Temperatures are rising. I spotted some shorts on the rack last weekend. It's about that time to participate in my favourite activity in the world right behind dusting under my desk and having blood drawn - that's right, it's summer clothes shopping season.
For a large proportion of men, this exhilarating event will mean being turned into life-size Ken dolls for the women in their lives to dress. Sure, we all look to our partners for style advice, but I was surprised to learn recently that a few guys I know don't purchase any clothes for themselves. The reality hit home when I read in an issue of Toronto Life that the possible future leader of Canada can't - okay, doesn't - dress himself. "My wife is the boss of everything to do with fashion, but I get to make marginal choices, about things like buying shoes," Michael Ignatieff said.
I'm not immune. This tendency of women to mould their man's look has touched me a few times, leaving a chip on the shoulder pad of at least one suit in my closet.
In an attempt to impress an artsy punk girl during university, I let her talk me into a pair of bright green steel-toed combat boots.
How many times did I wear them after we broke up? Zero. Later, another woman bluntly critiqued a fitted shirt I'd picked out in a Montreal second-hand store. "You look gay," she said. "That just means it's avant-garde," I countered. But I let the woman win that battle too.
Frances Yalonetsky, owner of Grreat Stuff, a men's clothing store on Queen Street West in Toronto, sees a lot of co-operative couples who shop well together, but she also regularly witnesses unsettling power struggles played out in front of the dressing-room mirror. "There was one time where a man had a suit on and he looked great," she remembers. "It fit him perfectly, but his partner was giving him a really hard time and knocking him down. And when she walked away, my husband said to him, 'You know, you'll never find another suit that fits you like this off the rack. But you can always find a new girlfriend.' "
It was a tongue-in-cheek comment, but he had a point. If your woman is fascistically foisting her style opinions on you, maybe she's the item that doesn't fit.
Down the street, at Sydney's, a designer jeans destination and bespoke shop, the story was the same. "Sometimes, you see a man who wants to push the boundaries a little bit and the wife doesn't necessarily want him to dress better than her, or wear stuff that's more expensive than what she's wearing," assistant manager Travis Richel says. "Some women don't want their husbands or boyfriends to look too good."
I took the dilemma to fellow Globe and Mail columnist Russell Smith, author of Men's Style: The Thinking Man's Guide to Dress, who pointed out that the problem with this situation basically comes down to this: When women dress their men, they tend to unconsciously desexualize them. He says they do this either by putting men in "overly square" clothes that make them look like their own dear dads (this is where women will employ the aforementioned "too gay" accusation) or by "infantilizing" their guys, dressing them up like little boys.
When I suggest some men actually like being dressed by their women and are in fact happy Ken dolls, Mr. Smith agrees. "It's what their mothers did when they were kids and maybe men find that comforting."
I know a lot of you dolls out there just really don't care about style and have placed your full trust in an objectively adept woman, but I ask this: Would the world really be such a horrible place if all men chose their own attire, be it a purple suit (Ms. Yalonetsky has one in stock) or sweats and a stained T-shirt? Actually, I went ahead and asked this to a woman I met recently at a party. "Maybe not," she replied, "but there would be a lot less sex happening."
It was a cheap shot, but it hit a soft spot.
Still, there is such a thing as education. Pick up a magazine or use the services of store salespeople to update yourself. Metrosexualize. (Yes, I said it. But it's better that than continue to behave like a helpless child.) Or choose a friend to shop with, someone with whom you are less psychologically enmeshed than your partner and who will thus have a more superficial motive: to make you look good. This has worked out for me.
While shopping last fall, a friend picked out a sweater that I wouldn't have chosen myself. "I don't know, it's too flashy" I said. "I can't wear it." But he insisted it looked good so I bought it. Later that day, a woman in line at Pizza Hut checked me out, then came on to me while we waited in line, giving new meaning to the phrase fast-food pickup.
In the end, I guess I'll be less concerned with what's on me if it inspires someone to take it off of me. And if Mr. Smith is right that the woman in your life defaults to desexualization, then chances are she'll be pleasantly surprised by what she doesn't choose.
Micah Toub's memoir, Growing Up Jung: Coming of Age as the Son of Two Shrinks, will be published in April, 2010.
