* Pebbles & Sunshine *

I’ve heard the new fad in pop psychology is to interpret everything in terms of hardwired gender differences. No doubt this is a lashback to the era when people were supposed to be born completely malleable, and like any lashback, it will be carried too far and inspire yet other lashbacks. So I realize it’s not the complete answer.

Nevertheless, I’m a big believer. And after having great success with our diet, my husband and I are always putting on our Paleo Paradigm Glasses to see whether they shed light on anything else. I had them on one fine morning when it finally hit me why women are pathologically addicted to shopping: It’s our gathering instinct way back from our hunter-gatherer days! It suddenly seemed so obvious. We’d done it every day for millions of years. Of course it’d be ingrained in our nature!

To test my hypothesis, I grabbed a bowl and headed out to forage some berries … and did I have a blast! I came back with a delicious snack, a feeling of peace, and (most importantly) an antidote to my perpetual itch to shop. Not bad for one morning’s work!

I followed my nose a little further and found that the same line of reasoning explains a lot about men too. Haven’t you ever wondered how men can walk straight into a store, buy what they came for, and leave without so much as a sidelong glance at anything else? (All those beautiful rows of merchandise, waiting to be foraged …) Men also like first-person shoot-em-ups, chasing women (but not necessarily keeping them), and anything that can be used as a weapon (chain saws, firearms, power tools, paintball guns). Men are hunters. No wonder we don’t get each other. :)

All this further ties in with something I read in Why Gender Matters: Men’s eyes are hardwired to see motion, while women are better with color and texture. This makes complete sense: Hunters must chase running prey, while gatherers have to accurately identify edible and poisonous foodstuffs. Naturally, we would have developed these respective qualities during our three-million-year evolution.

Anyway, I’m sure many smarter people have already “discovered” this, but I’m still proud for coming up with it all by myself. :)