Being a Boy (6 page)

Y
ou can change your hair and you can change your outfit three times a day, but, much like your face, there are some things you are just stuck with. Learning to love yourself
^*
sniggers
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takes YEARS, but eventually you sort of stop caring. Remember that there is nothing more uniformly boring than men who spend all their lives looking in the mirror. You have to find the happy medium between making yourself look good and accepting your saggy bits.

• Your height
  
• Your weight, within reason. (Some of us are naturally slimmer than others, regardless of what we eat. Yep, the old ‘metabolism’ chestnut.)
  
• Your skin colour
  
• Your eye colour (Coloured contacts are weird and creepy.)
  
• Your shoe size
  
• Your penis size
  

Yes it blows, but that’s the way it is. Take solace in the fact that EVERYONE IN THE WORLD has bits of their bodies that they hate, especially the gym bunnies – why do you think they hit the gym so hard? Basically it’s a worldwide party of self-loathing and you’re invited! Grab a drink and a cocktail sausage and let’s all be in it together!

A final thought from CLEVER PSYCHOLOGISTS. You might notice that you have a wonky nose or whatever, but other people view you as a WHOLE rather than component parts, which is how we see ourselves. Therefore your wonky nose has little impact on a partner finding you attractive.

Myth Busting:

• All that mad crap that lands in your junk e-mail folder offering pills, potions, creams, spells and enchantments to make your knob bigger are a total waste of time. They are trying to mug you.
  
• Tugging on your schlong for three hours a day will do NOTHING to increase its size. Also, you can’t do your homework one-handed.
  
• There is NO truth in rumours that height, hand-span or foot size are in any way linked to penis size, which is great because you can’t change any of those things anyway.
  
• There are SLIGHT variations in average penis size of different ethnic groups. Suggesting so publicly could well earn you a black eye.
  

B
eware genies in bottles and men with magic wands. Injecting steroids or growth hormones to bulk up like some inflated, life-size action figure has SERIOUS side effects. For one, your testicles will SHRIVEL UP AND DIE and you’ll also be at risk of depression and heart and liver disease. For God’s sake, just DON’T.

I
t would be pointless to deny we live in an unequal society. For some of us, we don’t have to make do with the body we’ve been given because we can pay doctors to change it. This is ‘plastic’ or ‘cosmetic’ surgery.

Now while doctors can make bits bigger or smaller, shiny adverts in glossy magazines don’t show you the scars, the agonising surgical procedures, astronomical cost or lengthy recovery periods. There’s no such thing as a quick fix.

Furthermore, surgery can be a slippery slope. Look at pictures of celebrities who’ve gone too far. You know who I mean. They look like lumpy pieces of elastic stretched over a Mr Potato Head
^®
. Personally, I think any surgical procedure that’s purely for the sake of vanity rather than a legitimate, medical reason is far riskier than learning to love what you already have.

I
f you haven’t skipped this section based on its title, well done, because clothes are more important than you might think.

1. Partners don’t want a fashion disaster on their arm let alone their genitals. Shallow but true.
   
2. I believe clothes are linked to your self-esteem. Wearing drab ‘manoflage’ advertises a lack of confidence in yourself. Like you don’t want to be noticed. The only reason you wouldn’t want to be noticed is that you don’t feel worth noticing. And that’s just bollocks. Let’s address that.
   

As fun as it might be, I cannot individually come shopping with all of you. However, there are a few basic rules that should see you looking hot-to-trot.

Always wear clothes that fit:
Whatever your size, wearing clothes that are too big or too small will only highlight your body in all the wrong ways. And really only you know what size the tag says, so it doesn’t really matter now, does it?

Do not blindly follow trends:
Far, far more important than fashion is fit. Wearing spray-on skinny jeans might well be ‘rockstar’, but if you don’t have the body for it, you could look like a HUMAN MADE OUT OF SAUSAGES. Why would you do that to yourself? Work out your proportions.

I
nstead of being concerned about which label you’re wearing, I’d advocate buying a series of stylish essentials that you can mix and match over and over.

• Two or three pairs of jeans. Jeans are ALWAYS in fashion. ALWAYS. Avoid jeans ‘of the moment’ i.e. with trendy embellishments, as these date FAST.
  
