The Idler

Sick of Shopping

CLARE POLLARD has better things to do.

I am a woman. According to the lazy, offensive generalizations of popular culture, this means that I’m constantly worried about the size of my arse, addicted to chocolate, from Venus, and I love - I mean absolutely LOVE - shopping.

Arseless, cheese-loving earth dweller though I am, it’s the shopping part that most annoys me. It’s always a big joke - woman drags bored man around the mall, him moaning about missing Man City away, her orgasmic over those cutting-edge red patent courts… But it’s actually not that funny. I find the mugs you can buy teenage girls in cards shops, with their jaunty cartoon characters and motto: BORN TO SHOP as depressing as the little girl’s T-shirts that say PRINCESS. Shopping is not a leisure activity. Shopping is for when you want to buy things, which unless you’re incredibly rich or indecisive - and give or take the odd trip to Tesco for bread, wine and loo roll - really shouldn’t take up more than a couple of hours of your month.

My hatred of this gender stereotype really began during a weekend with some mates in Bournemouth. We’d all been sunbathing and having a splash in the sea, and at last decided to move on from the beach. At this point I made the error of going to the loo. On my return, I was informed that the boys were going to play crazy golf then go to the pub, whilst the girls were all going shopping. Sorry, but for God’s sake! Watching someone try on shorts and decide whether they give her a camel-toe, or crazy golf and beer? I couldn’t believe how deeply these girls had been brainwashed. It’s like those women who go bankrupt buying shoes. Not champagne and exotic holidays and good times. Shoes. You want to scream at them: it’s okay love, the black ones go with everything! It can’t be much more fun than going bankrupt buying frying pans or cushions.

And then there’s window-shopping. Window-shopping. Ugh. Wandering around soulless arcades past faux-marble pillars and glass elevators, that pumped cookie smell, David Gray quietly whining in your ears as you press your nose against the glass, thinking: I want that sheepskin coat, I want that Chanel limited edition compact, I need that Gucci-look handbag. For me. For ME! Whether it’s pitiful or just plain greedy, the effect is of thousands of manicured Gollums taking over the town centre every weekend.

“Greed” though - that’s a word that’s not used often these days. You’d be forgiven for thinking it had dropped out of the Top Seven Deadly Sins. All the adverts for shampoos, spa baths, ice cream, sickly liqueurs - “Because You’re Worth It,” “Indulge,” “You Deserve It.” Journeying on the tube can sometimes feel like being Christ in the wilderness. Am I the only woman in the world to think: no, actually. I don’t really deserve a Radiant Skin Flash Balm, as I’ve sat on my bum all day emailing and drinking tea?
Before I begin to sound like a hippy, I’m not against nice things. I like a new dress or CD as much as the next person. What I find distasteful is the fetishising of the act of consumption, the constant stress on spoiling yourself through purchase, which leads to people buying things they don’t need, or appreciate, or even want that much. “Retail Therapy” perhaps epitomises this trend. Feeling low? Why don’t you buy a nail polish! Manic Depression? What you really need is some lacy knickers! The whole concept is a nonsense. Unhappy people should watch a cheesy film, or phone their up mum for a chat, not be encouraged to run up a potentially even more depressing credit card bill. And talking of money, I saw the vilest advert in my Natwest the other day, showing a woman um-ing and ah-ing over a red and a white version of the same dress, and encouraging her to get out a personal loan to buy both. A loan. To get two versions of the same dress, because she doesn’t know whether she prefers red or white. No wonder this country has a debt problem.

So anyway, my main point is, I don’t think you are ever allowed to call yourself a feminist again if you even think of purchasing India Knight’s book, The Shops (Viking) (and any man who buys it for his girlfriend should be immediately dismissed.) It’s perhaps not as hideous as it had potential to be, but, oh - who am I kidding? She uses language like “delish,” “yumorama,” “swoonorama” and “skinny-pinny.” From her awesome heights of snobbery, she calls anything bought at Iceland The Food of Shame, (even frozen cheesecake apparently, which I’ve always found quite innocuous,) says of shop bought ready-meals: “Waitrose and M&S are the least revolting” and informs us that the cheapest decent standard lamp you can get costs ��75.

Her protestations that she isn’t a “repulsive capitalist monster, urged on by greed and the need to acquire and amass” begin to ring a little hollow after a while, especially as every time she’s defending the thrill of shopping she mentions, say, flowers, hair bobbles and lollipops, whereas the rest of the time she’s insisting that the only straightening irons worth buying cost ��88, and that if you “can’t be arsed to cook but shun the microwave” you want to order “thyme-rich” beef stew and “pistachio meringues that look like works of art” from The Grocer on Elgin. Oh, not an oven-chip sandwich then? (Or, sorry, is that the Food of Shame?)

India Knight lives in a world where godparents start laying down wines at Berry Bros. for a christening present, and suggests you buy boys of six-to-eight dinosaur eggs that start “at a couple of hundred quid.” Her book’s the most shameless piece of showing off that I’ve ever witnessed. And the really, really cringeworthy bits are when she occasionally remembers poor people might be reading and says, of course, if you can’t afford perfume for Les Senteurs for your mum’s birthday, you can draw her up a voucher to say that you’ll paint her nails. Like anyone’s mother wouldn’t be bitterly disappointed by that. Or better yet, when she suggests that to reach the “true Heaven” of a goose feather duvet, you could: “get everyone you know to donate a fiver at your next birthday.” (At ��335 that would be 67 of them, so I’m guessing for a lot of us that might involve a whip-round at work and a plea to the barmaid in our local.)

Such touches only serve to remind us that this book participates in popular culture’s pornographic attitude to wealth. Like Sex and the City, with all its money-shots of Carrie sliding her foot into a new Manolo, the real message of The Shops is that “buying the big 1930s leather sofa will make your life better.” It won’t. It won’t even make you cool - it’s a well known fact that really cool people rummage at second hand shops and make things themselves and get their furniture from skips (or maybe that last one’s just me.) But constantly displaying unobtainable objects to the majority of people in this country, who can’t afford them, does cause unhappiness.

In today’s Britain, most of us don’t have much leisure time - especially women, who too often end up shouldering the bulk of the housework and childcare as well. Why spend your precious weekends buying a lifestyle you will never have the time to enjoy? If we all bought less, we might even find we didn’t need to work so hard. OK, so perhaps purchasing a small fridge to keep her eye pencils hard does cause a surge of joy for India Knight, but joy can also be found in lots of free things - like Scrabble, for instance, or a walk in the park, or tea and a natter at a mate’s flat - that aren’t as pointless, ecologically damaging, or, well, boring really. Maybe I am a bit of a hippy, but that’s better than being Born to Shop, and on those occasions I do feel like being a decadent western spendthrift, it at least involves a meal out, friends and lashings of red wine, not a frigging blouse.

Taken from Idler 33