There I was, heading to work, minding my own business. As I approached the subway station, I grabbed a “free” Metro from the dispenser. (I like to try to finish the Sudoku puzzle before my train reaches Downtown Crossing.) But wait! Before I could settle into my seat and turn to the puzzles page, my commute got hijacked! There on the front cover was a teaser for a p. 8 article about the pants and moves you need for a “groovy booty.” In case I wasn’t sure what a groovy booty was, there was a nice colorful photograph of two women with perfectly shaped booties; they (the booties) looked like upside-down hearts, complete with that butt-thong effect that seems to lift and separate those butt cheeks. And our booty models had their backs arched just so – perfectly offering up those booties in prototypical “fuck me” poses.

Oh, poor me. There I was thinking I was just heading to work and keeping my neural pathways fired up by solving a little puzzle on the way, but really what was happening was I was being delivered up to the highest bidder – the advertisers who clutter just about every sight-line in of our lives with messages about what’s wrong with us and which product will make us better. They offer us near constant coaching on our flaws followed by a near constant flow of buy-able fixes.

But wait. This wasn’t even an ad. It was a news story! I turned to page 8.

“The body part of the moment is surely the booty.” That’s the opening line! And what a fleshy yet muscular opening line it is. All at once, it accomplishes so much, including:

1) Reminding us that there is such a thing as a “body part of the moment.” In case you were just feeling like a regular whole person whose body parts are more or less united in the business of being a body, this article reminds us that No, it’s not quite like that in the “real” world where corporations go all-out to keep us susceptible to their messages. In this world, it helps for some body parts to get separated out for special mention. They become the focus of extra attention and require special products (such as a line of “rear-shaping leggings)” and special services (such as fitness classes with special butt-taming squats). Not that we all don’t have body parts we might especially treasure – of our own or of others. But when we give those body parts extra attention, let’s do it in the imagination, in the bedroom, or when we’re choosing our outfit for a hot night of mate-attracting activities, such as going to the disco. When the marketplace dissects, compartmentalizes, criticizes and oh-so-helpfully attempts to reconstruct our body parts, it’s not because it treasures them. It’s because it’s trying to make money off of them.

2) Using the word “surely,” which makes us think that it’s all obvious. Everyone else already knows the booty is the body part of the moment. Where have you been? Under a rock? To participate in culture, to be in the “in” crowd, to feel like you are a part of things, you better know it’s all about the booty. This has the strange effect of making it seem like the booty is something new, a recently discovered body part. News flash: it’s not! People have always loved the booty. We shake it when we dance. We dress it up and decorate it. It’s a hot erogenous zone. It always has been. Even in the prim and proper Victorian times, upper-class white ladies wore elaborate dresses with complicated bustles that poofed out and added color to their rear ends. We’ve always loved ourselves some booty, people. This is not new. The market is trying to steal what you already know and re-package it for you so that you will buy things for it.

3) Turning our attention away from whatever real things we might be thinking about and focusing our attention instead on the important work of managing our butts! Not that thinking about butts isn’t legitimate. By all means, think about booty on your daily commute. It might even be better for your neural pathways than trying to solve that damn Sudoku puzzle. But your butt isn’t something to manage. Something to sit on? Something to get pleasure out of? Something to admire in others? Sure. But it’s not a news story.

Unless of course the news story isn’t just a news story, but rather an attempt to create a friendly environment for the advertisers. For all the people who read the story about how to get control of their butts – complete with step-by-step directions for butt-shaping squats and the name of the website where you can buy pants with special ribbing that smooths your cellulite – there is an ad on the adjacent page for some sort of spa that offers some sort of procedure that “shapes you without surgery.” It’s called CoolSculpting, and it will help you “fear no mirror.”

Think how much more primed we are to consume that ad and the product it is trying to sell us now that we’ve seen the pictures of the perfect upside-down-heart butts and read the directions for the squats and calculated that even after a million reps. of the “Single Leg Russian Deadlift,” we still are not going to get the fat cells in our butts to migrate into perfect little round orbs.

On January 15, 2015, Martin Luther King’s birthday, activists in solidarity with Black Lives Matter boldly shut down I-93 in two different places outside of Boston, causing huge traffic jams. Many people were inconvenienced; some ambulances had to be re-routed; a whole bunch of time was wasted. And people got pissed. They felt like their commute got hijacked and they were unfairly subjected to something they didn’t choose.

My sympathies and solidarity are with the protesters and with the Black Lives Matter movement, which has put us on notice that there can be no business as usual as long as black lives are treated as expendable. If anything is inconvenient, it’s racism, which entails things like waiting in the projects for 45 minutes for an ambulance to come when you call, and missing school and work and other important things because you’re going to yet another black person’s funeral. If you’re worried about wasted time, consider the millions and millions of hours that black people have spent sitting in prisons thanks to a criminal justice system that targets them, locks them up, and throws away the key.

But I also understand the commuters. It makes sense to be angry when we are subjected to conditions we didn’t choose. It even makes sense to be pissed at the protesters. They are easy to target. They seem marginal. They should “get a job.” It makes less sense to be angry at all the other ways we are hijacked everyday – on our commute and just about everywhere else. Seriously, what is the pay-off in being angry about sexist advertising? What good is it going to do to get pissed about commuting yet again to your alienating job where you are bossed and controlled and not paid enough? Mass incarceration? Yeah, it’s terrible, but what can I do about it?

This is a good question for organizers: How do we make it worth it for people to go ahead and get pissed about all the choices being made for us, the limitations being put on who we can be and how we can express ourselves, the hijacking of our time, our health, our mental energies and our lives?

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