No ifs or butts…

Bottom cosmetic surgery is a bum steer.

It’s time to talk about the bottom line. No, not the financial one. The cheeky one. The one you’re sitting on.

When I was growing up, skinniness was inniness. We girls lived on a daily diet of one low-fat celery frond in order to keep our bottoms perfectly pert. Our obsessive avoidance of a bulging base meant we wouldn’t even cook with thick-bottomed saucepan.

But now, after all that enforced starvation, big bottoms are in vogue. A full derriere is now de rigueur. Yep, all that tortuous dieting was all for nothing – which was pretty much all we ate from the 70’s on.

Today’s pin-ups are of a much peachier persuasion. Kim Kardashian, Jennifer Lopez, Beyoncé, Nicki Minaj and curvaceous co personify the current fashionable look for females. Many of my girlfriends are now swapping their organ-squishing spanx for padded pants to give them a more rounded, juicy look. It’s like a wonder-bra for bums. But some are taking the fad too far.

A young woman in my gym class has just undergone buttock implant surgery. She vanished from Zumba for a for a few months, then re-appeared with an inbuilt bustle. She stands in front of me in class, which is really quite handy as I now had a ledge on which to place my water bottle.

In the change rooms afterwards, classmates gathered around for a fuller inspection. The operation is called the “Brazilian butt lift” or the “Kim Kardashian” she told us. The procedure, carried out under general anaesthetic, took about 2 hours. As we ogled her gravity-defying rear end, she explained how the fat was removed from her upper thighs using liposuction, then injected into her buttocks to create this much fuller effect.

But you’d have to be loco to use lippo on your thighs. If the medical hoover gets turned on too high, your vagina could become askew, and no woman wants to be referred to as a “little bit on the side.”

As classmates prodded at her fleshy cushions, many voiced a longing for their very own ‘rear of the year.’ At this juncture, I thought it might be time to point out that bottom implants have the highest death rate of all cosmetic surgery. An estimated one in 3,000 operations ends in tragedy. Fat injected into large veins can travel to the heart or the brain, resulting in death. Despite the risk, women desperate to emulate the Kardashian silhouette still queue for the scalpel. Oh well, at least they’ll have lovely curvy corpses as they lie in their coffins.

Even if the procedure doesn’t kill you, complications arising from buttock surgery are also horrendous – bacterial infections, scarring, dead tissue, wound ruptures, abscesses… Having signed your surgery consent forms, when strangers point and laugh, all you’ll be able to do is ‘turn the other cheek’ – what you have left of it.

But apparently my bottom is not all I have to worry about. Apparently, I need fillers for my clinkles (cleavage wrinkles) and injections for my kinkles (knee wrinkles). I need to get my hands lasered to remove age-betraying spots. I must to do something about my earlobes too, evidentially, which are sagging. Not to forget my ‘bingo wings” which also need to be replumed and re-invigorated with surgery….

As my classmates catalogued my flaws, it struck me that maybe it’s not women, but society which needs the make-over? A new survey by Plan International reveals that eighty nine percent of girls feel pressure to fit an ‘ideal’ face and body type and twenty five percent feel ‘ashamed or disgusted’ by their body.

Surely the only way to cure this facial prejudice + shapism is to emphasise the importance of interior, rather than exterior decorating; to focus on the brain rather than the brawn. Surely, everyone would be more beautiful if they read a book now and then.

So, let’s ban cosmetic surgery that can kill, starting with the Brazilian butt lift. If you really want a firm derriere, try squats, cycling… or possibly crushing a toy boy between your thighs on a nightly basis. In truth, there’s only one vital quality for a backside – that you never, ever talk out of it. Something the cosmetic industry is yet to master.

And if you want to raise your spirits, then do come along and have a few laughs at my little Girls’ Night Out show, in Sydney on November 1st and Melbourne on the 4th.

See you there for some fun and frivolity!

SYDNEY
Date: Friday, 1 November 2019 @ 8:00pm
Venue:  Seymour Centre
Tickets: Click here or call Seymour Centre Box Office 9351 7940

MELBOURNE
Date: Monday, 4 November 2019 @ 8:00pm
Venue: Athenaeum Theatre
Tickets:  Click here or call Ticketek 132 849

Tickets and more information here.