Big Ugly Man Doll

Here we are, another Friday, and it’s answer time at the ManFAQ.  Once again I don my manly mantle as Sage of the Sexes, helping demystify the more malodorous gender for those of the gentler, as we add to the list of questions women have asked about men over the years.  Actual questions, posed by real women, and answered by a REAL man.

What could go wrong?

Question:  My husband was complaining about the large conference area in his office; it seats around 100 people, but the men’s room only has a single urinal.  I asked him why you guys can’t double up on a urinal, and he looked at me like I’d suggested he kiss the other guy on the mouth.  What’s the big deal? 

Answer:  I’ll concede that we’re built in such a fashion that you would think this would be feasible.  But it isn’t. 

Many years ago, I read a brilliant essay concerning universal rules.  One of those rules concerned the men’s room, and the fact that you DON’T LOOK AT WHAT THE OTHER GUY IS DOING.  You mind, as it were, your own business.  You hope he’s doing the same thing you’re doing, but you don’t look over to check.  It’s just not done.

Even in restrooms that maximize what I will call urinary efficiency, which cover an entire wall with porcelain and add a few waterfalls here and there, we men will stand in reasonably close quarters to do what we need to do – but we do not cross the streams.  It’s not that all life as we know it would stop instantaneously or that every molecule in our body would explode at the speed of light, but still – it’s just not done.  Part of this is about ownership – men and dogs still mark their territory this way, and to actively cross the stream of another guy is to say, “that’s not yours, I deny your claim, this is mine now,” which is not usually a conversation you want to have with a stranger with your dick in your hand.  Most of us haven’t played “who’s is bigger” since that time in 2nd grade when the – you know what, never mind that.  It’s not done, is the point.

We’re not in stalls, waiting our turn.  When we’re standing up, we’re out there in public, hanging it out for the public eye.  There is – I’m told – some degree of insecurity there for some guys.  (I, of course, have the opposite issue, and wait my turn for privacy as a public service so as to make sure not to embarrass lesser men.)  So why do we not, would we not, can we not share a single urinal?  I’ve given you universal rules, social mores, and privacy concerns.  Let’s discuss the clincher.

You’ve probably, at one point or another, been around a bathroom that has been used by a standing man.  What did you do?  You cleaned it up, didn’t you?  We’ve covered this before here at the ManFAQ, but it bears repeating:  We have lousy aim.  Now, would YOU want to stand anywhere near the line of fire when Johnny over there opens up?  I just got these Ferragamos polished, baby – if he pees on them, I’m going to have to sweep the leg in retaliation.  It’s just not pretty.  So it’s just not done. 

Now you know.  Please, feel free to comment!  Also, forward any questions you’d like answered to BUMD – at – biguglymandoll.com!  As always, your anonymity is guaranteed!

Here we are, another Friday, and it’s answer time at the ManFAQ.  Once again I don my manly mantle as Sage of the Sexes, helping demystify the more malodorous gender for those of the gentler, as we add to the list of questions women have asked about men over the years.  Actual questions, posed by real women, and answered by a REAL man. 

What could go wrong?

Question:  What’s the deal with the low pants?

Answer:   Well, and you have to understand that since I am, relatively speaking, not merely a Big and Ugly but also an Old Man Doll, I am not afflicted with this particular syndrome myself, but I can safely conjecture about the deal, as you say, with the low pants, because I am a Real Man, and despite the fact that I tend to wear my pants hiked up around my navel, I understand these things. 

Started well, that sentence.  It got away from me.   Sorry about that.   Anyway, some guys wear their pants low because they want to you notice their rock hard washboard waists and abs, and then, with your eyes already drawn down, hope that you will become contemplative of what else they might have to offer in the rock hard department.  This has never been observed to actually work in practice, but it doesn’t stop them from thinking like that. 

Some guys wear the low-riding pants as a daredevil move, tempting fate to pants them in public.  Others have simply lost a good amount of weight recently, and haven’t gotten around to buying new pants yet. 

Mostly, though, low pants are a mark of low IQ, and as such natural selection tends to correct for this over time.  For instance, when being chased by something hungry and with more teeth than himself, most guys will run away.  The guy in the baggies with his belt around his knees is at an immediate and obvious disadvantage there.  This is also true in the procreation department, since most women will look at two otherwise identical specimens and choose the guy who looks like he’s actually dressed.   Most of the time, anyway.   

Now you know.  Please, feel free to comment!  Also, forward any questions you’d like answered to BUMD – at – biguglymandoll.com!  As always, your anonymity is guaranteed!

Here we are, kicking off February with a Friday, and it’s answer time at the ManFAQ.  Once again I don my manly mantle as Sage of the Sexes, helping demystify the more malodorous gender for those of the gentler, as we add to the list of questions women have asked about men over the years.  Actual questions, posed by real women, and answered by a REAL man. 

