Signing your pink parts

But first, the good news: I am tickled pink that my last humor book It Only Hurts When I Pee: RJ Ledesma’s Guide to Bodily Gases, Hair Loss and Pink Parts was nominated as a finalist in the leisure category of the 32nd National Book Awards. It is more humbling to know that I belong to an esteemed group of finalists that comprise three culinary lifestyle books (including fellow Philippine STAR columnist Claude Tayag’s book Linamnam: Eating One’s Way Around the Philippines) and a book on Kapampangan beauty queens. I am not sure that my book on bodily gases will triumph over more gastronomically satisfying and aesthetically pleasing competition, but in true Oscar award-winning fashion, I would like to say that it is an honor being nominated.

On another note, I would like to invite all of you — family, friends, fugitives, NGSBS, DOMs, yayas and my three female readers — to the launch of my latest humor book Playing with Pink Parts: RJ Ledesma’s Guide to Gayumas Aphrodisiacs and Love Spells this Friday, Sept. 20, 6 p.m. at National Book Store Glorietta 1, Makati. I will be signing books and giving a brief talk on my pink parts as well (if you want to know if it will stay in my briefs, you have to come to the book launch).

Allow me to give you a legally permissible sneak preview of the book. But if you want to read more, then please subsidize my children’s education and buy a copy of the book available at National Bookstore, Powerbooks and Bestsellers. Please buy the copies before my mom buys them all and turns them into paperweights.

The scariest three words in the world

During the wayward days of one’s heathen bachelorhood, the most feared set of words that a man can hear uttered from the mouth of his girlfriend is  — aside from “Am I I getting fat?”, “ “My dad isn’t afraid to be charged with manslaughter” and “I’m late” — are “Can we talk?”

You see, most men are capable of maintaining an intelligent, adult conversation on three things of import — basketball, girlie magazines and bodily gases (in no particular order particular, unless it was a particularly good basketball game). Now if the topic of conversation moves beyond these topics, men risk bowel discharge, nosebleeds and brain implosion. This is because, as a result of evolutionary missteps, men were not predisposed to talk for periods exceeding five minutes (give or take five minutes; instead, we were given chest hair and non-utilitarian nipples. So, please be warned that if you plan to engage men in conversation — most especially a conversation that will involve a revelation of feelings — please know that men will screw up. Royally. If you really want her to engage in a meaningful conversation, please talk with your gay best friend instead. However, if you insist on talking to us on a heterosexual level, please only ask us questions that we can answer to a degree of certainty like “What time is it?”, “What is the limit on your credit card bill?” and “Who is the sexy senator?”  

Men, please remember: Women do not want to hear your solutions to their problems. They want you to clam up like a constipated sphincter and do something that our government rarely does and just listen to her carefully. Under stress or pressure, a woman’s speech function is activated and she starts talking as unnecessarily as epal government officials. When your woman is stressed, she isn’t seeking a solution — she already receives comfort and relief from the process of talking. 

So, woefully single men, when your significant other prefaces her conversation with the phrase “Can we talk?” here are some practical tips that have kept me a hair’s breadth away from castration:

• Just shut up. 

• Stay awake.

• Take it. Just take it.

• In the event that you are forced to talk, be prepared to reply every single time with “Yes, dear, I understand.” Or, if worse comes to worst, “Please stop, dear. I have lost sensation in those parts.”

• Clench your butt muscles. It has nothing to do much with the conversation, but it will give you a constipated type of look that will make you appear as if you are listening. 

• Do not interrupt with “What’s the point?” or “Can I watch TV instead?” or “Honey, you aren’t making any sense.” (The last phrase are the last words you will squeak before she rips open your guts and consumes your spleen for protein). Just keep on clenching those butt muscles.

• Do NOT try to minimize her problem by telling her, “You’re overreacting” or “It’s not a big deal, forget about it” or “Why don’t we (unprintable unprintable unprintable) first, I’m sure you’ll feel much better after. I know I will.” If any of these phrases depart from your mouth and land in her ear, then expect your fate to be similar to many of the poultry products sold in dubious wet markets: you will be double dead .

• If you can no longer take the talk, ask to be excused, make a mad dash to the banyo, take out your razor and perform a lobotomy on yourself. Or if this takes too long, just shoot yourself in the head. You might feel better after that. 

• If, because of divine consequence, you misfired while in the banyo and find yourself instead regaining consciousness in the ICU and she complains that you should have let her into the bathroom so that she could continue to talk while you tried to shoot yourself in the head, then it is time to search for that sensitive man that resides deep in the crevices of your being and listen to your significant other intently. Then, after she is done, try to choke yourself by swallowing your own tongue if your gun was confiscated by the authorities.  

Our favorite appendage

We praise our favorite male appendage that has given us endless hours of pleasure. However, it has also been a victim of frequent abuse: Our opposable thumbs. 

