Women shop, Men drop

It isn’t true men are afraid of commitment. At least not until women utter those three little words:

Let’s go shopping.

Men are unable to comprehend this sweeping, amorphous, all encompassing word. Shopping. It brings to mind images of several dollar bills springing wings and flying away. The kind you see in cartoon films and comics. Except that life is not a comic book and the joke is on us.

A man’s idea of shopping is pretty specific. If, say, we want after-shave, we go to the chemist and pick up after-shave. We don’t decide, upon reaching the chemist, that while we’re here we may as well stock up on ice cream, Alka Seltzer, mints, Aspirin and anything else that catches our fancy (or our hypochondria).

Sure we go crazy at gizmo stores and window shop more than we should. We may even buy the odd iPod mini (and we’ll pick up the pink one if it makes you happy, hon). But gadget stores are the exception in an otherwise sane shopper’s behaviour.

With women, it works the other way. It is very rare that you go out and buy only what you set out to buy. You flirt with store shelves. You try everything from lip gloss to lingerie. You spritz perfume from sampler bottles on your left wrist, then you right wrist, then, having run out of wrists, you summon our wrists (spare us that bromide about women not using men for their bodies) and when done with us, proceed to spray assorted strips of paper before imperiously strolling out in a cloud of Ferragamo, Gaultier and Chanel. The male of the species always gets his timing wrong, we do not know at exactly what point we should whirl and leave the store. So we face the wrath of the snooty sales staff’s frosty gaze.

The entire experience of shopping seems to have evolved around a woman’s basic instinct to top up the shopping. You go for a haircut and stay on for hair colour. You pick up clothes and decide you want shoes to match. Or vice versa. You go for a massage and pick up aromatherapy oils from the spa store. You shop at the Singapore Shopping Festival and then pick up duty free on the flight back. The only impediment to straying from store to store was inter store distance. But the malls are the ultimate seduction for retail promiscuity.

Over time, we came to accept that men can’t be too rich, women can’t be too thin, have too many clothes or too many Manolos. You countered our resistance by saying that you wanted to go everywhere together and do everything together and shopping was no exception. We, however, felt this was just a whole load of mush and that you took us shopping because you needed someone to swipe a credit card and carry the bags (not necessarily in that order).

Of course, this was in the age of single income nuclear families. Somewhere down the line you decided to have a career of your own and the tables turned. You got your own pay packet, your own credit card, your own car and driver. That burst our notional bubble of indispensability.

We felt sheepish. We stopped complaining. In a bid to conform, we even started to put beauty products on our shopping lists, we decided we didn’t mind looking pretty, streaking our hair and hydrating our skin, if need be.

But deep down, fear is the key. Earlier, we were afraid to go with you. Now, we are afraid of NOT going with you. We accept that a woman can now go shopping without a man. What we fear, perhaps, is that a woman can shop for pretty much anything these days. Even a man.

This piece appeared in the Femina issue dated February 1, 2006