IN TOUCH WITH HIS FEMININE SIDE

I remember the advertisement by a local brew many years ago when I was a kid. It always starts with some real mucho macho men who worked hard and at the end of the day they will sit around a table and drink their manly brew. Yes, a nice end to a day's hard work.

Two decades forward, that advertisement no longer exist. You can still see some advertisements promoting alcoholic beverages, but mainly in the first few minutes of the advertisement time before the start of a movie in the local cinema. The brew still exists of course. You can even smell it if you drive by the Federal Highway towards Subang if you have your car windows down. But then again, who drives with their windows down these days??? Now the brew is mainly promoted via posters prominently pasted on the walls of some local restaurants, often cradled in the nubile hands of some scantily clad anorexic model. Ah, now the brew is not only manly, it's also SEXY!

Now, the buzz word is not being macho or even manly. The buzz word about being a man these days is being a METROSEXUAL GUY. How do you define one? I dunno, lots of magazines attempted to define the metrosexual man. I read in one magazine that the metrosexual man owns at least one MAROON colored shirt. I have two....so I guess that qualifies me as a metrosexual, I suppose. I suppose at the heart of being a metrosexual man is a guy (or one who resembles a man, anyway) who is in touch with his feminine side. One who is not afraid to cry, one who appreciates beauty and says it out loud, who who takes care of his skin, who goes for facials, joins a gym...blah, blah, blah, so on and so forth.

How does one reconcile the old with the new? The notion of being a macho man who drinks his brew and the new man who is sensitive and vulnerable?

I can think of one way. DRINK! Drink your booze and you will be in touch with your femminine side (actually I am not sure the word 'femminine' has one 'm' or two); at least morphologically anyway. Let me explain...

A few days ago I posted a picture of the back of a man and asked if any of my readers has an inkling as to what it was. Edina Monsoon ventured to guess (sorry gal, wrong on both counts; and oh, I have no idea how to link your website to mine... hope you can teach me) . Very intelligent guesses too! The correct answer is....SPIDER NAEVI!!! You will now go, like, huh???

And they were some of the biggest I have ever seen too!!! I saw this man in my clinic some time ago. He was a chronic alcoholic. What are spider naevi? Well. they are basically dilated small blood vessels present just beneath the skin. What causes them? Some believe they are due to the high estrogen level (the female hormone) associated with people who drink a large amount of liquor over a prolonged period of time. Why do we call them spiders? Because the lesion has a centre point which if you depress it, the lesion will disappear but once the pressure is lifted, the vessels fill up in a centrfugal way, much like a spider spreading out its legs. Get it??

Other features associated with chronic alcohol consumption are: loss of body hair (except the scalp), enlarging breasts, testicular atrophy (in layman terms, smaller balls) and decreased libido. And the man who drinks begin to resemble a woman over time. What better way to get in touch with his feminine side!! SEXY isn't it?

Why am I so free to write all these non-sensical stuff...because I am on call again this weekend and I am just plain bored. :-) Just in case any one of you out there is a bit dense (my apologies), my point in writing this is....PUHHHLEEEeeeeeeeeeZZZZZ DON'T DRINK!!!! I have seen enough misery caused by alcohol in my patients. Trust me on this one.