AssMatrix.com Analyses the Asses of the Masses

All images courtesy of AssMatrix

Way before Vogue proclaimed their arrogant love for ass in an article entitled, ‘We’re Officially in the Era of the Big Booty,’ a niche site named AssMatrix.com was in a corner of the internet quietly worshiping the derrière. While the fashion bible would have you believe it, white people did not discover ass. Many cultures have long been butt-obsessed, and the crew over at AssMatrix.com is part of that—they’re a collective of people from all over the world held together by their love for the posterior, and going to insanely nerdy lengths to analyze it, and to further educate the masses on asses.

The website was founded at the dawn of the 2000s, and it doesn’t appear that the format’s been updated since. It’s stacked with content (pages upon pages of blog posts ranging from titles like “Do you like Ghetto Booties or Lard Asses!” to “Poon Blockage”—honestly, I can’t make this shit up) set to the tune of an autoplaying song that sounds like it should be heard in a boxing ring. They even throw some history with posts that cite the roots of booty from Venus Hottentot to Victorian buttresses. Some pages are long form rants on serious ass-related topics with names like “THE SINGULARITY: Booties becoming “1,” while others use elaborate diagrams and analysis to deconstruct videos featuring butts with the sort of obsessive attention to detail as if they were examining the Zapruder footage. The result is an awkward cross between MTO and some dude’s 9/11 conspiracy site, that’s firmly rooted in everyone’s love for ass.

Over the years, they’ve had thousands of submissions to their “Send Ur Pics” section where people can submit photos of their own butts to be analyzed by the AssMatrix.com team. You really don’t understand how oddly knowledgeable they are about this shit until you see these chicks’ photos with their butts sectioned off with dotted lines and circles to point out the “booty meat.” The whole thing is so full of dedicated, worshipful nerdery you’d almost forget that the site is just a wee bit reductive and objectifying. Almost. I had the chance to chat with one of the ass analysts to clear the air about booty appreciation. To protect the integrity of their analysis and anonymity, they asked that we refer to them as a collective. It turned into the most lengthy, intellectual conversation about ass that I’ve ever experienced.

VICE: Can you tell me a bit about each of the classifications of ass that your site uses?
AssMatrix.com: So we start off with what, in my opinion, is the best. But I’m coming from the more athletic field and we tend to like more like roundish, ball-looking-type things. So that would be the "AppleBottom." But obviously it’s not for everybody—they don’t like the perkiness of it, they don’t like the top of it, it’s so round on the bottom. It might be too much of a woman for some guys. It’s just too much for them to deal with right now.

The overwhelming majority loves the "Teardrop." And that’s characterized by the slope to the top with a nice, round bottom. So where you might have a hard curvature coming right off the back or just be shelf-like like the AppleBottom, you have a slope going on when you’re talking about the Teardrop. People like that, it looks like aerodynamic, it looks great in dresses. But you’re putting on dresses that jack it up and make it look like "AppleBottom."

So then we move on to the "Pigtail". This is more or less like it’s a development under the body. Everyone thinks they have "AppleBottom" or "Teardrop," but then when they find out they don’t, they get very pissed off. So it doesn’t have too much crack to it, it doesn’t have much curve. It’s pretty much just a little bit of fat dropping under the body. But it does tend to have a bit of a feature to it like an "Ass Smile."

Now, the "Ass Smile" you can get on any booty. It basically looks very bulbous, very curved, and then it extends up the middle and there’s the definition at the very bottom of the butt. Even if you’re like a tiny thing, you still like an ass with an "Ass Smile." It’s not really a class as much as a feature, but some people don’t have anything but that.

Then you have the last category, which is the "GhettoBooty." So everybody in the hood and people in Africa and people who just like a lot of size, they love that. People think big means better and that’s not true. It’s that big, round thing, it looks like a huge extension to the "AppleBottom." So it’s really a huge "AppleBottom" or a "Teardrop." Now, everyone’s paying to get injections, transplants of fat. So that used to be very prize back in the day, but now it’s all falsified.

Then there’s flat, in which there’s just nothing there. But if you’re flat and you have the "Ass Smile," a lot of guys like that.

