Confessions of a Bondi Blonde

A friend of mine just dropped $14,000 to hitch her tits.

Shira works fourteen hour days, five days a week in a fast food store. She has done so for the past 10 years, since she was 23 and migrated with her family as a single mum, from Iran.

While watching blonde and tanned Aussies pass her Bondi Road shop window, carrying surfboards on their way to the beach, she stayed financially chained to the deep fat fryer, her youth congealing. In Tehran, Shira’s father was editor of the Shi’ite newspaper, in Sydney he works as a labourer at Flemington flower markets, swapping the rush of a daily deadline for the eerie pre-dawn world of the early shift. Shira has  suffered from the limitations of being a foreigner with the extra burden of being tied as a single mother.

But recently she started to get ahead. Managing the store, one of a chain of Portuguese food stores, owned by an Orthodox Jew, her decade of toil has given her relatively rich rights and privileges. She earns decent money, over $60,000 a year. She drives a huge, imported  4-wheel drive and mall crawls on her odd day off with her early teen daughter. Many of her clothes still have their store labels attached. Although she has the means to purchase the clothes, she doesn’t have the life to wear them. She works in the Eastern Suburbs, she commutes to beyond Parramatta, where she lives in an Iranian enclave, and she goes to bed. Repeat the next day.

Shira is beautiful. Half of the affluent divorced dads buying their single evening meal (or “family pack” if it’s an access weekend) would date her, given the slightest encouragement. But there aren’t that many Muslims in Bondi, so Shira’s opportunities to find a mate her parents would accept are next to none. And she has a natural charm. So many people buy her presents; books, candles, little what-nots. In the soullessness of Sydney survival, she has created a small, fragile community under the harsh, fluorescent shop lights.

Today she is bleeding, sore and suffering. She had her breasts lifted a couple of inches last Tuesday by one of Double Bay’s most friendly plastic surgeons. A one hour day surgery operation with no overnight in hospital didn’t sound so bad. One week later, she can’t move. She can hardly breathe without bloody hurting all over. Her breasts, swollen by the operation are of Dollywood proportions. They’ll deflate, but now she looks a lot like a blow up doll, rather than the pin-up perfection she was seeking.

There aren’t many statistics on plastic surgery in Australia, but international trends from the UK and the USA show a year on year increase of around 7% for cosmetic procedures such as liposuction and breast augmentation. A 1999 Committee of Enquiry into Plastic Surgery in NSW revealed that almost all patients – or consumers – of cosmetic surgery  were women. Mosman was the epicentre of excision and augmentation, followed by North Sydney and Vaucluse. Hang around  the Balmoral Pavilion or the Edgecliff Centre long enough and you’ll encounter some of the 4% of poor self-mutilating souls who’ve chosen to go under the knife 10 times or more.

In Shira’s case, it was so unnecessary. She’s a natural physical beauty and her real attractiveness has nothing to do with her nipple position. But I think that, because she spends so much time slaving over dead chickens and half cooked potatoes, on her few hours between work and sleep, she needs to assert her femininity. In her gentle way, she’s trying to buy a better future by being better anyway she can.

And she’s bought into the bullshit of our beauty being what defines us as women. Who hasn’t? I’m a regular Botox babe and wouldn’t say no to a little free liposuction, if the Nylex suction hose was being offered around by a lurking Extreme Makeover crew. But spending three years of savings from a go-nowhere job for a higher butt, bigger tits or a smaller nose? No fucking way. The money could have been Shira’s passport to a better life. The 14 grand would have gone some way towards getting a decent education for an easier, less life-owning occupation. And Svengali boss man probably would have cut her the slack to reduce her work hours to fit a study schedule. At the very least, Shira could have invested the money in an education fund for her only daughter.

Instead she’s bleeding and shocked that the nice surgeon’s promise for a zipless, almost painless operation was a crock. She’s not back to work yet. She’ll be off for at least another two weeks. Shira’s a wage slave, so there will be no money coming in during the self imposed sick leave. But the shop will survive. Shira’s sixteen-year-old sister recently increased her hours there. She’s earning decent money now, much better than the weekend pay she was getting before she left school, one year before doing her HSC.