I may have figured out women!
Monday, January 09, 2012
Ok, no not 100% or anything, but I did have some errands to run over my lunch, and I think I may have figured out a little bit of the female psyche. Specifically...shopping.
Insert "Can't stop a WOMAN from shopping" in your best Chris Rock voice here.
So Kendle's birthday is coming up, and she has told me that she would like a new bathrobe from Victoria's Secret. I wen't to two separate stores (no small feat in this crazy city) to be turned away by both. I was not allowed to buy what I wanted.
This was shocking to me. See, when I buy things, typically it's just video games. They ALWAYS have video games. There are whole stores devoted to having OLD video games, so even when something is out of print, you can still find it. I've never been told that I can't have something while shopping. When I shop for clothes (you know...every 4 or 5 years), I just buy what they have in the store. If I don't see something I like...it's onto the next store. No big deal.
So that's where I was on shopping. It's NBD. But then on the long disappointing walk back to work, I started thinking, and came up with this theory.
We used to be hunter/gatherers. Specifically, women would go out and search for the best berries or pieces of firewood. They took their time, found the best stuff and brought it back so that society could move forward. It was a very important job.
Dudes? They were typically the hunters. They went out and trapped or fought and killed whatever they could. It was also an important job, but you can see where the ability to choose a specific prey was dictated by what ran the slowest.
So through natural selection and generations upon generations of people, the ones who survived were probably the ones who's gatherers found the best (ie not rotten, won't get you sick, etc) food. There was probably some sort of innate drive to find the best stuff.
So you see, now that we have supermarkets and big chain grocery stores, the need to search for the best food has become mindless. Add in marketing and brands and it gets even simpler. Go to the store, buy a can of your favorite brand of carrots. You barely have to look at what you are buying. So how do our gatherers fulfill that need? Shopping. Hunting for the best deals, the thrill of finding that prize piece, having that thing that no one else has.
And that's why women shop, and somehow retailers have keyed in to this very basic need and have "seasons" for things, or limit supply.
Also to further drive home my point. Guys are really good at pattern matching and viewing things in 3d. Which are awesome skills for picking out the shape of a panther in the jungle, but not so great for say, picking out a ripe apple, from one thats just past ripe and will make you sick. It's a much broader "get the overall feel" set of skills. Which is why guys don't always understand why a woman will scrutinize over 12 red sweaters. Guys see "Red" and "Sweater" and we are done. Girls see the stitching, the feel of the fabric, and the details on the neckline.
So that's my theory. Now the best part about all this is the next time your lady friend is taking forever to find something and she holds up three of the exact same pants and asks your opinion, you can bow out! "Sorry honey, I'm a guy, I dont see details. You are the gatherer, you know WAY better which one is best" and then point her to this blog. While she's reading you can excuse yourself to video game store or go play with all the fun stuff at Spencers.
Labels: Kendle, life lessons, rant
