Sex, Gender, Becoming - PULP

Shopping for gender 77
adults, for many it has become just another routine responsibility for
which they have little inclination. 102
Despite this, statistics worldwide confirm that women still do the
most shopping. A report from Great Britain in 1982 found that 80 per
cent of domestic purchases were made by women, or were influenced
by them, 103 and an American study from 1986 claimed that 85 per
cent of mall shoppers were female. 104 Goss surmises that because of
the gendered division of labour, 67 per cent of shoppers are female,
even though the activity is increasingly being associated with males.
The space manager for Old Mutual Properties agrees that women in
South Africa do 90 per cent of the shopping, 105 and women make most
of the decisions regarding purchases for the family. 106 Carol Grolman,
marketing director of Woolworths, confirms that ‘women are still the
shoppers in South Africa and the real money is to be made by making
retailing styles more female-friendly. Men are lazy shoppers ... men
in South Africa don’t even buy their own underwear — women do it for
them’. 107
A further gendered construct in relation to shopping concerns ‘family
shopping’. The notion of shopping as an integral component of the
nuclear family unit is important because it underlines one of the
crucial contexts in which the relationship between consumption and
identity formation is constructed. Moreover, the familial context of
shopping signifies the dominant and naturalised context of consumption
and division of labour in patriarchal society. The perception
of the mall as a space for families is a gendered construction framed
by the historical link between women and shopping. The reality is that
few families enjoy shopping together; parents want to get away from
their young children, and teenagers do not want to be seen shopping
with their parents. 108 The idea that families that shop together stay
together is a social myth based on a specific cluster of capitalist
values. The myth of the family is often invoked as a metaphor to
reinforce the ambience of shopping malls as warm, safe, convenient,
friendly, and welcoming places 109 — in other words, in terms of socalled
feminine characteristics. The stereotypically representative
nuclear family of two parents and a boy and a girl is fore-grounded as
a unit of blissful consumption in a print advertisement for the Board
of Executors (2003). This shows the patriarch leading his family home
after a fruitful day of consumption in upmarket London stores such as
102
Underhill (n 9 above) 114-115.
103 Lancaster (n 65 above) 202.
104 Friedberg (n 62 above) 449.
105
S Burdett ‘Mall fever’ (2003) May Fairlady 174.
106 J Cameron ‘Designed to shop “til you drop”’ (2000) September Fairlady 73.
107 Sampson (n 89 above) 76.
108
Miller (n 4 above) 97-102.
109 Miller (n 4 above) 93-94, 96, 104-105.