it's physiologically convenient.
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
Like one scientist told me that like, you know, it wouldn't be very convenient to store a bunch of fat in like your elbows or your knees, you'd topple over. But it's definitely true that women have more fat on their bodies than men. And generally they store that fat in their butts, which is not generally the case for men.
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
Yeah, well, I think your understanding is probably more true about how we actually live our lives. But the fashion industry dictates what's, you know, what butts are fashionable, just like they dictate what, you know, breast size is fashionable, or, you know, whether we should wear shoulder pads or any number of other kind of ways that we ought to look.
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
One of the times we see this most potently actually is in the last 30 years. In the early 90s, if you look at, you know, if you look at every issue of every Vogue in the early 90s, the kind of models you see on the front are going to be people like Kate Moss. You know, that's a very thin body. It's a woman who's, you know, she spoke to a trend at the time called heroin chic.
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
You know, it's like super, super thin, super bony, not a lot of fat. But by 2015, 2014, you know, a lot of magazines were calling 2014 the year of the butt. All of a sudden, well, it's not really all of a sudden, but by that time, the ideal butt, the ideal body was much more curvy. The ideal butt was much bigger.
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
And so although surely it was true that there were lots of people in 2014, just as there were in 1992, who liked big butts and lots of people who liked small butts, what had become part of the mainstream idea of fashion had actually changed.
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
Yeah, I think that's interesting way to put it. I think maybe, but I also think it's sort of a snaking its own tail kind of situation because we also choose the celebrities that fit the moment. People become celebrities at specific times because of other things that are happening in the culture.
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
You know, in 1997, when Jennifer Lopez was in this movie, Out of Sight, all of the press, and after that movie came out, I mean, every piece of press I found, the interviewers asked her about her butt. And five years earlier, they would not have done that. They didn't, you know, they weren't talking to, like, first of all, there weren't big butted celebrities that were in movies, but also
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
mainstream fashion magazines didn't even really use the word butt. They used words like backside and derriere. So something had happened that made butts more culturally interesting between the early 90s and the late 90s. And what a lot of scholars point to is
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
The changing demographics of America, so America was becoming less white, and also hip-hop was becoming the dominant form of music, and more and more people were white, non-white, were consuming hip-hop and were becoming interested in its ideals of beauty, which were very butt-based in the 90s. And you see that in songs like Sir Mix-a-Lot's Baby Got Back, but also in a number of other
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
hip-hop hits in the 90s you see the way that butts were a part of the hip-hop beauty ideal there are butt scholars yeah there's a lot of people i mean there's definitely there's people who study All kinds of stuff.
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
I mean, there's the scientists, but then there's also people who are really interested in these questions of changing body and beauty ideals and in questions like what was happening in 1997 and how and why did people talk about Jennifer Lopez's body and the way that they did. There's people who study the history of dance that is very butt-centric. All kinds of people study the butt.
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
I mean, to some extent, who knows right now there's a, we're in a funny moment where there's in like just really in the last month or two months, there's been a number of articles that are predicting the end of the big, but trend to the extent that it is a trend, you know, there's basically like thin is in is a very common type of headline that you'll find right now.
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
And I'm not surprised because that's just basically in some sense, how fashion works is that if a thing is big, it's if, if a body part is, becomes trendy for being big, it's almost inevitable that you'll need the opposite of that in order to continue sort of the machine of fashion churning.
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
so that's one thing but then there's also a thing which is like to some extent thin has never been out although big butts have been fashionable over the last 15 years they've always really been on the bodies of very thin women and they've been very kind of controlled butts you know butts that are look a certain way on a certain kind of person it's not like all big butts are something that people and fashion have been excited about over the last 15 years
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
Oh, sure. Thanks, Mike.
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
I got interested in this topic because I have a big butt. And when I was in high school, I'm a white woman who grew up in the suburbs of Lansing, Michigan. And when I was in high school, that felt like, yeah, it's not just something we didn't talk about, but something to be a little bit ashamed of. It felt like kind of the wrong body to have. But then over the last...
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
30 years, that felt like it really started to change. And more and more, the kind of body I had became, you know, an ideal of beauty, it's became considered more attractive and more part of the way that we we think of what a beautiful woman's body might look like.
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
what we talk about in polite conversation was part of what interested me about it because I actually think these things like butts that feel like oh we don't talk about that or that's a little bit too silly to take seriously in those topics we actually can find quite a lot that's interesting in part because we actually don't take it seriously and we don't think it's polite to talk about.
