The Male Mall Slouch

Here we go again, guys. As if shopping in a Mall at Christmas wasn't purgatory enough, now we have to suffer Valentine's Day.

Malls are feminine. If you don't believe me, try and find a carpenters shop, a gunsmith, a tool shop, an angling or a hunting shop. That isn't how Malls started. The name 'Mall' comes from the game of pall-mall which was played on a long street. It was played in the 17th century, and was a precursor to croquet. It means 'ball' and 'mallet.' In London, England, it gave its name to Pall Mall, a street in the center of the city. Incidentally, a street I have strolled along - without feeling out of place. This does not happen with today's Malls. Today, men are tolerated as long as they are with a woman and are there for the purposes of carrying and paying. Other than that, it is an alien environment and a single male is treated with suspicion.

A lone male is a lost soul. After last year's mall Valentine visit, it took me two weeks of therapy to recover. However, it doesn't take two weeks to adopt the Male Slouch - that comes naturally. I stuffed my hands in my pockets, hunched over and began to shuffle around the mall in Male Mall Wander Mode. I nodded to some other vacant eyed males until I remembered that eye contact is a definite No-No.

Would Purgatory be like this? Would there be the same lack of seats for weary men to relax on, or would they be forced to sidle along the sides forever? Would all the men's washrooms be at the very end of a very, very long corridor? So long, in fact, that the last part of the journey would be a 100 yard dash? I was busy taking a mental note to carry incontinence pads at all times, when I realized I was staring into a lingerie shop window at thongs of various colors.

Instinctively, I crossed my legs, and then I noticed - purely by chance you understand - that the packaging for ordinary knickers was completely different from the packaging for thongs. The normal pantie packages had photographs of the underwear on a real woman from the front. The thong packaging photographs were of women lying face down and the photograph was taken from the direction of her head, showing her back and butt. It took me a few minutes to understand this at first, as I don't normally look at underwear - not so that anybody else would notice, that is - but this was Valentine's shopping and I had a perfectly valid reason. I puzzled over the box until it dawned on me that if the photograph was taken from the front of the young lady, it would classify as pornography.

Hoping nobody had noticed my intent interest, I quickly looked the other way - towards three young women walking away from me. I winced at the way their thongs were cutting into them. Shaking my head at my folly in forgetting that the first rule of mall wandering is to keep your eyes down, I looked the other way, and saw another couple of women coming towards me, flaunting aggressive belly buttons. There was nowhere to hide.

Most of the men you see slouching around the Mall are living in the past, yearning for the blissful era when main streets where the place to shop. Where men could walk tall and pass the time of day with other men without being looked on with suspicion. A time when you could wait for your wife in the car; if it was cold, you turned the heater on. If you were bored watching the girls go by or reading the newspaper, all you had to do was tilt the seat back and snooze. Ah Happy Days!

But those Happy Days may not be gone forever; seemingly, shop designers are learning common sense, and the mall will soon be no more. Instead, we will have 'Lifestyle Centers.' The idea being that the shop doors in a Lifestyle Center - which is just another name for a Mall - will open onto a pedestrian way with fountains, lampposts, mail boxes, fire hydrants, and in short be places where people, including men, can linger. Does this remind you of anything from your past, like your home town's main street?

Sheer bliss will be if the 'Lifestyle Centers' have pubs - real pubs, where men can belly up to the bar and have a beer in a male environment; maybe even have a game of darts as we hide from Valentine's Day?