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1 October 2006

A weekly column published in the ‘Sunday Star-Times'

COSMETIC SURGERY FOR REAL MEN

At last it is done. And how typical that it has been achieved by the longest continuous civilisation since the evolution of humankind. Indeed they were painting pottery and taking civil servant exams while my ancestors were still trying to work out if it was OK to bonk a Neanderthal.

Yep, the Chinese are back. Back on their way to becoming the next great Superpower and ready to challenge the Americans for mastery of the globe.

They’re being subtle about it too. No long marches, no funny uniforms, no threatening to blast Taiwan back into the Stone Age.

Instead they’ve decided to do something very un-Chinese. They’ve embraced an oxymoron and made it work: collective individualism. They’ve unleashed all the latent talent of their vast population, and yet ensured that the Communists still run the show. In short, they’ve privatised socialism.

Unlike, say, the Americans who insist that you will be free – dammit – or we’ll invade you. The Chinese take a softer approach. They learned from their mad foreign forays into Korea and Vietnam. You can let sleeping dogs lie and still eat them. Don’t beat them: buy them.

In fact, the Chinese economy isn’t just on fire at the moment – it’s the core temperature of the Sun. All those previously shackled entrepreneurial instincts have not only been given their head but also that genetic capacity for hard work. They are currently strip-mining Australia of raw material and the Aussies aren’t exactly complaining either.

China’s re-entry into the modern world has also been good for Kiwis. They make quality stuff cheaper than it costs to even think of their product. The Warehouse may be their major outlet in this country but it is also the swanky clothes shops in the Quadrant or on Lambton Quay.

Mind you, our social attitudes to the Chinese have always been ambivalent. We taxed them for coming here in the nineteenth century and regarded them as yellow rabbits or oriental sparrows. Fortunately enough of them stayed to grow the market garden industry, but even then their children and grandchildren were subject to schoolground ridicule.

Because they were as different as you could get. Different skin, different face, different physique, different language, different religion, different customs. New Zealand didn’t do different – not even in the fifties, sixties or seventies.

Personally, I put a lot of their eventual social acceptance down to the Kiwi discovery of Chinese food. No-one can remain prejudiced against an ethnicity if you enjoy their cuisine. It’s why Winston Peters eventually declared himself Oriental.

The converse is true, too. Which is why the French loathe the English.

And acupuncture. When All Blacks started getting the needle to get back on the field, it was as if Ed Hillary had recommended Buddha sticks. Everybody had to have some.

The one thing that always distanced us though was communism. It made them as alien as the Exclusive Brethren is to gay Labour. So all those early trade missions and sister city exchanges were just a bit fraught. It was the moral equivalent of sidling up to the apartheid-era South Africans.

It probably still is. China regards its dissenters as either psychologically disturbed or organ donors. Its criminals don’t even get that option. Almost 2,000 Chinese – the really bad buggers – are executed each year and their organs are fair trade.

Lovely justification too: their way of repaying Chinese society for their crime. Not sure I’d want Jules Mikus’ bits living on.
But none of these innovations hold a candle to their latest breakthrough – a medical innovation both stunning and diabolical. Because after years of rich men convincing their female partners that cosmetic surgery will ensure they remained loved, rather than pre-loved, the Chinese have done it.

After decades of surgically making women sexier, bolder and better-looking … with everything from botox to breast implants to butt uplifts … the evil day for plastic surgery has finally arrived. Courtesy of some inscrutable surgeon, somewhere in Shanghai, the first successful penis implants have been achieved.

None of this would be known, had it not been for some ungrateful Chinese wife. Her 45-year old husband had lost his manhood in an industrial accident. The parents of a recently deceased 23 year old man gave their permission for their dead son’s organs to be donated, including his member.

Lo, the middle-aged man was restored. And extraordinarily successfully. Until … the wife complained. She felt, um, violated. She demanded he lose his replacement. Which is how the story made the western media because, the oddity was, that the husband obliged.

Yes, I know. An incomprehensible cultural divide. Western men universally screamed ‘Wha-att?!” Chinese men understood.
But it doesn’t matter. The egg has cracked, the tear has torn, the arrow has sped or any other metaphor you might care to add. It has been done. The world of cosmetic surgery will never be the same again. For men.

One problem. The world’s greatest source of organ donors – voluntarily or not – is China. They are not known as an – ahem – tall race. They don’t have long noses or feet. They are not renown for their sensual adventures. I shall say no more. Except that if Jamaica was China, this would be more of a breakthrough.

Nevertheless, the Chinese are on their way. This will be their decade, their generation, their century. Unlike previous world powers they have centuries of culture from which to draw their inspiration and centuries more of sophisticated learning.

Better still, they’re demonstrably not PC. That alone should guarantee them world domination.

ENDS