The Sun-Herald

Sick - or just spoilt?

This morning I felt cranky, tearful even. I didn't feel like writing anything at all and wished someone would come and release me from my misery and throw a huge party in my honour. I stamped my foot, threw my mobile phone across the room and then realised the problem. I must have ADD.

Why not? The condition is what's supposed to have caused Paris Hilton's jailbird doldrums and the sheriff felt so sympathetic he let her out early. But then again, I could have something else: MPD (Multiple Personality Disorder) or PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) or ME (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome). Take your pick - there's plenty of disorders and syndromes to choose from if you're looking to excuse your latest bout of the can't-be-bothereds.
Before you berate my flippancy about these serious medical conditions I am of course completely aware that for some, they're real and nasty. But they're also a golden opportunity for the idle, indulgent and selfish among us to shrug off responsibility for their actions.
Years ago in the UK I worked with a serial philanderer and bar room brawler who left such a trail of broken hearts and noses behind him we all grew exhausted mopping up his messes. But he expected us to indulge his antisocial behaviour and misogyny because he blamed it - unapologetically - on manic depression. Worse still, in the creative profession this gave him extra credibility. He made a very decent living out of being depressed; all his work was about feeling miserable, looking miserable or thinking about misery (never, funnily enough, trying not to be miserable). As a result, he had a far from miserable lifestyle with a very large house in a lovely part of town and a much higher income than any of his less depressed colleagues. Eventually we realised: this man wasn't depressed - he was just a pain in the backside.
Even if you really are sick, it's still no excuse to foist all your symptoms on those around you. If you were covered in open sores or suffering from uncontrollable diarrhea you'd keep them to yourself, so why do we have to put up with people's mental equivalent?
A friend of mine on the dating scene was recently seeing a man who seemed quite charming and well-adjusted. They were getting along fine and then, without warning, he stood her up one night, leaving her waiting in the rain outside a restaurant. Next day he rang and said it was all over. No apology, no real explanation. All he said was: "I'm bipolar."
My single pals tell me this isn't unusual. Their dating war stories are riddled with examples of men who have appropriated the vocabulary of psychological dysfunction to excuse plain rudeness and laziness. Everything from 'too much baggage,' to 'low self-esteem,' to fully-fledged psychosis is wheeled out to explain behaviour for which the best treatment would be not pills but a slap round the ear.
One of my friends made an interesting point the other day. "Have you noticed that it's only middle class people who get chronic fatigue?" she said. "When was the last time you heard about a case in a factory worker or a single mum working three jobs to feed her kids?" She reckons the condition should be called WBC - Wingeing Because I Can.
My parents say they can't remember anyone at all suffering from it when they were younger. Nor can they remember adults with ADD or any of the other illnesses in the modern disorder epidemic.
In his book Therapy Culture which mourns the growing medicalisation of emotions, UK social commentator Frank Furedi points out that until recently, ADD or ADHD was just a children's disease. Now adults can join in. Equally depression, once the primary domain of adult women, is diagnosed in kids, men, pensioners and even animals. Eight year olds say they're stressed by school. Bad behaviour is dosed with drugs. Counselling and compensation are prescribed not just for the victims of crime, but their relatives, the eyewitnesses and even people watching the reports on TV. Everyone's a victim.
In celebrity world, illness and addiction is a fashion statement. Drunk and disorderly stars expect a pity party when they check into rehab for the umpteenth time. Ones who can't keep their pants on claim sex addiction and there's even an illness found only in rich, happy people called Paradise Syndrome. And if it isn't bad enough being asked to feel sorry for people who when I was at school would have been called malingerers and sent to the back of the class, we also have to listen to them bang on about their misfortunes in tell-all books and talk shows. I fear that very soon, we'll be assailed by Paris Hilton's litany of psychological woes. Whether they're real or not is anyone's guess, but I know this: some people have genuine, troubling illnesses, but they're usually the ones who keep quiet about them, try to get better and don't bother anyone else.
Being a right royal pain isn't a medical condition. You're just born that way.