What could go wrong?

Question:  What makes him flirt with everyone who walks past in heels and a skirt?  I had to tell him the last one was a drag queen, for god sake!

Answer:   There are many reasons for this; good reasons, bad reasons, new reasons, old reasons.  Among them include the more obvious, such as “he’s an asshole,” and the more esoteric, to wit, “he’s evolved to be predisposed to spread his genetic code as far as he can,” i.e., he’s an asshole.  Let’s dive deeper.

When he sees a beautiful woman, most of his neural network goes into “reset” mode.  Those of us who process information faster tend to snap out of it in a second or two, but trust me that all of us do this.  It’s not that he doesn’t like you, love you, or respect you – it’s not even that he thinks she’s better looking than you are.  It’s just that for that blip of time while his brain is resetting, he’s forgotten you exist, much less that you exist in a state of mounting irritation since you’re sitting across from him and he’s starting to drool. 

He’s flirting because he’s wired that way – short skirt, long hair, it’s an automatic reflex.  The problem is that he’s forgetting you’re there, watching him “innocently talking” to a 22-yr-old bombshell who probably thinks he looks like her dad.  If you hit him hard enough, he’ll snap out of it – unless there are pheromones involved.   Trust me, if his subconscious thinks she smells like motherhood and apple pie, you’ve probably noticed that you need a two-by-four.  There’s a reason some perfumes are banned in Boston, baby. 

So try to not beat him up too badly – remember he’s not really driving the bus, doing most of the thinking, most of the time.  A simple “eyes over here, buster” should usually push the reset button back where it should be.  Also, Chanel #5 is better than a 2×4 every day. 

Now you know.  Please, feel free to comment!  Also, forward any questions you’d like answered to BUMD – at – biguglymandoll.com!  As always, your anonymity is guaranteed!

Here we are, another Friday, and it’s answer time at the ManFAQ. Once again I don my manly mantle as Sage of the Sexes, helping demystify the more malodorous gender for those of the gentler, as we add to the list of questions women have asked about men over the years. Actual questions, posed by real women, and answered by a REAL man.

What could go wrong?

Question: Why is it that almost all of his “plans” are spontaneous? I’d like to go to a movie or dinner, sure, but not tonight. Why does it seem like he doesn’t think more than 5 minutes ahead?

Answer: There are number of reasons for this, some of which were covered more specifically under Planning Parties. More generically, we tend to think about “the future” in two distinct categories:

1. A period of time not exceeding the next 12 hours.
2. “You know, a while from now,” which includes a range as soon as “tomorrow” and as late as “sometime in this life or the next.”

Needless to say, we don’t spend a lot of time on the second category. That leaves the next few hours as our primary focus. This is because we are thinking about Hey Hey, and we don’t think about Hey Hey in the abstract – we think about it as something we’d like to do RIGHT NOW. The net effect of this, of course, is that if we’re asking you about plans, the little guy doing the thinking isn’t doing any long term planning, he’s thinking about tonight.

Having established who’s doing this so-called “planning,” you can safely assume that any plans that involve you and the next few hours are, in his mind, plans that could conceivably lead to Hey Hey. (Take this as flattering or not, as you will.)

So why do we not plan for that second category of time, that amorphous future sometime between more than 12 hours from now and forever? Now that you know who’s doing the planning, can you really expect long-term thinking from a 6-inch-tall dude who spends 99% of his time hanging out in the dark with a couple of nuts? Really, that might be asking too much. The next 5 minutes are all he plans for, because really, that’s about all his headlights are illuminating, if you know what I mean.

Now you know. Please, feel free to comment! Also, forward any questions you’d like answered to BUMD – at – biguglymandoll.com! As always, your anonymity is guaranteed!

Here we are, another Friday, and it’s answer time at the ManFAQ.  Once again I don my manly mantle as Sage of the Sexes, helping demystify the more malodorous gender for those of the gentler, as we add to the list of questions women have asked about men over the years.  Actual questions, posed by real women, and answered by a REAL man.

What could go wrong?

Question:  Why do we women have to make ourselves pretty and do our nails, but guys don’t?  Why don’t I see nail polish on men?

Answer:   Ah ha!  I heard this question, and what did I see?  I saw an opportunity for….  SCIENCE!

That’s right.  Only through empirical evidence would I be able to provide a completely accurate and objective answer to this obviously burning question.

I’m Fabulous!

It just so happened that I was in a position to get a manicure anyway – sometimes life just conspires to throw you into your fate – and so I got the first manicure I’ve ever had in my entire life.  After a full 90 minutes of creaming, clipping, shaping, cuticling, priming, coating, pumping, painting, drying, and primping, I had fabulous nails.  Since I lead a double life working on an Army Post, I chose Army Green, except with sparkles!

