Shopping the "Ladies' Section" Gives Me All the Feels

I have sweater dressing agita. It all started back in September: the weather was turning and I found myself coming off a closet-cleaning rampage that left me sans half a hefty bag of last year's layers. I started shopping around, flirtatiously weighing the pros and cons of this knit versus that knit. How was the ribbing on this hem? Those sleeves? Can I settle for a wool/acrylic blend? A marked yearning for a camel cashmere jumper took root, so I sought out the perfect one and found J.Crew's Collection Cashmere Boyfriend Sweater. I headed to the store's Soho (women's) boutique and asked where I might find it.

"Is it a women's sweater?"

Ok, I guess I can forgive that. Someone might not know the J.Crew boutiques in Soho are (unfortunately) segregated by sex. But if I've memorized the name of the item I'm looking for, don't we think I know where I am? Anyway, I confess to the sales associate that I am indeed hunting down a ladies' jumper and proceed to the back, where she thinks I might find it, though she can't say for sure. A huge sale is going on and piles of cashmere, merino wool and cotton-cashmere blends are littered across every table and bench in sight. I show the sweater to another associate (I've saved a picture of it on my phone), who declares it to be sold out. I rifle through more piles of dejected merchandise, feeling slightly insidious as I do so, as if violating the women around me by forcing my man shoulders into a half-zip mockneck that's less forgiving than anticipated.

Eventually I find my sweater, albeit in the wrong color, and the small fits nicely. I resign myself to scoping out the brand's Fifth Avenue location later in the week.

"Do you know her size?"

It's another sales associate, this time a man—presumably a gay man, one who is small, like me. I let him know that it's for me and suppress the urge to be like, "Really?" Maybe America is too PC after all. It doesn't matter—they don't have the camel. Now I'm on this nebulous quest with no end in sight, but that's beside the point. The moral of the story is (or is intended to be): dividing stores by sex is stupid, especially during sweater season, especially when it's a "boyfriend sweater."

Simon Doonan summed up my shopping life in one of his recent trend pieces for Slate: "I grabbed a ladies’ size large and inspected it for bust darts. There were none. Et voilà! Unisex!"

I just get really sick of having to remind people that I know my own body—my waist size, my chest size, what have you. I wish people would stop dividing things straight down the middle as if that's normal or realistic and I'm the one who's lost my way. My favorite sweater is the one I'm wearing in the picture, a ladies' large from the COS capsule collection at Opening Ceremony a season or two back. It fits wonderfully and is gorgeous and I die. And I look like such a dude in it, right? I'm practically a Gap ad—not that that matters or is what I'm going for, really I'm just lazy.

Anyway, that's my gripe. I'll let you know if I find any good sweaters. Let me know in the comments or via Twitter or what have you—do you have these same issues? Or does the cheese stand alone? (Mm, cheese.)