• by Amy Cooper at 04:34 PM
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Let's not get too real

"Is that real?" is one of the phrases I hear most often in this job and the object of speculation could be anything from hair to a handbag to a fully-grown salt water crocodile or someone's entire body. Fakery is the foundation upon which the party scene is built. Illusion, smoke and mirrors, gaffer tape and low lighting are what holds it all together - people and places alike.

Actually, I don't mind. Stark reality is overrated - especially in the morning. But I do sometimes wonder where all this trickery will end.
I once had a friend who was so artificially enhanced she was practically bionic. Shoulder pads (this was the eighties) a suck-it-all-in slip with butt-lifting tights, and a bra that gave her cleavage where normally she was as flat as drunken karaoke. These borderline-prosthetic devices, combined with coloured contact lenses and hairpieces, created a seductive suit of armour. Inside it, dwelt a fairly normal-looking girl.
I never dared ask what happened when she shed it all in the bedroom but surely a man, witnessing the bum, boobs, hair, eyes and waist he'd fallen for coming off more easily than her stilettos, would be entitled to feel conned. After all, the product wasn't what was billed. If it was a movie, you'd want your money back.
Fakers could even be messing with evolution. One scientific theory says that attraction between men and women occurs visually when our genes detect other genes likely to match best with our own. What happens, though, if you can't see what genes you're getting because they're hidden under silicone, padding or surgery?
Imagine you're the perfect genetic match for a slender, floppy haired, milky-skinned individual with a pointy little nose and a fleeting resemblance to Diana Ross. You hook up with Michael Jackson - but of course, not the real one underneath, who's pretty much the opposite of all that. The result could be a genetic abomination worse even than the man-made one that spawned it.
If you decide to leave yourself unaltered, you'll be doing the right thing by Mother Nature. You'll also, say love boffins at The Social Issues Research Centre (SIRC), be able to judge who best suits your particular level of spunkiness, which is important. You should "target someone of the same level of attractiveness as yourself" to achieve maximum compatibility, they advise in a guide for singles.
"Studies have shown that the more evenly matched partners are in attractiveness, the more likely they are to stay together," it says.
Nice theory - but who's an accurate judge of their own attractiveness? Even when we've tricked it up and padded it out, self-image is a fragile, shifting thing. For women, especially, life can be a harrowing stroll through a psychological hall of mirrors. And when around 80 per cent of us believe we're too fat, how will we ever find enough huge-bummed, cellulite-dappled men out there to match our skewed self-assessment?
Men on the other hand, tend to over-estimate their attractiveness. Their imagination fills in the missing assets- inches, hair, hygiene, whatever. They don't have a woman's arsenal of body-boosting, flaw-concealing ammunition, either, so they tend to let it all hang out with a 'what you see is what you get' bravado. I'm sure this is why so many blokes bithely chat up girls way out of their league.
I don't recommend a sudden injection of reality into the party circuit, as this would needlessly traumatise its inhabitants. But perhaps everyone could carry with them a little snapshot of what they really look like. This would ensure no mating mistakes occurred. And it would be a bloody good laugh.

• by Amy Cooper at 12:29 AM
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I miss comedy hair

"Have you noticed how men have less hair these days?" said my friend as we sat in a window at the Bayswater Brasserie and watched the rain cascade in rivulets down the bald heads of passers-by.