What do you mean, those couldn’t be my nails?  You don’t believe me?  Fine.

Here’s another picture.

Really Fabulous!

Yes, I know – I’m fabulous!  The nails highlight the hat, and the hat works with everything, as we all know.

I left the polish on for 10 days, here in January, which included a full week in the office and out to many public places.  So, why don’t all the guys you know get their nails painted?  And I’ll cheerfully conceded that they don’t – even my mostly flamingly fabulous friends don’t (as a rule, at least) walk around with their nails done.  Why not?

Let me review for you all the reactions I got to my amazingly Army Green Sparkling nails.  First was disbelief, from most of the family and coworkers.  Next came the laughter, mostly of the “I can’t believe you did that” variety.   Then there were the inevitable questions:  “Have you, um, started a new, um, phase in your life?”

To some I explained what I was doing in a nail salon, to others I merely said, “Science!” and moved on with the conversation.  The interesting bits to me were more the non-reactions, which were, for the most part, very carefully studied non-reactions.  The first day I walked in with my newly gleaming gelled-up nails, I happened to have a meeting scheduled with about 10 big guys – manly men – with the Army.  There I was, front and center in a small room at a small table, drumming my fingers on the table while all these guys – not a woman there – very carefully didn’t ask me about the nails.

I interviewed a guy for a job we’re hiring for, later that week, and over the course of 30 or so minutes, he carefully didn’t ask me a thing about them.  Mind you, he couldn’t tear his eyes away from them, but he didn’t say a word.

So, why don’t we wear polish more often?  The person who had the hardest time getting used to the nails was me.  I touch type, for the most part, and every now and then I’d glance down at my keyboard and freak out to see my mother’s hands doing my typing.  I hadn’t realized, up to now, the extent to which I have my mother’s hands, but seeing mine with painted nails was deja vu all over again – I knew those hands!  It took a fraction of a second to realize that it wasn’t my mother typing, and another fraction of a second to realize I wasn’t having a really bad acid flashback.

And then there came the big day, 10 days later.  After paying a nice young lady, whom I couldn’t understand at all, good money to put it on, I went to another salon and paid another nice young lady, whom I couldn’t understand at all, good money to take it off again.  While the first experience was pleasant, even if it did lack the happy ending I was curious about (turns out not to be that kind of salon), the second was, how to put this – less so.  My new and incomprehensible friend started by savagely attacking my nails, cuticles, fingers, knuckles, and indeed pretty much any part of my anatomy that she could easily reach from her side of the desk with the largest sandpaper block legally allowed in a salon. She bruised, scraped, smacked, and scalped my nails until the finishing top coat was toast and the exposed underbellies of my fabulous green nails were naked to the elements.  Those elements were quickly replaced with 100% pure acetone.

Yes, my battered, bruised, and bludgeoned fingers, some of them scarred and scratched from their bout with the sandpaper of doom, were submerged in the strongest consumer-grade solvent available, usually used for thinning fiberglass and prepping metal for industrial purposes.  You can probably imagine without my recounting them the various words I used when the scratched parts of my tender hands hit the heated – did I mention she heated it? – acetone, but in case you lack for imagination, please assume that those words included the time-honored phrase “fuckitty-ow.”

After a mere 3 minutes of this, I was ready to give up the location of the rebel base, but my smiling interlocutor had other plans for my hands.   I tried to tell her that I’d confess to anything, just please, let me go, but that’s when she pulled out the pliers – and the paring knife.  I was hoping she was just going to kill me at that point, but no.  She pulled my hand from the acetone, causing it to freeze, since the hot acetone evaporated faster than lines of cocaine at Charlie Sheen’s house.  She then proceeded to hold each finger at an angle that would make Euclid blush and tried to scrap the entire fingernail clean off.   She failed in each attempt, which caused her to dump them back in the acetone – when did a solution of 100% acetone look like sweet relief from pain? – and try again with the next hand.

Twenty minutes later, I was holding a few shaking dollars out with the stumps of my nubby little hands, paying for the privilege of simply leaving at that point, and running for the door as though my life depended on it.  The ends of my fingers looked like pinkies.  (Pinkie has two meanings, you know, and in this case I mean not the little finger on each hand, but rather “baby mice.”)

And so, let me answer, finally, your question.  Why don’t you see nail polish on men?  Because taking that shit off again hurts, and we’re wussies.  Ow ow ow ow fuckitty-ow.  We’re glad you do it – honest – but we don’t understand why.  No one’s worth that kind of hassle and torture.  That’s just crazy!

But they sure looked nice, didn’t they?  For 10 days in January, I was fabulous!

Now you know.  Please, feel free to comment!  Also, forward any questions you’d like answered to BUMD – at – biguglymandoll.com!  As always, your anonymity is guaranteed!