THE SHOPPING SEX, OR, WHERE DID DARWIN GO WRONG?

The winter sales are over, in Rome, and one sees many men who, by their prison pallor, show that they have just emerged from their bunkers or hide-outs and returned to a normal life. There is no doubt that men and women have two very different approaches to shopping, and this seems to hold true from Patagonia to Reykjavik, from Honolulu, due East, to Smolensk.

If a guy – for example me – needs a pair of shoes, he will amble down a less fashionable street and, having spotted a likely pair in a window will pop in to ask if these are available in black and in size so-and-so. If the answer is affirmative, he will try them on only to give the attendant something to do, and dash back home again in time for a cup of tea and a relaxing pipe.

The lady of the house, instead, will start fretting about footwear some ten days earlier, casting despondent glances in the closet where her 28 pairs of assorted shoes are stored, and then, catching the man unawares will drag him, kicking and screaming, to the poshest street in town. They will trudge from shop to shop, and an infinite number of shoes will be tried on, while, at the same time, a side sortie will be made to buy a necktie for the man, who really doesn’t want one. Finally, battle scarred and barely cognizant, the head of the family returns home and unburdens himself of parcels containing at least four pairs of shoes, two pairs of gloves, the much resisted necktie and sundry other items.

The question, which has Darwinian overtones is not whether this happens, nor, really, why, but actually when did this begin.

If we cast our minds back a few millennia, to, say, the stone age, we see that the man of the cave did the shopping: he would take his club, foray out, bash in the heads of some edible creatures and, possibly, of some obnoxious neighbours and, upon returning to his cave would explain exactly how he wanted his Tournedos Rossini, and they better be done right.

Nor do I think that Beatrice took Dante window shopping in the magnificent streets of Florence and the closest perusal of the correspondence between Abelard and Eloise will show no mention of winter or summer sales.

I believe that this tendency – one of the many symptoms of the end of civilization as we know it – began sometime in the second half of the Nineteenth Century, probably in England, when all the goods brought back from Imperial conquest made it imperative to create a consumer society and women, to whom so many pleasures were denied, seemed like the ideal candidates to fulfil the role of consumers, while their men were in the Tropics making the world a safer place by pacifying successive groups of natives, thus reducing their numbers and making them much more subservient and useful producers of ever more goods to be consumed.

Does anyone have a different theory?