Why Do Men Have Nipples? (7 page)

The presence of mucus in the nose and throat is normal. When you are sick the mucus can become thicker and change colors. Color is not a clear indication of a bacterial infection, but persistent rust-colored or green mucus tends to indicate a more serious condition.

For those do-it-yourself types, there are many ways to make home mucus to prepare yourself for a career in medicine:

RECIPES

Ingredients

1/2–1 pound fresh okra

1–2 cups water (the less water you add, the thicker your mucus will be)

Instructions

1. Chop the okra into large pieces and place them in a saucepan with a tight-fitting lid.

2. Add water to cover and boil the okra, about 10 to 15 minutes, until it is a dark grayish green and very soft.

3. Turn off the stove and remove the lid. Let your slimy substance cool.

4. Strain the slimy mess into a bowl and discard the okra.

Or

1. Stir 1/8 cup borax into 500 ml (2 cups) warm water. It’s okay if some borax remains undissolved. Allow solution to cool to room temperature.

2. In a separate container, stir 2 spoonfuls of glue (Elmer’s) into 3 spoonfuls of water.

3. Stir a couple drops of food coloring into the glue mixture.

4. Add a spoonful of the borax solution to the glue mixture. Stir (if in a bowl) or squish (if in a Baggie).

WHAT ARE EYE BOOGERS?

To answer this question we called one of my smartest friends, an Ivy League–educated ophthalmologist who is a retina surgeon at a prestigious university hospital. He’s the kind of guy who sends me Proust as a birthday gift. Doesn’t watch TV. Listens to NPR. So, we go to him for the answer. . . .

Nothing. He tells me he will look it up. This just goes to show you that medical school sometimes misses the really simple stuff.

So, who has the answer? Honorary physician and expert on medical oddities Mark Leyner wrote about this malady in
Maximum Golf
magazine. Here, one pseudoschizophrenic golfer hears two golf announcers having the following discussion in his head:

Announcer B:
Michael’s a bit off center—I’d say less than a foot from the left edge of the mattress and maybe a good foot and a half from the right rim. He’s got his left arm tucked under the pillow—

Announcer A:
Which looks to me like a 245-thread-count cotton-twill shell filled with a 95-percent-Canadian-feather-and-5-percent-down blend.

Announcer B:
What’s that in the corner of his left eye? A small emerald green particle. Can you make that out?

Announcer A:
That’s the mucopolysaccharide secretion from the lachrymal gland that’s accumulated and crystalized overnight, Bobby.

Announcer B:
Eye gunk. My mama used to call that a “sleeper.”

Announcer A:
Well, we’ve got a lovely aerial view of Michael’s sleeper from the MetLife blimp,
Snoopy Two,
cruising at thirty-five miles per hour at an altitude of twelve hundred feet. Our thanks to Captain William Schmickling and his crew for that shot. Absolutely splendid.

Announcer B:
Chris, he’s gotta get that outta there. What would you do in this situation?

Announcer A:
There’s the very slightest breeze coming through the open window, but not sufficiently gusty to warrant any sort of major tactical adjustment. I’d use an index finger here, position it on the corner of the eye, precisely there at the lachrymal duct, and just ever so gently, ever so deftly, roll the particle out.

Announcer B:
You can’t try to do too much here.

Announcer A:
Just get it out, actually—that’s a job well done.

Announcer B:
Reminds me of when Ernie Els got an eyeful of sandpiper guano at the ATT Pebble Beach National Pro-Am in ’95. Played the back nine basically half-blind. One of the most courageous exhibitions I’ve ever witnessed.

This eye gunk is nothing serious. While you sleep, a mixture of oil, sweat, and tears collects near the corners of your eyes. As the tears dry up you get left with a nice little bit of crust.

WHAT ARE THOSE LITTLE HALF MOONS IN
YOUR NAILS?

The pale half-moon shape at the base of each nail is called the lunule. It shows where the hardening process is not yet complete.

The American Academy of Dermatology provided these nail facts:

Nails grow about 0.1 mm (or about .004 inch) per day.

Fingernails tend to grow a little faster than toenails.

Toenails are approximately twice as thick as fingernails.

In general, nails tend to grow faster in summer than they do in winter.

Men’s nails usually grow faster than women’s nails.

Nails on your dominant hand tend to grow faster.

CHAPTER 3

ALL YOU (N)EVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX

The
party continues and has taken on a much more serene and romantic tone. Leyner is on the couch with his Cinderella and is eating cocktail egg rolls off her webbed toes as they share his bottle of tequila. I am finally free from the body questions and at last can enjoy a drink myself. It seems as though the drama of the evening is over until I hear Leyner shout, “Can anyone get me some duck sauce?” Leyner is too impatient and his libido is obviously inflamed, so he is unable to wait for the hired help to procure the requested Chinese condiment.

I cross the crowded room and find Leyner conducting a focus group on homemade and alternative lubricants. As I reach the front of the group, Leyner is now meticulously mixing exact proportions of Tabasco, runny Brie, and a dash of his sacred tequila to form what he now calls his “spicy sex balm.” I try to suggest that the Tabasco may cause contact dermatitis on the more sensitive parts of the body, but Leyner chooses not to heed my medical advice as he leads his new “special” friend to his ad hoc laboratory.

I am left behind to answer a sudden barrage of questions about sex. With anatomically correct dolls,
Sex and the City,
and Internet porn, you’d think there’d be nothing left to learn. But there are still some questions people are afraid to ask until they’ve had that third martini.

IS SPERM NUTRITIOUS? OR FATTENING?

