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My husband dresses me
He chooses everything. I long gave up buying my own clothes
Men hate shopping. It is now official. A survey - commissioned by a shopping centre - has just discovered what most people already knew, that men don't like shopping and tend to get upset when forced into it, as they are more and more these days. Women, on the contrary, positively like shopping.
It seems that a lot of serious researchers have spent a lot of time following selected shoppers round department stores, measuring their blood pressure and their heart rate and their stress factors, and have established that shopping is actually bad for men's blood pressure. Women, by contrast, seem to get through it with very little anguish, even with children in tow.
One must try not to object to these surveys. There is really very little harm in this sort of job creation, which provides purposeful and paid activity for people who are doing nothing more sinister than establishing the obvious. And I suppose this particular survey might serve the useful purpose not just of establishing the obvious, but of reminding people of it, which in this case is that men are usually very different from women, and ought, therefore, not to be expected to fulfil the same functions.
No doubt there are all kinds of evolutionary explanations, about men being hunters and women being gatherers, but common sense alone will tell you that men usually shop badly, and reluctantly, and indeed rather pathetically. I don't think they should be made to do it, least of all if it's bad for their blood pressure.
I hate seeing men shopping glumly in supermarkets, obediently following their wives round the high-fibre cereals or sanctimoniously pushing jumbo trolleys of disposable nappies. That kind of man looks all wrong to me; the male supermarket shopper is like a hunting dog transformed into a poodle, wagging what little remains of his tail and hardly aware of his unnatural and rather comic servitude.
There must be some, or more likely many, who resent this new dispensation; it is only since the feminism of the Seventies that men have had to shop in supermarkets, and - even more important - be seen to shop. In one of my husband's favourite comic scenes, at the beginning of The Wimbledon Poisoner by Nigel Williams, the resentful and murderous husband, sent off to the supermarket for the week's supplies, notes with pleasure at the check-out that not one single thing in his trolley corresponds with the list imposed upon him by his wife.
Women who force men to shop are not just playing fast and loose with their partners' arteries; they are also playing with fire, or possibly with poison.
However, all stereotypes are made to be smashed. I, though a woman, loathe shopping. Apart from buying food and things for small children, which I enjoy, shopping makes me feel quite ill - no doubt it makes my blood pressure soar, just like a man's. Even bookshops make me want to leave at once. In almost all shops I feel overwhelmed by a yammering inner monologue about trivial choice, or major choice, and by the deluge of things I don't want, or that my children ought not to want, or that won't suit anyone I know, or that are cluttering up the world with unnecessary and hideous junk.
Even shopping for Christmas stockings is no longer a pleasure. I once read of another survey about shopping, which was unforgettably sad. It said, all too plausibly, that most people only feel "empowered" when they are shopping in malls. For me it is the opposite. It is only when I am shopping that I feel beside myself with indecision, confusion and a longing to be somewhere else.
Fortunately I am married to someone who also defies the stereotype, a man who genuinely loves shopping and is good at it. I don't mean supermarket shopping; my husband would consider it a defeat to find himself behind a trolley. Nor do I mean department stores, which make him oddly irrational, as per the stereotype. I mean everything else, all those things that are fun or interesting or difficult to buy.
He even buys all my clothes. I long since gave up trying to do it myself. Occasionally I buy a pair of shoes - I am considered reasonably sound on footwear - but otherwise he chooses everything, very often when I am not there, and often in sales, when clothes can't be returned. They always fit perfectly. I realise that this is very odd and not at all empowering, but as someone who loathes shopping, I think I'm very lucky.
There are some odd consequences of it, though. My image is not my own, or not my own idea. My husband's taste is not mine and our view of me is not the same. I have been wearing black or grey for years, against my nature. I lurch from boldly understated in subversive grey to alarming decolletage in glitter; sometimes in the Eighties I used to feel like a female impersonator, in a skin-tight Lycra leopard-skin sausage dress, for instance, wobbling on Vivienne Westwood Minnie Mouse platform shoes: I sometimes think my husband indulges his sense of humour at my expense. But it is quite fun to pretend to be oneself when one isn't.
However unfeminine this may be, absolutely anything beats shopping especially as the alternative shopper in my life is much better at it than I am, defying not only me but both survey and stereotype.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, December 06, 1998
