The XX Factor: What women really think.

The Obama-Retail Complex

The NYT Style section has a short piece on the puzzling lack of shoppers who showed up for a free makeup giveaway that took place Tuesday at hundreds of department stores nationwide in fulfillment of a class action settlement on cosmetics price-fixing. The article suggests that perhaps lack of selection in the gratis goods was the reason for the poor turnout, but, darling Style section, have you glanced over at the old Business section lately? Beggars can't be choosers. I wonder if low turnout had more to do with the fact that the giveaway coincided with the inauguration, a juggernaut of an event that cast a shadow longer than anything even free Chanel Ombre Essentielle could create. It's a smartly timed news dump by the department stores who didn't want to lose too much inventory but also a testament to how huge a cultural phenomenon this inauguration was. Americans love free stuff, but apparently we love the stuff surrounding our institutions of freedom even more.

(By the way, Hanna, you'll be thrilled to note that to get to the article, you've got to click through a patriotic J. Crew ad touting their goods as "always inspiring." The Obama bump has been great for the retailer. Its Web site—with a new feature on designing for the Obama ladies, how's that for creative interpretation of off-the-rack?—has been swamped to the point of crashing since the inauguration.)

It Is Time To Outlaw Black Friday

Numbers are supposed to explain everything that happens in the economy, and there are numbers that can help illustrate why a couple thousand people assembled in a Long Island parking lot were so hellbent on out-consuming one another that they were not above stepping on a thirtysomething overnight stock worker named Jdimytai Damour as he literally lay dying. While same-store sales are projected to fall nearly 7% this year from last across America's retailers, Wal-Mart is expected to outperform its peers by 9 percentage points. While the end result for Wal-Mart is only a 2% gain over last year's sales, the trajectory, relative to the rest of retail-land, and the rest of the economy, and the plunging net worths of everyone with a house or a retirement plan, and the general sense that those trends can only over the next few quarters and years continue, is impressive. Here is how impressive: many Wal-Marts reportedly ran out of cash to make change before banks opened! Cash, which people are using allegedly because the credit crisis has cut off people from debt -- but have these people never heard of debit cards? Are they so overstretched that their bank accounts have been snowed under by dozens of overdraft fees? (Hey, I've been there!) But if that's the case, what the hell, in this economy, are they doing buying anything -- much less leaving the house after a 3,000 calorie meal to line up in the cold for twelve hours to buy it?

I have been on the Black Friday beat before, when I covered retail for the Wall Street Journal, and my sense was always that people shopped on Black Friday because it was Black Friday. It was, like holidays and sporting events, a tradition. The sales were often no better than they were in the desperate days before Christmas, days which are sure to be direly desperate this year. Truly price-sensitive consumers often found better deals on the internet, and anyway, truly rational price-sensitive consumers recognize the opportunity cost of all that sitting out in a cold exurban parking lots is way too steep when considered against those same hours spent working time and a half. Nope, it was tradition -- a distinctly so-grotesque-as-to-have-become-a-parody-of-itself one, like eating contests or bull fights or American Idol auditions, perhaps, but a tradition nonetheless. And traditions, while comfortable, are in no way rational. The populace will take much longer to discard them than is necessarily efficient.

Which underscores a larger point about this sickening tragedy, and sales. Retailers and the market shy away from making grand pronouncements on the basis of isolated events, but maybe here our lawmakers can show leadership:  maybe ban Black Friday -- by forcing retailers to make all Black Friday prices, or all prices selling merchandise below wholesale cost, available on the internet, since all these hard-core "loss-leader" tactics to drive traffic to stores only really serves to whip shoppers into an irrational frenzy which is only dubiously justified by any profit it generates. I would venture not a single person working in retail anywhere on the totem pole really likes Black Friday for anything other than psycho-sentimental reasons. It's a pain, it's cutthroat, it's subject to an absurd degree of Wall Street scrutiny and you end up losing money on the vast majority of the products whose prices you slash only to pray you make it back before December 24. It is, in other words, irrational, and by extension inefficient.  

Until recently sales were highly regulated in much of Europe, confined to certain seasons, something American retail executives found socialistic but which actually had the effect of minimizing waste, creating retailers like H&M that controlled their inventory tightly and were capable of delivering merchandise on an as-needed "just in time" regular replenishment schedule, so that no one got stuck trying to offload 16,000 green checked leotards that bombed on the store shelves or whatever. As a result of these laws and other factors, consumption culture in Europe was and remains comparatively civil. And while there are many things the world needs now, civility is not a bad start.

What's So Funny About Pretty Panties?

Nayeli, I'm with you in favor of adorable underthings. Definitely worth the money for the personal confidence and the occasional zing in the eyes of one's date. (Someone I dated briefly liked to call me a "smartypanties.")

And yet at the same time, like Lucy and Amaka, I feel sickened by the culturewide commodification of sexuality—of intimate life and personal worth, really—especially when it's aimed at children (by which I mean anyone under 20! I'm old) who are still developing a sense of self.

As the Rolling Stones knew well, all consumer advertising peddles one basic thing: dissatisfaction. We're constantly being sold the idea that we could be happy if ... if we just fixed X problem by buying Y product. Soft-porn merchant Victoria's Secret, like Abercrombie & Fitch, is in the business of selling the belief that you should be sexier. Sure, they have a right to do it, and I even sometimes wear their underthings. But it is especially disgusting to peddle to young girls—and here I'm not targeting VS alone, but also MTV, Girls Gone Wild!, and the soft-core underage porn culture et al.—the feeling that she's really a ho in training, that her personal worth depends on arousing others' lust. That's selling the idea of being an object, not a subject—-a big difference, although sometimes hard to define.

There's a subtle line between liking to wear fancy panties ... and needing to see others drool over your bottom before you can feel worthwhile. One is powerful; the other's an eating disorder in waiting. One is finding power in enjoying yourself and your body in a mature and confident way ... and the other is a degraded manipulation of self by instincts out of whack and in thrall to others. Sometimes, of course, both are at work at once. Which is why we're having this discussion: figuring out which is which isn't so easy in the consumerized world in which we live.

There's a very odd overlap here between feminism, on the one hand, which wants women to take power without being pornified, and on the other, Christian activists who also want to resist the consumer culture's attempt to drag us around by our gonads and insecurities. At their best, both groups want to respect the individual as being more than just her body, as having a meaningful inner life. This resistance against personal degradation is also why feminists and Christian activists have a similarly uneasy alliance against sex trafficking.

I'll take any and all allies in standing up against personal commodification, whether "chosen" or forced. Christians talk about maintaining a meaningful inner life as having a relationship with God. The God-language can make some feminists gag, but I respect it—even though I don't necessarily agree with each and every one of God's self-appointed personal emissaries. Especially not when they think they know exactly what I should and shouldn't be doing with my smartypanties.