Let’s keep Secret to ourselves

I was in a Victoria’s Secret store not too long ago. The place was packed and I noticed that most of the women in the store were high-school age and younger.

Interestingly, there were as many males as females in the store.

It used to be – and maybe I’m showing my age here – that shopping for lingerie was a private, feminine thing. You usually only encountered two types of men: The sheepish, embarrassed men stringing along behind their wives; men who were expected to do little more than carry a woman’s purse while she shopped. Or, there was the confident man. He was usually alone, leisurely selecting a special gift for a special woman. A gift the man intended to help unwrap later.

Actually, now that I think about it, there was occasionally – before the advent of Internet shopping – a third type of man, a quiet man who had his own reasons for being in a woman’s lingerie store.

You certainly never saw teenage girls. Who wanted to be seen in the same place their mothers shopped?

Victoria’s Secret has changed all that.

With more than 350 million catalogs mailed each year, its provocative “T and A” television commercials and storefronts featuring scantily clad mannequins in pseudo-erotic poses – mannequins that are as physically unlikely as Barbie dolls – Victoria’s Secret has moved far beyond the cheesy and slightly risqué image of its predecessor: The Frederick’s of Hollywood catalog.

Now, the lingerie stores attract the same kinds of crowds as, say, the neighborhood video store, or the food court at the mall.

Am I the only one bothered by this?

Call me stuffy, but I’m uncomfortable shopping for my dainties in the company of twitchy teenage boys who wear their caps backward and their pants way too low; spotted adolescents who hold up tiny scraps of Spandex and call out “Hey, Baby, now

that’s

what I’m talking about.”

I don’t want to see young girls trot obediently over to the boys and then pay for the purchase with baby-sitting money.

It’s depressing. And it puts women – real adult women like moms who drive the neighborhood carpool, piano teachers and educators, for instance – in an awkward position.

No one wants to pick out a suggestive little something to wear for a much-needed weekend away with your significant other, while you’re standing beside the 15-year-old sexpot from your third period biology class.

Can you imagine the chitchat?

“Hi Mrs. Jones, Don’t’ you just, like, love animal prints? My girlfriend said that leopard is, like, so ‘90s, but I was all like, what

ever

, Gwen Stefani wears leopard prints and she’s the Queen of Hot so don’t be telling me … Oh, that reminds me, my mom wants you to call her. She wants to know why I got a D on the final. She got, like, pretty hot when I showed her my report card.”

You couldn’t blame poor Mrs. Jones for putting the sexy little teddy back on the rack and fleeing to Target to buy a six-pack of Hanes full-cut white cotton panties.

The kids have taken over the grown-up’s playground.

A byproduct is that people who used to stay in the shadows feel brave enough to come out into the light, and hang around the demi-bras and thongs the way others loiter in coffee shops. My daughter, spending Victoria’s Secret gift cards at the after-Christmas sale, was approached by a friendly man who wanted to stand quite close to her and chat about the things she had selected. (A man who, by the way, is very lucky that Daddy wasn’t there.)

Suddenly, shopping for underwear is a spectator sport.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a prude. It’s just that, unlike Victoria, I prefer to keep my secrets.