• Dozens of plain cotton round neck t-shirts
  
• Cotton shirts (patterned and plain)
  
• Knee length shorts (denim or otherwise)
  
• Wool or wool-mix jumpers: V-Neck and round neck
  
• A smart outfit/suit in case someone gets married/dies
  
• One pair of smart shoes
  
• One pair of casual shoes
  
• Lightweight summer jacket
  
• Smart winter coat
  
• Undies, obviously
  

There. How easy is that?

That doesn’t look like a lot, but with those things you can make about a hundred looks. The fun part is LAYERING. So you start with your jeans and t-shirt. Put a shirt over the t-shirt. BAM! If you’re carrying a little weight around your middle there are now parallel lines cutting through your thickest section. If you’re slender, do the same but leave the buttons undone to your chest to make you look broader. WOO!

Fashion really is about creating illusion – drawing attention away from your dodgy bits and focusing on your best bits. Above all, wear what you like and what suits you.

But be warned: A well-dressed, confident you is likely to make you attractive to equally foxy onlookers.

W
hy is it that teenage boys’ bedrooms so often become gas chambers? People shouldn’t be able to smell you before they see you. GO EASY ON FRAGRANCE. That said, don’t forget the deodorant. It’s all about the balance. No one will want to snog you if you smell like bum OR like you’ve been attacked by a cologne-wielding shop assistant in a department store.

T
here is a word that we don’t teach you at school: FETISH. In this world there are people who go for big noses, jug ears, pot bellies, big bums, flat chests, scars, bald heads, back hair and third nipples. So whatever you look like, someone out there is frantically masturbating to pictures of someone who looks just like you. There’s someone for everyone, so stop worrying so much!

N
ow we’ve talked about how you’re going to FEEL about puberty, let’s get cracking with the science part. This is the bit, by and large, that schools do quite well, but frankly some of you will have been taught this better than others.

Puberty can hit at any time from about nine years old in early-starters to as late as sixteen for late-bloomers. Waiting for the changes to start is like waiting at home for a delivery – no matter how many times you ring the company hotline, they refuse to give you any indication of when the goods might rock up at your front door.

Once the first boy in your class hits the ‘Big P’ it becomes an agonising waiting game during which time a demon voice will grow increasingly loud in your head suggesting that you might be the first biological freak in history to NEVER undergo puberty and therefore be trapped in a state of eternal childishness.

PANIC NOT. Puberty WILL come and make a right old mess of your body. In fact, when it does arrive, although initially filled with relief, you might wish it never had.

Puberty is notoriously unfair. Some boys will effortlessly glide from boy to man, while others are doomed to a phase best referred to as ‘Ron Weasley’. The good news is, that whatever it is, no one especially enjoys change. Take comfort that everyone is going through a change even if you all look different.

Also bear in mind that ALL adult humans, male and female, have been through puberty. They mostly survived and if they didn’t the cause of death wasn’t puberty.

I have found that funny-looking teenagers often become great looking men. A lot of the best looking guys in my school were fat and bald by the time they hit twenty-five while the fugly kids were starting to blossom. Being hot in school is no guarantee of being hot later in life.

What you look like as a teenager has very little bearing on what you will look like as an adult. If you don’t believe me, take a look at the
About the Author
page at the back of the book.

This is the thing with puberty: You never know what you’re going to get.

The difficult thing is you have to do puberty when you are at school, surrounded by lots of other people who are also going through puberty and this can be MISERABLE.

FACT:

According to data from recent surveys, MOST bullying is centred around physical appearance. How shady is that?

THINK:

Before you open your spiteful mouth to make fun of what someone else looks like, just remember: tomorrow you could wake up with a body you hardly recognise. You’re all in this together, buddy.

I
n this section, let’s look at which parts of your body are likely to undergo remodelling over your teen years.

BRAIN:
We already mentioned that hormones affect your body in the last section, but this is HOW. They’re actually quite complicated. They are chemicals released by various glands that tell the rest of the cells in your body how to behave. These chemicals affect your brain just as much as any other organ, meaning your thoughts and behaviours are going to be MENTAL as you hit puberty. That’s because an enormous amount of these chemicals are required to kick-start the change.

The adults in your life will eye-roll and refer to ‘mood swings’ because they have completely forgotten what it’s like to feel inspired and excited one second and then want to drown yourself in acid the next. It’s very individual and don’t let anyone tell you how you should feel. Just go with it. It’s probably just regular hormonal shifts that are a normal part of puberty. But if you think it might be more serious, get help from a trusted adult or doctor. (See
‘Helpful Numbers and Stuff’
at the back of the book.)