I was at the Palmerston North Plaza shopping centre a couple of weeks ago looking at the directory sign that describes the shops and their location. The premises are colour coded and I counted the womenswear outlets and there were nineteen.
There were just three menswear shops.
So nineteen to three is apparently the ratio of importance the genders place on their outward appearance.
I noticed however that department stores were separately coded. The Farmers store in the Plaza is huge. As you walk in the door you encounter a gleaming white tiled floor that announces the makeup, perfumes and jewellery section. The goddesses behind the counters with redder than red lipstick and blushed cheeks smell and look gorgeous.
You hurry past them in case your own dowdiness presents too great a contrast.
The women’s clothing section takes up most of the rest of the vast store with a wee corner set aside for apparel for the mere male; so you can alter that ratio to twenty and three and a half.
The women’s underwear section in The Farmers has to be seen to be believed. Now I don’t want to paint the wrong picture here. I am in this area traipsing behind my wife and my daughter carefully averting my eyes away from the racks and racks and rows and rows of women’s bras and other undergarments in various sizes, shapes, colours and designs. Lace in its element and then there’s the exotic and erotic lingerie section with raiment of shimmering transparency.
I am eternally embarrassed when the female section of my family repair to the changing rooms and I am left the only male within a thousand square metres. I look around desperately for another member of my gender, but there are none.
Of course these are not the only shops set aside for female exclusivity. There are hair salons and manicurists and fashionable shoe shops where women can acquire high heels that look agonisingly difficult to wear, but admittedly enhance the appearance of the wearer.
The chemist shops compete with The Farmers and have a myriad of shelves devoted to makeup and perfumes and there are now shops that sell a product that was virtually unheard of a decade or so ago called “bling.”
Women feel obliged to be dedicated followers of fashion and yet on some occasions it works against them.
In an interview with Susan Wood on Q and A last week Australia’s immediate-past Prime Minister Julia Gillard talked of the misogyny she encountered in Australian politics and the news media’s concentration on what she wore and her hair style rather than the substance of what she was saying and doing. Her male counterparts, she said, have a constant uniform that never changes and attracts neither comment nor criticism.
So have our womenfolk fallen hook, line and sinker for the clever marketing ploys of the fashion designers?
Do the skeletal models that walk the catwalks of the western world have the rest of the sisterhood under such a spell that regular wardrobe upgrades are mandatory?
Have our fairer sex in fact made a rod for their own backs?
I was still standing by the directory when I endeavoured to envisage a shopping mall in a male-dominated Islamic country. I imagined just one dress shop with racks and racks of dull blue/grey burka’s purportedly designed to diminish the desire of the menfolk. No need for a hair salon, but a shoe shop with a modest range of sensible sandals - and that’s about it really.
Surprisingly, Islamic women appear to willingly accept these enforced dress codes and when westerners have sought to overturn these seemingly repressive customs those under apparent subjugation have spurned their succour.
This alien society would also be devoid of any liquor stores and so retailing would hardly play a part in their economy. Shopping malls I presume would be few and far between.
Julia Gillard in a burka perhaps?
No worse I suppose than Tony Abbott in speedos.
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