There are many ways to secure a date with a woman that will not require coercion, self-flagellation or public humiliation. One of the more obvious ways to get her to say yes to the date is to subtly impress her by your job. Nothing impresses a woman more than a career choice that reeks of ambition, virility and prosperity. By my reckoning, you can impress her with the following careers: as an elected official, as an up-and-coming celebrity with a sex video or a president of an NGO. These careers will surely get you noticed not only by women, but also by the proper authorities. 

But all the pork barrel in the world is futile when you engage the woman in the most dreaded of courtship rituals during a dinner date: small talk. Because, my three female readers, engaging in small talk has the same appeal for men as a colonoscopy.  

Gender issue specialists Allan and Barbara Pease contend that, unlike women, speech and language skills are not specific brain skills for men.  Although speech and language operate mainly in the man’s left brain, it has no particular location on that side of the brain. When a man talks, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans reveal that the left hemisphere becomes active as it searches to find a center for speaking in the brain but is unable to find one. Sad to say, our center for language skills in the brain is as missing as this administration’s moral compass. And this confirms what my three female readers have known all along about men: That we have really nothing inside our heads.

Since men have limited brain locations for speech, we needed to find a way to communicate the most information possible with the fewest words possible. And since man could not figure out how to communicate through flatulence, man collectively pleaded with the Almighty to save us from heathen small talk. After having a good laugh for several hundred years, God took pity on man and gave us text messaging.

Text messaging is an abbreviated conversation, free from the confines of spelling, punctuation and grammar, and can be said in less than two hundred lines or less (at may smiley face pa).  Whenever you talk face to face with a date, there is always the possibility that you can screw up and insert the word “naked” if you talk longer than five minutes. Granted that when text message a woman, there is still the possibility that you can screw up. But, you can screw up in a much shorter period of time.  And, more importantly, she cannot slap you via text.   

Texting even allows you to feign wittiness because you can forward cheesy romantic texts that you Googled and claim them as your own.  But for the less resourceful men out there who have no time to formulate cholesterol-forming text messages because they need to send the same text message to ten girls simultaneously, they can always resort to the pakyut texts which simulate thoughtfulness like “Mis u na me mwah,” “M thnkn f u” or “Sinong tatay mo?”.  And, if you finally run out of things to text, you can always send out the all-ambiguous “=)” (No, that is not a phallic symbol. Unless you want it to be.

The best cardiovascular exercise

After a romantic dinner with your date, you lazily stroll through the mall, fingers interlaced, whispering sweet nothings into each other’s ears until you both grow slightly diabetic, when suddenly you are seized by a vision that defies the law of physics:

A woman whose twin modules have become so enhanced that they have their own pair of moons, whose high heels have caused her derriere to oscillate so wildly that it is knocking down nearby pedestrians, and whose vocabulary does not seem to contain the words “modesty,” “subtlety” and possibly a whole lot of other words. 

What is a man, whose vital organs are still in working order, supposed to do in this situation? Is he supposed to: 

• Ogle the woman?

• Voluntarily stab hot pokers in both his eyes?

• Ask his date to take his cellphone picture with the walking science oddity and her twin satellites?

• Spontaneously combust?

What would be the natural male reaction to viewing enhanced female aesthetics like these? Aside from spontaneous combustion? And when he doesn’t have his cellphone or hot poker on hand?

Unfortunately, my three female readers, your date cannot help but ogle that scientific oddity (unless you have a hot poker on hand). He is a slave to his biological dictates: ogling at women is as natural to him as not washing his hands after making pee-pee, farting and spinning around quickly to see if he can catch a whiff of it, or making cambio his equipment in public. 

Men are also stimulated through our eyes (and trust me, my three female readers, this type of stimulation does not require hot pokers).  We are wired to look at the female shape because the female form, if gender issue specialist Barbara Pease is to be believed, evolved as a permanent, portable and, ahem, potent sexual signaling system which was purposely built to attract male attention and body parts (but once you are happily married like I am, your signal is permanently placed out of the coverage area. Yes, pangga, I assure you. Please set aside the hot poker). 

But as faulty biology and unconfirmed scientific reports have it, did you know that ogling be actually good for a DOM’s, este, man’s health?

An article circulated among several email newsgroups that claimed The New England Journal of Medicine carried an article saying that ogling a woman’s breasts was good for a man’s health and could add years to his life. According to gerontolgist Dr. Karen Weatherby, “Just 10 minutes of staring at the charms of a well-endowed female is roughly equivalent to a 30-minute aerobic workout. Sexual excitement gets the heart pumping and improves blood circulation. Our study indicates that engaging in this activity a few minutes daily cuts the risk of stroke and heart attack by half. We believe that by doing so consistently, the average man can extend his life four to five years.”

Is this the reason why there are so many DOMs who have been around since prehistoric times? You’ll have to read my Pink Parts book to find out.

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For comments, suggestions or a donation to RJ Ledesma foundation for his comic book collection, please email ledesma.rj@gmail.com or visit www.rjledesma.com. Follow @rjled on Twitter, rjled610 on Instagram and  like www.facebook.com/rjledesma.