Buttock cleavage

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A painting by Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg of a woman with visible cleavage

Buttock cleavage is minor exposure of the buttocks and the gluteal cleft between them, often because of low-slung trousers.

In her history of the 14th century, A Distant Mirror, Barbara Tuchman makes reference to people scandalized by buttock cleavage in the mid-Medieval period in Europe.

Traditionally the "coin slot" (or "builder's bum" or "plumber's crack") has been associated with overweight plumbers ^[1] (due to their frequent working position exposing the area). It is sometimes associated with unattractive overweight men in general: For example, in "Last Exit to Springfield," an episode of the animated television series The Simpsons, one character mischievously drops a pencil down the cleavage of the overweight character Homer Simpson.

Conversely, such cleavage has also been portrayed as attractive, such as with Salma Hayek's character in the film Wild Wild West. There is a dramatic scene in the French film The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe, in which a young woman greets the protagonist at her door, wearing a black dress that comes up to her neck, then turns around, revealing her bare back down to her buttock cleavage.

A "whale tail"

In the early 2000s it became fashionable for young women and men to expose their buttocks in this way, often in tandem with low rise jeans.^[1] ^[2] In reaction to this trend, Saturday Night Live, aired a parody advertisement for a product called Neutrogena Coin Slot Cream. Low-rise jeans sometimes also resulted in what was often called a whale tail--the appearance of the waistband of a thong or g-string above the waistline of one's pants, creating a shape resembling a whale's tail created by Gavin Hamilton, the creator of site ^[3]. The term was selected by the American Dialect Society (a group of linguists, editors and academics) in January 2006 as the "most creative word" of 2005.^[4]