Women Shopping – Velvette Von Clare

July 26, 2024

There are two men who stock the clothing store. It is all women’s clothing, bad dupes for designer, with cutouts in entirely impractical places and fabric just a few threads from transparent. The walls are bright white, the clothes are packed into the rack in a tight line, Katy Perry is playing on the speakers. Everything in the store is under ten dollars. There are three employees from what I can tell. One woman working the counter, two men chasing the girl customers as they shop, running to fix the clothes after they are repeatedly picked over and demolished. There is more clothing than space on the rack, it is filled to the brim. Metal hangers stick out like mangled arms from a gravesite, catching and impaling the garments on their jagged edges.

The two men rush to restock the shelves the second an item is removed. But the shopping women are faster and more plentiful than them. The racks are continuously destroyed faster than they can be fixed. Women leave the store and more enter in their place. Pretend you are Sisyphus, but instead of pushing that big rock around, you trail after indifferent women all day long, collecting their abandoned bras and miniskirts. I imagine these two men crawling, weary-eyed, out of their apartments into the cold, wet morning. Clocking in at the store for weeks that stretch into months that stretch into years. I imagine them returning home and turning away from their wives and daughters. There is a hot meal in the kitchen, but they do not see it, they can not see it, they scoff at the stacked dishes in the sink. 

I can imagine them deriving a sensation akin to hatred from this daily servitude at the clothing store. I can imagine them coming to the conclusion that women’s pleasure, joy, expression comes at their expense. I can imagine them stopping at their daughters’ room on their silent walk to bed. The door is ajar, begging them to peek through. A pile of their daughters’ clothes, the same cheap clothes they slave over daily, is on the floor. The two men would surge with anger at the sight of the same situation that occupies their entire life replicated again, here, in the space that should serve as their sanctuary. Women everywhere dumping their things on the floor so carelessly, spoiled and unbothered. Getting away with it. Each man, shrouded in darkness, would then begin to drink. When the men are good and drunk, their attention would fall upon the clothes again. 

Full of resentment and drunken rebelliousness, a zipper is undone, and a warm stream of piss seeps into the frilly pink fabric. The man is pissing not just on the clothes, but on his wasted days, on his forced silence, on the very principle of serving these beautiful and self important creatures. It is just, it is right, it is deserved. It is, at the very least, an action as opposed to a non-action. What is there for a man to do but take action into his own hands? It is destroying what destroyed him. Women and their stuff, their constant mess. To his daughter, who will face the piss pile in a few hours when she returns from seeing her friends, it is her father’s misogyny dripping into her carpet, staining her bedroom. It is deplorable, it is an outcry. It could be argued that it is the woman’s right, this lack of care, when we act as customers in a store. But no matter what role we are inhabiting, we still act this way. How unattainable we are only adds to our perceived value. 

This lack of interest, of sympathy, is deeply feminine in nature. We destroy precarious arrangements of people and things in search of our exact preferences. We do not apologize if we do not find them. We simply turn away from the rubble when we discover there is nothing more for us to extract from a person or a place. In pursuit of perfection we disregard the consequences our impulses carry. We are present for as long as it serves us, and then we are not. We are allowed to ignore, to turn our nose up, to look away. In fact, we are more than allowed, we are encouraged to do so. Our attention must be won. It is not, and should not, be given for free. Our gaze is currency and we love shopping. Even when we leave the store, we are still shopping. We are always shopping, shopping for a boyfriend, a drink we don’t have to pay for, shopping for a warm body who won’t be offended when you tell it that it can’t stay the night. 

Some women prefer to think of shopping as collecting, but face it, if there is one thing that unites women across all styles and cultures and interests, it is this: we all love stuff. There is an inherent need to decorate. We make out of our bodies and our spaces a shrine to beauty. We collect and spill out objects and expect others, men, to clean it for us, or at the very least tolerate the mess, because we know they will, and they do. They have no choice. We use these objects, this mess, to adorn ourselves and be admired like jewels. When we say “I’m just a girl” what we really mean is “I’m an object of beauty and that alone allows me to enrich my world.” Non-action is a position of power for women. Non-action is a status symbol. When we leave the clothes on the floor without care, we are acting in opposition to the notion that women are housemaids. When we make a mess, it is always in a girlboss way. Past efforts of feminism shield us, and now dawns the modern era, in which we are at last the cultural manipulators.

At the clothing store, the job of the two men is to constantly repair the damage of women shopping. After years of that, who wouldn’t be a misogynist, and rightfully so. So what’s the solution? Stop being princesses? Pay more attention to men? To that I say: if men were properly satiated and taken care of, who would watch our performance? Who would be there to tell us how our jewels shine in the sun? They would not have to court us if we chased them. We are just girls, we don’t know any better, and we don’t have to.