I wasn't sure about that, but then I'd just been to Hair Expo, where thousands of hairdressers - many of them men - annually form a teased, spiked, bent, striped, frizzed and twisted forest. There, you can see all that is possible to be done with hair - except a style anyone would want to wear. The product fumes were asphyxiating and as my own hairdresser Dan pointed out, if anyone had lit a match the whole lot would have gone up like the Hindenburg.
But that's not the real world, and as I sat and watched Kings Cross' neon lights reflecting off a parade of naked domes like the Aurora Borealis over the arctic glaciers, it did seem there was more skin per head then there used to be.
I did a count at this week's parties. At four different functions I saw 43 bald men. Admittedly one of them was Michael Klim, poster boy for bald activists groups and so defiantly bald he counts as two.
Incidentally, hair has also vanished from chests. I'm lucky enough in this job to encounter topless male waiters regularly and you never see a strand mar the polished perfection of their pecs. But that might just be to help them slide more easily through the crowds and to keep crumbs from getting stuck.
My friend Debbie Lee thinks it's all the female hormones in the water system but she's forgetting that baldness is a sign of high testosterone and besides, none of these men have boobs or squeaky voices. What we're seeing is an increase in elective baldness I think men are shaving because it's safer. Now that they're are being exposed to as much grooming advice as women and have access to beauty services of their own, blokes have come to realise just how many wrong things you can do to your head. If in doubt they lose the lot, fearing the censure of the hair police.
When did you last see a real mullet or an extreme beard?
It's been a while for me, and I confess to rather missing those follicular disasters. Bald heads are neat and nice to stroke, but they're rather ... uniform. And they just can't compare with the rich mirth derived from a misguided man-ponytail or over-inflated bouffant.
There's an even greater casualty of all this deforestation which I fear may soon be extinct: that old family favourite, the combover. I can remember marvelling at the dexterity and determination required to build - and maintain - this complex creation. And now it's considered such a dying artform that there's a retrospective movie paying tribute to the wraparound do. and recording it for posterity.
I'm not the only one mourning men's homogenous heads. Pressure groups are starting to defend their right to hold onto their remaining strands or detract from their thinning pates with a statement beard. In the UK the beardies have their own Beard Liberation Front which campaigns against "beardist discrimination,' and in the US one man has patented the combover to protect it from being consigned to history's hall of shame.
There's nothing wrong with a fine head of skin, as Kelly Slater demonstrates delightfully. But experimental hair is fun to watch- especially for those of us who spend a lot of time at parties, forget names easily and require simple, visual aide memoires.
I'm wondering if we should also encourage the return of the wig and more imaginative use of hats.
Ladies: your views?

• by Amy Cooper at 11:53 PM
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Faithful? He must be gay, then

So Barbara Walters and her pals on US talk show The View are concerned about Our Hugh Jackman's sexuality. They reckon he could be a bit festive.
Let's ignore for a moment that it really shouldn't matter a hoot whether our spunkiest export's tastes veer towards men, women or inflatable frill-necked lizards and reflect upon the origins of the ladies' speculation, which - let's face it - we've all heard before.

Walters blames Jackman's role in the Broadway hit The Boy from Oz. People witnessing his flamboyant turn as Peter Allen, she says, believe he's really gay.

I'm sure some do. They're the ones who also believe Jackman's a wolf in real life because he keeps playing them in movies (in fact, they probably think he's a gay wolf). The rest of us merely give the bloke some credit for doing his job well.

Then there's that darker theory: Jackman's missus, according to the View's arbiters of aesthetics, doesn't score as highly as Hugh on the Hollywood hot-o-meter, and this means he must surely be more interested in men.

Remember, while most women would be only too delighted to wake up one morning looking like Deborra-Lee Furness, we're talking about the celebrity world's beauty standards, which deem only those women with the vital statistics of a fishing rod to be truly beautiful. But this isn't the point. Even if Mrs Jackman had a face like a welder's bench, no-one these days would seriously take this to mean that her husband batted for the other team.

True, there's a certain breed of male celebrity who feels compelled to advertise his heterosexuality by dangling only the most Hollywood-perfect women on his arm. But these blokes are a dying breed in a world where even the most alpha males can break celebrity mating conventions and pick older, curvier, or cleverer women without raising an eyebrow.

So why the gossip? Here's my theory: one of the distinguishing characteristics of the Jackman union is that it appears to be monogamous. There have been no kiss n' tell flings; no rumours about Hugh's sexy co-stars. He hasn't been busted in strip clubs, had a night in Paris or emerged from Cameron Diaz' crib at sunrise. This makes people suspicious. Sad but true: we still find it hard to believe in the power of real love, and so expect rich, cute, heterosexual, famous men eventually to get caught with the wrong woman. If they don't - well, they must be gay.

I think the gossip about Jackman's predilections has less to do with his choice of woman than the fact that he's actually made a choice - and stuck to it. And if he was the sort of man to care what anyone thought about his bedroom habits, just one tasty skirt-chasing rumour is all it would take to clear up the speculation once and for all.
Hugh, if you need me, my skirt is ready and willing.

• by Amy Cooper at 10:56 PM
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