Cultural baggage withstanding, Buffie the Body deserves Vixen Icon status - 6/9/2009

In an era of commercial excess and overindulgence, Buffie the Body embodied the state of rap.

Blessed with an absurdly large, 45-inch wide derriere she showed off in videos for artists like 50 Cent and Tony Yayo, she went on to play “Big Booty Judy” in T.I.’s 2006 cinematic debut ATL and appeared on the covers of urban lad magazines including King, BlackMen and Smooth. In the process, she became more famous than many of the MCs she flanked.

But her reign as rap’s sex symbol seems to be drawing to a close. The Athens native, born Buffie Carruth, is no longer a regular presence in music videos. King has shuttered, and the remaining magazines have largely moved on to younger models.

Still, Carruth remains in the spotlight, and the release of her anticipated memoir Vixen Icon on June 20 occasions an opportunity to evaluate her impact. Her transition from an anonymous urban model into something of a cultural ambassador has managed to challenge — if not altogether change — the notion of mainstream beauty.

Full disclosure: I auditioned to ghostwrite Vixen Icon. Having spent time with her in New York and Athens and profiled her for Creative Loafing and the Village Voice, I received a sample chapter “try-out” from Carruth’s publisher, Triple Crown Publications. Ultimately, however, the publisher decided to stick with the Carruth-penned version.

Long before she’d appeared in a G-Unit video or graced the pages of King, Carruth worked in a grocery store baking department. Feeling depressed about her then-skinny figure, she visited a “miracle doctor” referred by a co-worker. He prescribed a liquid appetite stimulant and put her on a weight-gain diet that included pasta and peanut butter.

Within weeks she’d added 25 pounds, and her newly acquired self-confidence eventually led her to the Atlanta strip club scene, where she performed before such celebrities as Lil Wayne, Usher, NBA baller Steve Francis and, in Philadelphia, Allen Iverson. “He gave me his number, told me to call him the next day and he and his boys bounced,” she writes of Iverson.

Far from a genetic freak of nature, Carruth built herself into an international brand mostly through foresight, discipline, and apparently, a lot of Jif.

When we first met at the Affinia Manhattan hotel in 2007, I was amazed to see that she had no entourage, and to hear that she didn’t drink or smoke. “A typical day for me when I’m not working? I’m usually at home, in my office ... working,” she told me later, explaining how she divided her time between updating her websites, editing her photos and sending out invoices. That was at our second meeting, in Athens later that year, when she charmed my pants off by introducing me to her tiny mother and sister Judy, for whom Carruth’s ATL nickname, Big Booty Judy, was even more appropriate. “When I was growing up I used to see how guys were on her because her butt was so big,” Carruth recalled, adding that Judy was deluged by phone numbers when they went to the skating rink.

Sizable posteriors have been an aphrodisiac since the dawn of time, of course, but for decades there was no place in the mainstream media for sexy, curvaceous women. That’s changed in recent years; nowadays the cellulite-celebrating, Armenian-American Kim Kardashian is an A-lister.

With a fan base that goes well beyond the urban niche, Carruth helped shift the paradigm. She claimed that white guys were “shy” about admitting their butt fetishes before she came along, and lad magazine editors consider her a pioneer. Sweets Publisher Antoine Clark even referred to her as “a hero for big-butt girls.”

Is this a positive development in the female body-image wars? Quite possibly, insists Florida Gulf Coast University media and culture studies professor Myra Mendible. “It may well be that America’s butt fling signals a growing acceptance of difference — a desire to broaden the repertoire of acceptable body types and beauty myths,” writes Mendible in an article published earlier this year, which partly discusses Carruth, titled “Big Booty Beauty and the New Sexual Aesthetic.”

“If this celebration of fulsome booty helps women move beyond the self-hatred and anxiety attached to body fat or encourages ethnic pride in women whose bodies have historically been pathologized and denigrated — then power to the butt, indeed.”

Of course, there’s always the threat of exploitation whenever capitalism and sex collide, and somewhere along the way, Carruth’s celebrity became less about her ass and more about America’s cultural baggage. While hundreds of girls with large rear ends came and went, Carruth became increasingly well-known to naysayers and fans alike, racking up hundreds of thousands of dollars in appearance fees by charming men across the country with her easy wit and humble attitude.

OK, so her posterior played a huge part in it, but she also wanted to be known for more than just her backside. Perturbed by my characterization of her face as not “especially striking,” and her figure as “not-exactly-modelesque” in the December 2007 Creative Loafing profile, she called me on my cell phone late one evening to complain. It seemed to reflect not just her deep sensitivity, but her anxiety about the future. “You can’t be in a magazine showing your butt forever,” she’d told me.

In recent years, Carruth has expanded her brand, from a workout video to an instructional e-book for aspiring urban models. Though many suspected her story would rattle off her sexual exploits a la Karrine “Superhead” Steffans’ 2005 tell-all Confessions of a Video Vixen, Carruth’s Vixen Icon details her career ascent without kissing and telling, and without burning bridges. “I’m not going to shit on this industry. The industry has been good to me,” she said in Athens.

Even after her looks fade, Carruth will likely retain her status within the hip-hop world. Perhaps she’ll successfully diversify her business interests. But even if she can’t, her image — and the impact it made — remains forever stamped in the annals of time.

Icon? Indeed.