I hope you all know that M. is now 30. I think this is awesome, as I no longer have to date someone in their twenties… This birthday gave me an opportunity to go shopping for items for M., which ended up being quite an experience for this woman, shopping for items coded ‘boy’ for someone not herself.
In the past, birthday shopping for M. was a process very closely approximating excruciating torture. M. at one point had no interests but work, sleep, and going for long walks. None of these activities are very conducive to suggesting exciting birthday gifts. But over the last year, M. has developed not only interests, but hobbies, making shopping so much easier!
So my list this year looked like this:
1. Fuente 0pus X (a high-end cigar with somewhere near the flavour profile that M. likes)
2. Chrome Z!ppo, engraved with her initial.
3. Pocket knife
4. New white dress shirt with french cuffs (this so that M. can wear the awesome cufflinks that I gave her on the occasion of our wedding. She didn’t wear them when we got married, but that’s a different story, perhaps one M. will tell).
Let me tell you about my experience shopping for these items. The lighter, I bought online, in a brilliant stroke of genius, while sitting in my underwear in the living room. Shopping online is amazing. However, I am not a good advance planner when it comes to gifts. Often inspiration strikes late, and I have to trudge all over half the city the day before the event, desperately trying to do it the old-fashioned way.
So, I shopped for a shirt. I walked into an all-men’s store and looked around me. I don’t shop in this kind of environment very much,if ever. Department stores are easier to manage, as all the sections sort of bleed into each other a little bit. I feel very, very conspicuous when I walk in, but I play it cool and walk right over to the shirts. I gaze at the wall in dismay: the shirts start at a 15” neck. Well, M.’s neck is smaller than that. A 14.5, to be precise. At this moment, an enthusiastic and dapper grey-haired gentleman with a measuring tape around his neck comes up to me and asks me if I need assistance. I ask him if he has any shirts with a 14.5” neck. He looks at me and says they are hard to find. I say no kidding. He looks through every display and comes up short, offers to order one. I say not yet, I’m holding out. I find the one (ONE) shirt that is M’s size in the whole store, and pick it up. Then, I survey the ties.
Up pops the salesman again, who has kept an eagle eye on me the whole time I’ve been in the store: ”does he prefer skinny ties?” Christ. Yes. ”He” does. Obviously, being ’skinny’, M. does indeed prefer skinny ties. So I say yes. But I feel really weird about it. The first time it was assumed that I was shopping for a man, I came home and told M. that she had been mis-pronouned, and that it made me feel weird. But M. told me that there is no wrong pronoun. So I don’t correct people anymore, because it seems like not what M. would prefer. So the salesman used ‘he’, and I didn’t correct him or explain.
Then, a young saleswoman walked by me as I was sorting through the belt rack and said blithely, “it’s so much easier to shop for ourselves, isn’t it, than to shop for men!” I nodded sickly, though I don’t agree in the slightest. I find it nearly impossible to shop for myself. But I badly need to get out of this place, and feel like agreeing with anything they say to me. I put the tie I’ve been considering back on the rack and dive for the checkout. I am grilled again about ordering a shirt and end up with the salesman’s name written on a card. He is so eager to sell me a shirt. I pay and leave.
Oh you thought I was done with this didn’t you. Next stop: tobacconist. The tobacconist and I have a little history.
In Boston, there is a very well-known store that carries a large selection of high-end tobacco products of all types — pipes, cigars, lighters, humidors, accessories of every variety. It was here, a month or so ago, where I had my first run-in with the blatant assumption that a feminine woman in a store gendered ‘male’ is shopping for some man. Only this time, it’s not just any man. I ask for a cigar that would be appropriate as a gift. No pronoun, no gender attached to my statement. I am offered several, and asked about ‘his’ taste. I hedge, because I don’t know, and end up with something a bit mellow but not too mild. A popular celebratory cigar. The salesman proposes that if ‘he’ liked a bolder cigar, I could go with their top-of-the-line…he snickers a little. ”Something to remember you by at any rate”. I paid and bolted, somewhat mortified. From the look on his face it looked like he thought I was the intern, a la Monica Lewinsky, buying a gift for my boss/liaison. Ouch.
So with that track record, I venture back into the tobacconist for the birthday cigar better prepared. I did a lot of research so I could ask for it, by name, and they sold it to me without quarrel. I’m getting better at the tobacconist’s. But I find it ironic that I now know much better than M. all the different types of cigar simply out of a desire not to be humiliated in the cigar store.
Luckily, the pocket knife was easier. I know a lot about knives, and other than having the devil’s own time figuring out where the heck to buy one (the army/navy store did the trick), I had very little gender trouble, aside from feeling a general reluctance to serve me at all. The guy behind the counter first flatly ignored me, and then after I had been standing waiting for service for several minutes, helped this other random guy who had been there for 30 seconds before me. Eventually a younger guy rescued me from the twilight zone and we had a very pleasant conversation about quality pocketknives and how a swiss army knife is really only great when you’re 12.
So happy birthday, sweetheart. I hope you like your presents!