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
Such a good question. It seems like it should be easy to answer, doesn't it? I guess in a sense it is. Butts are basically joints. They are the joint where your hip connects to your leg. There's a muscle there, the gluteus maximus, and there's actually a couple others that make up the human butt. And only humans have those muscles and really only humans have butts.
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
Some people will kind of dispute this fact. When I say it, a lot of people are like, no, like monkeys have butts. But actually monkeys just have joints. Only humans have the gluteus maximus.
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
Yeah, it's such a good question. Okay, so the butt as an anatomical thing is basically muscles and fat. So women have, human females have more fat on their butts than males. And It's really not a lot more than that. It's a relatively simple part of our body, but it has come to take on all these different cultural meanings.
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
And those meanings are kind of, I think of it as like, it's almost like it's heaped on top of the anatomical truth. And that comes from, you know, centuries of equating butts with sexiness, butts with race. There's just a really long and complex history about all of the kind of cultural symbolism that we put onto the butt.
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
I do think one of the things that I encountered over and over again when I was researching just colloquially like when I'd go to a party or whatever is people often think like having a big butt or a small butt means something. So, like, oh, women with big butts, they are more fertile. That's a really commonly held myth about butts. Yeah, lots of people say that to me. Have you ever heard that? No.
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
Yeah, that comes out of some evolutionary psychology research from the 90s. But it's really not true. And the science around it feels very flimsy to me, at least as a science reporter. So that's one kind of stereotype people have. I mean, some people think big butts are really gross. And some people think small butts are really ugly.
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
And all these kind of like, over and over again, the meanings we have about butts that you realize they don't come from the actual... you know, factor, the science of the butt, it actually comes from different cultural moments. So thin bodies and thin butts kind of come into fashion in the 1920s. And in the 1920s, super thin women's bodies start to become equated with a certain sort of
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
liberation and bohemianism and kind of chicness. And that's essentially a stereotype and a way of thinking about bodies that's really continued well into the 20th century and really has never gone away. So, that's sort of a stereotype in a sense about small butts. And then, you know, I did a bunch of work also about what I would call like fit butts.
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
So in the 1980s, as the aerobics revolution starts to happen, there's an aerobics program called Buns of Steel that comes into being. This man named Greg Smith, he invented it. It's like wildly popular and people... start to try to actually not just have like big butts and small butts, but also like strong steely butts.
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
And that's definitely, you know, it's part of a much bigger trend that's about having fit bodies, but it really speaks to a way we think about our bodies as reflections of our own ability to control ourselves essentially. So to have a strong butt is to be kind of in control of your body to be a, to like have a bond of steel is to have a butt that's like,
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
People often think like having a big butt or a small butt means something. So like, oh, women with big butts, they are more fertile. That's a really commonly held myth about butts. Yeah, lots of people say that to me. Have you ever heard that?
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
Oh My goodness, you're absolutely right. It's I mean, I think it's like actually just pretty difficult to change your body One of the things when I started working on this book really early on was this was a question I have it's like how can a body part come in and out of fashion? I mean it happens all the time but what it's really asking of people and of women in particular is to
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
radically alter something that's all but unalterable. These days, the most extreme way and a way that's very popular to alter your butt is to have plastic surgery. But really, it's one of the only ways you can meaningfully change what your butt looks like. You can do what Jane Fonda calls like rover kicks, like donkey kicks or whatever.
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
all day long and you'll have like a slightly bigger butt but you can't really make an enormous butt out of a small butt. It's just not really possible. So it's one of the reasons why it's actually just so bizarre that fashion asks us this of us is that it's asking something that's kind of not actually humanly possible is to change what your butt looks like.
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
But that's probably also true about breast size or other parts of our body where
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
the demands of fashion to be something actually fundamentally different than what you are, it's just actually, it's part of why it's so emotionally difficult to contend with and also why so many women end up being really frustrated by the fashion industry is that it's actually asking something that's like not easy to do and really in many cases not possible to do.
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
I really like to think about it like the way I, one of the scientists I interviewed told, his name is Chris Hoff. And he said to me that any butt that's not killing you is a good enough butt, basically. And I think that's a nice way to think about it. Like probably your butt is attractive to somebody and that's like a great thing. human variation is a wonderful part of what it is to be human.
Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
It's part of how we're able to continue to live as a species and probably there's somebody out there who thinks your butt is great and to me that feels like a really exciting part of the research that I found is like there isn't actually a butt that is fundamentally correct.