[fortunately for J-Lo she is already married to someone who thinks her bottom is hot]

It is if you want to have a relationship with columnist and author Sam de Brito. He wrote a few weeks back in the Sun-Herald a controversial column about how he doesn’t feel attracted to women with big bums.

I disagree with so much of what he’s written and I’ve told him that in an email. Particularly the part about women denigrating men for how they look (did he miss the storyline in Sex & The City where Charlotte marries the bald guy with the hairy back?). He writes……

I could never fall in love with a woman who had a fat bum.

It’s not that I consider it a fatal flaw in a gal – some of my best female friends and relatives have huge arses – it’s just that I’m not attracted to chicks with big patooties.

But here’s the thing – by admitting this in print – I’ve guaranteed myself a minimum of twenty mocking emails, three angry phone-calls from the aforementioned female friends and at least one face-to-face smack-down with a fat chick.

Yet, if a female columnist or blogger wrote that she couldn’t fall in love with a short guy or a bald man, well, that’s a giggle, that’s completely understandable, that’s 90 per cent of episodes of Sex and The City

Jessica Biel….

Sam continues:

“Millions of guys, rightly or wrongly, daily dismiss or accept partners based on their body fat.

Men are obsessed with bodies and, thanks to the influences of pornography, beer adverts and high fashion, there’s more than enough fodder to convince us that if a woman is not sporting a tight rig, she’s somehow less desirable.

I’m as big a victim of this syndrome as anyone and admit that all of my serious relationships have been with women who made me sigh pleasantly when they disrobed.

This is because undressing a woman is like unwrapping a Christmas present from your Grandma. If you don’t like what you get, you just have to smile and pretend to be excited for the next two hours (or twenty years).

The thing is, our fixation on hardbodies is completely socialised – many of you could no doubt cite other eras that prize a Rubenesque figure in womankind, while Hispanic and black cultures hold the big booty as the archetype of femineity.

This merely serves to prove how powerful a lifetime of media imagery can be.

I wasn’t born with a preference for women with small bums and flat stomachs, it is not a default setting hard-wired into my circuit board, rather it’s been soldered there year after year thanks to swimsuit calendars, Bond movies and surf magazines.

When you’re a young bloke down the beach or at the pool with your mates, chicks are callously rejected because they “have a fat arse” and dudes whose girls are tidy are lauded as legends because they have attracted said glamour.

This is why women worldwide flagellate themselves with diets and eating disorders in order to fit a body aesthetic encouraged by the media and fashion designers, yet if men display impressionability to the same influences we’re considered arseholes, stupid or superficial.

They are actually two sides of the same coin and while males are not ‘victims’ of the same calibre as body-obsessed women, men and boys are certainly affected by the fear and loathing of fat – which is probably why you didn’t see white rock stars or George Clooney squiring tubby chicks to the Oscars last night.

Women, however, are ones who buy the magazines, clothes and potions that drive this ‘ideal’;men like me, who are attracted to it, are merely the by-product.”

Look, Sam is obviously being honest about the way he feels. That’s one thing. But I’m irked that he claims to speak for all men. Because to believe they all think that way? That’s a pretty bleak view of men. My view is brighter.

You can read the whole column here.