Montrose Shopping Centre

When I first arrived I took about 10 minutes to stroll around the shops to observe people before finding a bench in front of a toy store and across from a restaurant. There were quite a few couples strolling around and in each and every case where they were holding hands the man’s hand was on top/in front of the woman’s and the woman was shorter than the man. I’ve never really paid attention to this sort of thing before so I was kind of surprised that none of the women I saw were taller than their boyfriends/husbands. There was one couple who drew my attention because the woman was eating ice cream and just talking and talking without noticing that her significant other had stopped to look at a sporting goods store (from which she eventually had to drag him away). A mother and daughter shopping and chatting with the father trailing along behind, occasionally one of them would turn and talk to him but otherwise he looked rather out of place. One man sat outside each store with a dog while his wife disappeared inside for long periods of time. Another woman slapped the man she was walking with after he made a remark to her about something. A mom and dad were walking with their children in strollers; the mom washing pushing the stroller in front of her while the dad was towing it behind him with just one hand. There was a couple sitting outside the restaurant when a little girl walked by and knocked over a barricade post, the man jumped up from the table to pick it up and move it out of the way.

So, all things considered, I wouldn’t say that I witnessed anything particularly ‘radical,’ I was much more surprised by how stereotypical everything was. This phenomenon might be attributed to the location; it is a largely white, middle class neighborhood after all. In some cases the men had a more passive role, like the dad trailing behind his wife and daughter, the father who nonchalantly (and carelessly) dragged his kid along behind him, and the guy who was being dragged along by his energetic and talkative girlfriend. The one man who was an exception to this rule was the guy at the restaurant who jumped up to help the little girl. Either he does that all the time or he was trying to impress the woman he was with. From this impersonal experience it is difficult to assess the romantic status of these people, but I would say that all the ones I saw fell into the hetero-normative category.