The opposite of the "Ass Smile" is the "Grimace"—that’s the one that’s a sharper, almost like sunken version of the "Ass Smile." So when you have the curvature at the bottom for the "Ass Smile," you have this sharp peak. And a lot of ladies tend to have wide hips, but never really developed the butt and never really did anything, it never grew to scale, they have that.

And then of course there are hybrids. It’s definitely going to be at least one of those and we haven’t found one yet that didn’t have some take on one.

I feel like there’s been a trend in the Western world in general lately of people preferring butts over boobs. How do you feel about booty appreciation going mainstream?
Like anything in the mainstream media, once it makes it there, it becomes completely falsified. They started talking about tits, then they started putting the fake stuff in there, and then they want to put them in the ass. So what ends up happening is an appreciation for ladies that are a little more heftier, just have a little bit of booty in there and before they were called slobs, but you might have an "AppleBottom."

One of the negative parts about that is that if you say, “Get jiggy with it,” in the hood, you’re probably going to get stabbed. When you say something and you take it and you make it too mainstream, it just becomes dead.

The majority of the hate we get is because mainstream media is kind of forcing everyone out of the woodworks to say, Hey, look at my ass! And that created the national tension for non-black ladies with booty. Now, you can’t even find these black chicks, especially on TV or modeling, without fake augmentation. They’re all trying to go bigger because they’re trying to outdo the white chicks—the Ass Arms Race if you will. That’s the negative side of popularizing it. It’s still causing more non-ethnic people to want to celebrate the booty and that’s all we care about.

That’s the other thing we don’t like about booty becoming popularized though—the race thing, the we’re-better-than-you thing. That’s not what we’re about. You also get a lot of people with fetishes that come out and try to get in on it like this guy who put a banana in this girl’s ass and sent us a picture of it.

People must send you all kinds of weird stuff.
This guy from Ukraine, he kept sending us pictures of him fisting or him putting something in there. He just kept sending them every day. We had to have someone send him back something to tell him to stop doing it. We’re appreciating ladies.

There was this one girl and the first thing she was doing was coming with butt plugs and hooks in her ass. We get some weirdo shit about putting something in the butt. Like, can you not do that? Nobody’s talking about that, no one’s talking about anal sex. It’s always about look what I put in this lady’s butt! One guy he sent us a photo of his wife, he had her spread out on the bed and had a horsetail thing in her.

It’s like the bible—there’s misinterpretation. That’s what ends up happening to ass appreciation. We’re not talking about anal sex. Not that we don’t like it, it’s just not what this site is for. Don’t come to this site if you’re thinking about penetrating someone’s ass, because that’s not what we’re about.

For the most part though, the popularization of it is a beautiful thing. But it does have its negative aspects. Like Nicki Minaj—you saw her original pictures, she’s skinny as a toothpick and now she’s got this huge ass. It’s manufactured.

What’s AssMatrix’s stance on plastic surgery?
We absolutely do not promote that; we say openly that we hate that. We hate talking about the celebrities in the booty field because most of them are fake today. The Kardashian shit—fake. What happens is we’re sitting here looking at the celebrities endorse this stuff, next thing you know all the people in the streets want to do that.

Everybody wants a cartoon ass and that’s the problem. Every time we put something out there, we want to talk about real ladies in real situations. We tell you naturally what you need to do. We put some exercise sections in there and we have people talking all day—that was Jenni’s idea. She came in and was like, “Guys, some of these people are being serious with you and they actually do want advice.” And she helped turn it around.

Is there anything else you want to say to clear the air about booty appreciation?
We don’t like stereotypes. Stereotypes don’t always work, we already put a few pieces up that were trying to smash that because we want more people to look at their bodies—if it’s not so good, maybe you can improve it. Don’t go the surgery route. That’s the same thing as doing facial reconstruction. You’re ultimately not happy with yourself and you go and pay somebody to try to make you look like something else.

If you want to do the booty appreciation, make it natural—work out, buy a DVD, check the stuff that we put on the site, and have at it. And not just anybody can have a nice ass, but you can try. It’s not one size/one look fits all. There’s different ladies, different sizes, different types. Booty appreciation has to have almost no boundaries.

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