The weaker sex

I've always enjoy reading Mary's column.. this week, superb! love it!
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Monday January 25, 2010
The weaker sex
BUT THEN AGAIN By MARY SCHNEIDER
startwo@thestar.com.my

A minor ailment is enough to reduce Mr Macho to a whimpering babe.
MANY men morph into helpless babies when they suffer from a minor ailment.
For example, take Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Governor of California and star of the hugely popular Terminator movies. Although he’s a physically strong man, when he gets sick I’m sure he sniffles and snuffles loudly beneath his quilt and waits for his wife Maria to bring him a comforting bowl of chicken soup.
“Ach, Maria,” he might say in his strong Austrian accent, “I vood die vithout you. Don’t ever leave me.”
Maria will stroke the feverish brow of the ex-Mr Universe and smile knowingly. If she wants to get a new pair of diamond earrings or have her kitchen renovated, now is the time to ask.
When the man in your life is “dying” from the common cold or a painful boil on his bottom or a bee sting on his neck, you must milk it for all it’s worth.
When a usually powerful, independent man puts himself into his wife’s hands and whimpers over a minor ailment, it can make her feel extremely powerful. She is likely to pander to his every whim, in a way that she never would were he healthy, because she knows that she’s totally in control.
“Don’t worry, my little pumpkin, Mama will take good care of you,” Maria will tell Arnold, as she spoonfeeds him his soup. And the most powerful man on the west coast of the US will murmur contentedly and hand over control of the state to the woman playing Florence Nightingale.
If Maria has any brains, she will authorise the state of California to conduct research into pain alleviation interventions for women giving birth, dignified and painless mammograms, and the ability of men to give birth.
Upon recovery, Arnold will probably agree to these requests, especially the last one, ridiculous though it may sound. You see, Arnold became pregnant and gave birth to a baby in his 1994 move Junior. Never mind that the film was named the second-worst comedy ever by a popular movie critic, Arnold must have some empathy with the suffering that many women experience during childbirth to have made such a movie in the first place.
If you’re wondering about the worst comedy ever made, it’s Little Nicky, starring Adam Sandler. But I digress.
A friend who is a nurse agrees that men and minor ailments can be a real pain. However, give a man a life-threatening disease, and chances are he will take his condition with quiet stoicism. In other words, presented with a cancerous organ, your typical male will not utter a single woe-is-me word, but give him an ingrown hair follicle and he will carp and complain to anyone within earshot.
To back up this argument, there is a phenomenon called Manflu that afflicts most men. The Urban Dictionary defines Manflu as “the condition shared by all males wherein a common illness (usually a mild cold) is presented by the patient as life-threatening”.
If you have never encountered a case of Manflu before, here is a list of symptoms, courtesy of www.manflu.org.uk:
● He cannot give you a concise breakdown of his symptoms and relies on “it hurts everywhere”.
● His is a competitive ailment, so if you point out you suffered from the same thing but struggled through and recovered, he responds: “Oh, but this is much worse.”
● He retreats to bed or the sofa and appears nervous at the thought of moving, especially when the word “work” is used or if the phrase “get it yourself” is used in anger.
● He may be found watching daytime TV programmes or his favourite football DVD.
● Men suffering from Manflu are often unable to carry out their normal chores. If challenged, they may sigh heavily, look martyred and state: “I am ill, you know.”
● The patient may also pore over an A-Z guide to health problems or trawl medical sites on the Internet, with a resulting rise in the number and severity of symptoms.
The belief that a man suffers more severely than a woman does when they are both down with the same strain of flu virus, has been the focus of much research. Indeed, scientists recently claimed that men suffer from Manflu because they have weaker immune systems than women that leave them more susceptible to infections.
I’m just wondering if any men would be open to popping oestrogen-based pills to shore up their immune systems. Personally, I hope not. All those accompanying monthly mood swings would be too much for the average woman to bear