Journal 60 Girls in Malls

This week I went to Bloomingdale’s department store. It was the first time I was in a mall in approximately five years. But my cat needed some new towels. She likes thick ones, and Bloomingdale’s had a sale. She really enjoys the sensation of a plush towel and it helps her sleep deeply. Hopefully I got her satisfactory ones.

But when I first entered the mall, oh. My. God. I couldn’t breathe. As soon as I walked in, I entered a cloud of substandard perfume and other fragrances and odors.

It’s unnerving that inside malls teenage girls get exposed to hormone-disrupting fragrances in the one place where they feel they can walk around safely and have fun.

I was a mall rat as a teen girl. Where I lived, there was nothing else to do, nowhere else to go. I enjoyed looking at all the products and it was a way for me to take in some hubbub when I felt lonely. A mall is like a walkable street. Practically the size of a hamlet or a village. The proportions feel good, human, compared to the unwalkable nightmare of highways, stroads, and bleak streets outside. It’s easier for women to call for help if a man is bothering them inside a mall.

There is a mall in New Jersey called the Westfield Garden State Plaza. I think it is even a tourist destination. The mall enjoys the wealthy foreigners, but it seems to dislike its own local kids. Years ago, I was quite moved when I learned that they enacted a policy of requiring anyone under the age of eighteen to be accompanied by a chaperone after 5 PM on Friday and Saturday. They say some youths were disruptive. Hmm... So if adults start being disruptive, will they ban adults? What about seniors, they make messes, they steal things, will they ban old people? What about young children? They can make “disruptive”noises, will they ban young children? How about dealing with disruptive people individually?

As a former teen girl, who would have been aimlessly riding her bike through dark streets if she didn’t have somewhere to go on a Friday night, I disagree with that policy. Shame on them. In America, girls in malls are as American as apple pie. It's their birthright.

Now if only malls had fresh air and less hormone-disrupting chemicals.

Asya