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On Monday, September 17, 1810, Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society of London, joined other scientists, naturalists, and members of high society for a private viewing in the society’s house of exhibition at 225 Piccadilly. The exhibit was a twenty-one- year- old Khoisan woman named Saartjie Baartman, who had arrived in England from the Cape of Good Hope several months earlier. Baartman stood a little under 5 feet tall and, like other Khoisan women, had large breasts, protruding buttocks, and elongated vaginal lips (labia minora), said to resemble a turkey’s wattle. She had been brought to Liverpool earlier that year by Alexander Dunlop, a British naval surgeon who used his position to traffic and trade museum specimens from the colonies. He had convinced Baartman that she could make a fortune exhibiting her body in Europe, and so it was that she traveled to England, along with various other exotic specimens Dunlop had collected. There Baartman was subjected to medical observation and then exhibited as a freak show attraction, which members of the public could view at a cost of two shillings. The “Hottentot Venus,” as she was called, was advertised as having “the kind of shape which is most admired by her countrymen”; on display, she wore a small, tight dress that made “her shapes above and the enormous size of her posterior parts . . . as visible as if [she] were naked,” and she stood on a “stage two feet high, along which she was led by her keeper and exhibited like a wild beast, being obliged to walk, stand or sit as he ordered.” Upon attending one of her shows, the theater manager and comedian Charles Matthews “found her surrounded by many persons, some females! One pinched her; one gentleman poked her with his cane; one lady employed her parasol to ascertain that all was, as she called it ‘nattral.’ This inhuman baiting the poor creature bore with sullen indifference, except upon some provocation, when she seemed inclined to resent brutality. . . . On these occasions it took all the authority of the keeper to subdue her resentment.” This objectification continued long after Baartman’s death. She was eventually sold to an animal trainer and showman named Réaux, who exhibited her in Paris for some eighteen months, before her death in December 1815, from what the French naturalist and zoologist Georges Cuvier diagnosed as “une maladie inflammatoire et éruptive.” Upon her death, Baartman was autopsied by Cuvier, who made a plaster model of her brain and preserved her buttocks and vagina for museum display. He also published a detailed account of her anatomy, and used it as evidence for his scientific racism. Baartman’s brain, skeleton and genitalia remained on display in the Musée de L’Homme until 1974. Twenty years later, after election as president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela requested that her remains be repatriated, and the French government capitulated in 2002.1 For her audiences, Baartman was a source of fascination and revulsion, who epitomized the ugliness, savagery, and primitive sexuality of the inferior races. For many today, however, the shameless treatment she received epitomizes the racist and exploitative nature of colonialism. But Baartman’s tragic story also highlights our fascination with the form and appearance of the body. Now, as then, our societies are obsessed with the human body—perhaps even more so. People whose body is perceived to be beautiful are both celebrated and objectified, whereas those whose body is deemed to be ugly may be “body shamed,” or worse. Partly in response to this, the popularity of the body positivity movement, which advocates the acceptance of everyone’s body regardless of size, shape, or physical ability, has grown enormously in recent years.