The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [81]
Still, though the supermarket in this new paradigm carries some of the killer threats of food in the past, a trip to the supermarket is always a win. Despite the rarity of its happening, we all have an image in our minds of someone winning a “millionth shopper jackpot” at the cash register of a supermarket. The unspoken feeling is that food shopping in a supermarket is always a victory, despite the real loss of capital. Food abundance is not performed at home. Its key experience is at the store, seeing it all and putting whatever you want into your basket. Because food shopping is a necessary and repetitive task, it becomes a chore. That it is widely envisioned as women’s work does not help its allure. Nevertheless, we encounter the wealth of our culture when we go to the supermarket, and shopping for food recalls the primary jump from real-life scarcity to fairy-tale abundance.
Let’s now turn from food shopping to the more purely symbolic ways we nourish ourselves at the market. The shopping that people mean when they say “I love shopping” tends to revolve around the purchase of clothing. Why should that be such a source of happiness? Shopping for clothes is an opportunity to show yourself and others what you are worth. New clothes suggest that you are safe and aggressive, wanted, visible to protectors, yet camouflaged from critics and predators by being one of the healthy pack. This can be absorbing work. Clothes shopping is an opportunity to sheathe yourself in something that has a market value—and, weird as it is, there are no laws about what you may choose. In the past, dressing beyond your social station has usually been illegal, or at least despised. In ancient Rome, only patricians could wear red shoes. In the medieval world, purple cloth was for royalty. Nowadays, clothes have clear symbolic value, but you get to pick the value. Choose too low, and people will wonder why you dishonor yourself; chose too high, and people will wonder why you put so much effort into your sheath. Choose studded leather, and they will know you have been threatened and are in armor. How we dress is a very subtle science. Sherlock Holmes and television crime-scene investigation agents can tell a lot from a hat fiber, but most of us read a person for the gist of him or her. Jsut lkie yuo cna raed tihs even though the letters are rearranged, you get a significant visual impression of a person without sounding out the details. Shopping is an opportunity to make choices, and to reconfirm or reinvent one’s roles. Of course, cars and houses are just value sheaths that sit a little farther from the skin. Men shop for things we buy less often than once a year—big things, things that usually can be resold. Clothes shopping represents a more regular maintenance or adjustment of one’s value, a grooming of one’s image.
Shopping also holds our interest because it acts out some deep human dramas. Buying clothes is a celebration of freedom from the heavy tasks of keeping one’s family clothed. The pleasure of shopping may seem far removed from memories of bleeding fingers at the loom and long nights spent spinning, but historically speaking, women were enslaved to these tasks only moments ago and all the way back into time immemorial. Women’s clothes shopping is the enacting of an immeasurable modern triumph—the escape from endless tasks of fabric work. The first and greatest industry of the Industrial Revolution was textiles. Standard dates for the Industrial Revolution are from 1750 to 1850, and it would be another fifty years before there began a revolution of steel, chemicals, and technology. The “stuff” of industrialism, originally and foremost, was clothing. The massive proliferation of