Plenty of fans and critics over the past 30+ years have noted how Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Baby Got Back”—largely written off at the time of its release as a mere crude and objectifying novelty hit—is astonishingly progressive even by today’s standards: how he refers to women’s curves as healthy, declares he won’t verbally assault women, celebrates women enjoying non-diet food, doesn’t treat women like they’re disposable, talks about putting effort into actually satisfying his partners, and so forth. Given how much social media and photoshop and the internet overall have worsened body dysmorphia and eating disorders since the early-‘90s (and we thought the magazines were bad), this song nowadays feels even more necessary than ever.

Even on a religious level, this track also does an excellent job of challenging the neo-Platonic fallacies concerning the human body (a topic we have touched upon before), which have permeated Western civilization since the days of Ancient Greece, and heavily infected the Early Christian Church.

Some background: Plato’s basic thesis in his famed Allegory of the Cave (as found in Book VII of The Republic) is that all that which we perceive to be physical reality is but a shadow of a much higher reality, just as shadows on a wall are but the outline of physical reality. This allegory took on more spiritual dimensions in Late Antiquity during the Neo-Platonist revival that occurred around the transition from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire, leading to the widespread assumption in the Schools that the physical and bodily were necessarily lower and therefore more degraded than the divine; hence the physical had to be denigrated and despised in preference to the Spiritual. As Hugh Nibley once argued in his old lecture series “Time Validates the Prophets,” Neo-Platonism promptly infiltrated the early Church after the deaths of the last Apostles and the cessation of the spiritual gifts. The influence of Neo-Platonism is what led to historical Christianity’s longstanding obsession with severely restricting sexuality and with women’s modesty in clothing (which is ultimately pagan, not Christian, in origin; the Savior never mentions the topic over), clear down from St. Augustine to last summer’s Girls Camp.

But this shotgun marriage between Christianity and Neo-Platonism has always been an awkward one—not least of all because it leaves unanswerable the question of why, in this paradigm, Christ would voluntarily choose to resurrect with a physical body after his crucifixion, when the whole point in Neo-Platonism was to transcend and escape the bonds of our physical bodies entirely. It was yet another example of the philosophies of men mingling with scripture, to the detriment of both.

But our purpose here is not to keep dog-piling on the churches of the Great Apostasy, but to note that the centuries-long influence of Neo-Platonism upon Western thought is an especially an awkward fit for the LDS faith, because one of the high heresies declared by Joseph Smith was that he not only saw the resurrected Christ, but also a physically embodied God the Father. Indeed, it is a key component of LDS theology that our physical bodies are essential for our exaltation and eternal happiness; our bodies are a gift to be embraced, not a cage to be escaped.

Even amidst declining rates of religiosity across the First World, we still behold the incessant influence of Neo-Platonism in our postmodern society, wherein we still treat our bodies as an enemy, not a companion: plastic surgery, Botox, cosmetics, endless shavings, waxings, camera filters, and starvation diets that make even the Victorian corsets of old seem sane, are all clearly intended to beat our bodies into submission and shrink them down till they practically cease to exist. These practices collectively testify that we all low-key despise our bodies, resent them, and try to escape them by any means possible.

It is also no accident that Neo-Platonism was wielded as a club against indigenous cultures during the European age of colonization. Since most indigenous cultures don’t have these hang-ups about human bodies, European colonizers used this fact as evidence of their inherently lower development of civilization. It was bad enough that they used Neo-Platonism to restrict, beat, and exterminate and their bodies, but they had to even more savagely restrict, beat, and exterminate indigenous bodies into submission as well.

Here then it feels relevant that Sir Mix-A-Lot, as a Black man and descendant of slaves himself, is peculiarly invested in pushing back against these frankly oppressive beauty standards that have repeatedly sought throughout the centuries not to celebrate the human body, but starve it into submission—and Black bodies in particular.

It should frankly be so with us as Latter-day Saints as well, though I’m fully aware it’s not: Utah famously has more cosmetic surgeons per capita than Southern California, and has for awhile now. Our knowledge that God Himself is physically embodied has not made us love our bodies in any healthier a manner, but fight our bodies all the more unforgivingly. Perhaps it is long past time that we ourselves cease to dismiss “Baby Got Back” as a vulgar old novelty song to be banned from stake youth dances, but as sound doctrine pointing us back to God. Enos said his guilt was swept away because he knew God cannot lie, and neither does Sir Mix-a-Lot.