You are what you eat. In this case, it is somewhat true, as sperm contains important genetic material. But sperm, despite its important load, is not particularly nutritious or fattening. The average ejaculate, about one teaspoon, contains between two and three hundred million sperm. Total calories: about five. These calories are derived from protein, including enzymes and sugars (mainly fructose) secreted into semen by the prostate gland to provide the sperm with the energy to swim.

Other good stuff found in semen includes water, vitamin C, citric acid, phosphate, bicarbonates, zinc, and prostaglandins. A veritable breakfast of champions.

Gberg:
I still can’t believe we ended up with this title.

Gberg:
I still miss “Cocktail Party Medicine.”

Leyner:
I know . . . I can’t even look at my own nipples anymore without blushing with shame.

Gberg:
Or if you had your way, it would be “Is Sperm Fattening?” That would be even worse.

Gberg:
It hurts the neck to stare at your nipples for too long.

Leyner:
I still love that title.

11:50
A.M.

Gberg:
That would have meant the end of my medical career.

Leyner:
To the contrary—I think it would have landed you a Surgeon General nomination in the Hillary Clinton administration.

CAN YOU GET PREGNANT WHILE YOU ARE
HAVING YOUR PERIOD?

In the 1970s there was an after-school special on TV where two girls were talking about whether you could get pregnant from kissing a boy while wearing a wet bathing suit. That definitely isn’t true, but the answer to this question is a little more complicated.

The basic answer is yes, you can.

First, not all bleeding is a real period. Sometimes a woman can have spotting during ovulation and that would be a very easy time to get pregnant.

Also, if a woman has a short menstrual cycle (about twenty-one days), then she could be ovulating on day seven of her cycle. This would be the seventh day from the first day of her period, and if her period lasts seven days, then it is possible that her period is ending just as she is ovulating.

Confusing? It is definitely easier to practice safe sex.

DO OYSTERS REALLY MAKE YOU HORNY?

Oysters definitely do resemble a certain anatomical part, but this doesn’t make them stimulants. There are a lot of different foods and substances that are thought to be aphrodisiacs. Though there is no science to prove that any of them work, there are some theories on oysters.

Oysters are full of many vitamins and minerals, especially zinc. Zinc controls progesterone levels, which have a positive effect on the libido. Other foods and products that are thought to get your mojo working include:

chocolate

strawberries

champagne

Spanish Fly

animal crackers (but only if consumed during sex and dunked in Spanish fly)

BIG HANDS, BIG _____?

When I was in Spain, I learned that the Spaniards believed that the distance measured from either side of your nose across the tip to the other side hinted at your penis size. As the owner of a rather large schnoz, I, Billy, was happy about this. But, by this same measurement, Geppetto must have had quite a task making pants to hold Pinocchio, and Cyrano de Bergerac wouldn’t have had to waste so much time writing love letters for others. Unfortunately, none of this is true.

There also seems to be no evidence that hand size is related to the size of your package.

When it comes to foot size, two urologists, in a study in the
British Journal of Urology,
measured the stretched penile length of 104 men and related this to their shoe size. They found that there was no relationship.

As for other size issues, a small penis expands more than a big one during erection. And since a woman’s sexually sensitive parts are in and around the outer third of the vagina, a big penis is not necessarily needed to satisfy her. Size doesn’t
really
matter, ladies.

WHY DO MEN WAKE UP IN THE MORNING
WITH AN ERECTION?

You must be referring to nocturnal tumescence! Or do you mean Private Willie Is Playing Reveille, or perhaps Morning Glory? There are many names for this morning starter, but only one good explanation for its presence.

These erections are experienced in the REM (rapid eye movement) phase of sleep. REM sleep is more frequent just before waking up.

Erections can also happen at other times without any stimulus. There is no scientific reason why these spontaneous erections always seem to happen in the most embarrassing places (parties, holidays, movies, weddings, funerals).

Professor Leyner has written extensively on the subject. The noted scientific research journal
Maximum Golf
contained this exerpt:

Announcer B:
If you’re just joining us, Michael Neubauer is still in bed—but we’ve got an interesting development here.

Announcer A:
That’s an erection, Bobby. That’s a classic morning erection. You couldn’t diagram it any better than that. The corpora cavernosa and the corpus spongiosum are engorged with blood and rigid. Absolutely paradigmatic. What do you think?

Announcer B:
I think you just have to give it a good whack here, Chris.

Announcer A:
Apparently you’ve got the ear of Michael Neubauer, because that appears to be precisely what he’s going to do.

Announcer B:
I really like what he’s trying right now. He’s running this frenetic montage of actresses, models, and athletes through his mind: We’ve got Renée Zellweger, Neve Campbell, Liv Tyler, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Britney Spears, Salma Hayek, Foxy Brown, Niki Taylor, Lil’ Kim, Melissa Joan Hart, Charlize Theron, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Zaha Hadid, Benazir Bhutto, Se Ri Pak, Karrie Webb, Serena Williams, Anna Kournikova, Jelena Dokic, Mary Pierce. Now he’s going way back: we’ve got some high school yearbook action; we’ve got some baby-sitter action. He’s just totally scouring the memory bank here—there’s one of his grandmother’s mah-jongg partners with the arm wattles. . . .

Announcer A:
What are you trying to do in this situation?

Announcer B:
You’re trying to get some erotic traction. You’re looking for that face or that body that just clicks, y’know, that you can fixate on, and then you try to get the voice, the incantatory exhortations, “Michael . . . oh yeah . . . oh Michael . . . oh my God!”

Announcer A:
How do you like his mechanics right now, Bobby?

Announcer B:
Excellent. He’s got a very good rhythm going right now.

Announcer A:
Marvelous touch. You sense he has everything to gain and nothing to lose.