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forty or so or hundred or so other dudes who’ve seen them. He liked them, but he didn’t die over them. I guess it’s the way you might figure out your dog doesn’t like a certain brand of dog food. He’s eating it, but you can tell he’d rather be going to town on something else. So after a few months it occurred to me that Mike must be a butt guy. 1 And that’s when I became officially obsessed with looking at other women’s butts. I leer at women’s butts so openly on the street that I have essentially become a terribly rude man.
    This newfound concern for my butt is how I found myself at a Bar Method studio about a year ago, on the recommendation of a friend who developed an eating disorder before her wedding. It is a class for women, or rather for women’s problem areas. Women have problem areas in a way that men don’t. We have big hips and muffin tops. Men just have the thing where they create wars and wreak havoc all over the globe.
    Walking into Bar Method is not like walking into a normal gym. The lighting is warm and gentle. You immediately lose about three pounds just with the lighting. Cute girls work the front desk surrounded by bottles of SmartWater, which you can charge right on your account!!! Then there are the other women attending the classes. Everyone is in Lululemon. Everyone.
    You check in and then you go into the spotless studio room and sit on the edge of the spongy white carpet and watch other girls casually do splits as they stretch. Everyone knows to grab two sets of tiny little weights the size and color of Tic Tacs. Finally, an instructor with a brond ponytail and a headset walks in and clicks on a sound system. Everyone faces the mirror and starts marching in place. It’s time to begin.
    Bar Method is an hour-long class of teeny-tiny movements where you hold on to a ballet barre and just…move…your…leg…an…inch…up and down…a thousand…times…and if you stick with it, over the course of many hours, you will have the perfect ass. A dancer’s ass. It sounds ridiculous, but then you look at the butts of the teachers, who are also all in Lululemon, and you start to think maybe this is possible. None of them have a trapezoidal rear. Their butts are like the very best of the produce section. Juicy little fruits that stick out, suspended in midair, slappable, grabbable. Or so I imagine. I imagine what it would be like to be armed with a butt like this and be with a man, to feel the animal-like desire my new perfect butt would generate.
    What does the perfect butt look like? Why would I even bother telling you when we all obviously know? Well, I suppose there are a few variations. There’s the Lopez, a perfect big bubble. I’ve seen her in person; it’s truly spectacular. Did you know that Julia Stiles also has this butt? I do, because I saw her at a Hampton Chutney Co. 2 with her boyfriend one Saturday morning and he could not stop touching it.
    Then there’s the waifier, smaller, perfect butt, which is basically the shape of two tennis balls glued together. This butt is very common in Waspier enclaves and is often attached to a girl named Kim who wears an enormous amount of Tory Burch.
    But I digress.
    The biggest problem with Bar Method, other than everything about it, is that it’s impossibly difficult. My friend Julie told me that a friend of hers once had to walk out in the middle to throw up. I’m impressed that she made it to the middle.
    While I, too, feel the need to puke and cannot make it through a single set of inch-high mini squats without stopping, every other woman in this class is breezing through this torture like it’s nothing, from the ones in their fifties who are barely breaking a sweat to the majority in their twenties who already have the tennis-ball butt. They are just here for maintenance. This leads me to a devastating realization: Despite having been surrounded by New York’s population of beautiful women for most of my life, it had never