Having confessed that I don't like museums, I am now ready to reveal that I also don't like shopping. This is unlikely to get picked up by the major news services: "Guy doesn't like shopping!" Of course I don't like shopping, men never like shopping.
That's a stereotype, I know. But last weekend I entered (with my wife) a Coach store at an outlet mall (Guy footnote: Coach is a store that sells inexplicably expensive handbags). The place was teeming with women and girls who swarmed around each table of handbags, evidently appreciating their subtle details and differences in ways that far exceed my mental capacities. It would be easier to teach a chimpanzee calculus than to teach me to understand and appreciate Coach bags.
So, that's all very interesting, you say, or maybe it's not so interesting, but in any case what's the point? Well, I'm kind of intrigued by a historical fact, namely that museums and department stores started to appear in our society at roughly the same time, the late 19th century. Now, there were private collections of art and artifacts earlier than this, and of course there were stores and markets earlier than this, but large scale displays of stuff, available to the general public to look at or to buy, began to appear about 150 years ago. This suggests, at least as a speculation, that there is a connection between museums and shopping, beyond the fact that I can't tolerate either of them.
Those who have studied the matter have suggested a number of possible reasons why public displays of stuff began to appear when they did. For me, what makes most sense is that these were early forms of today's entertainment culture. Long before we could tell stories and present desirable products via film and television, it was still possible to just collect a bunch of stuff in an impressive building and have people be awed by it. As I said before, in our culture material objects can acquire a kind of celebrity, which means that people become utterly fascinated with these objects. Think for example of a product fad-people will wait in line for hours to get their hands on a particular toy or electronic device or whatever.
But to return to where I began, although men can get just as worked up about some desirable object as women, there is indeed some evidence that at least some men are less able to process hundreds of desirable objects gathered in the same place. Malcolm Gladwell summarized some of this research in his typical amusing and accessible style in a New Yorker article on the rise of khaki pants. It turns out that marketers have known for years that men and women react differently to advertising images-women can process much more detail than men can, at least in our culture. I'm going to use this to argue that I should be excluded from the next shopping or museum trip, that it's not my fault, that my brain is simply not up to it. It's worth a try.
For more information, please visit Peter G. Stromberg's website. Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dovcharney/3112212736/
