Why Real Men Don't Do Curtains (Gentlemen Prefer Blinds)
I recently decided to get a bit of decorating done at home, to freshen my bedroom up a little. Now I'm not the most handy of chaps so this was never going to be a full scale remodelling of the place, with laminate flooring, MDF partitioning or crafted drilled in shelving units. However, I did fancy a new lick of paint and wanted to get the place looking a little more modern.
Armed with a couple of pots of Cornflour White paint and some old sheets I set to work on clearing the room out so that I could get underway on my modernising project. Slapping the paint up and down the walls was fun for about ten minutes, but soon got tiring. I was also somewhat unprepared for quite how much effort is involved. I mean it looks so easy on TV...
In the end, I was pretty shattered, but it did leave me feeling emasculated and with a satisfying glow of achievement. The room certainly looked fresher and I was already visualising the wall art and rearranged furniture to help make it feel the way I wanted it to. There was just one thing holding onto the past: the curtains.
I've never been a great fan of curtains. As a child I eyed them with suspicion, fearing their many folds could hide all manner of creepy crawlies ready to pounce on me in my sleep. They also just feel intrinsically dated to me for some reason, like they're a relic of the past and only belong in retirement homes. Perhaps this comes from growing up in France, where curtains are less common than in the UK. These continental types tend to prefer the simplicity of blinds over curtains, and so, it turns out, do most British men!
A bold statement you might think, but I base this on the fact that when I went into my local DIY store to enquire about getting a nice set of blinds to replace my dated, ugly curtains, the sales assistant told me that it was always men who came in determined to "migrate" form curtains to blinds. Apparently, as a product, blinds were one of the most commonly picked up by single men shopping by themselves. To such an extent that this shop assistant thought it worthy of comment!
This got me thinking, what is it that makes blinds so favoured by the menfolk? Is there any one stand out reason that makes the simple perfunctory blind come out on top against even the most modern and trendy of designer curtain fabric? Or is it more of a collection of reasons that keep the male half of the population coming back to blinds?
For one thing, curtains are very often more detailed and, for want of a better word, frilly. Us men don't want frilly, we want functional. And it is this simple, straightforward functional nature of blinds that gives them such appeal. After all, a blind leaves less grey area when it comes to performing its duties. You want the sun to come in? Open your blinds. You don't? You close them. With curtains, unless you've gone for the heavy duty blackout variety, they don't often keep the light in or out. They'll stop people from peering in, sure, but if your aim is to lounge in front of your home cinema system with a Blu Ray or get in some serious PlayStation time, you want that screen obscuring natural light banished.
There's also a sense of appealing to the gadget lover in us all with a clean and modern set of blinds. It's almost like you're switching them on and off by choosing between open or closed. And yet you've still got that extra level of precise control, using the twisty wand to determine the exact angle of the slats you desire for your optimal screen viewing environment.
So it seems in plumping for blinds in my redesigned bedroom I was following a path well trodden by other men. And if you ever see a bachelor pad with curtains, I think questions must be asked!
Armed with a couple of pots of Cornflour White paint and some old sheets I set to work on clearing the room out so that I could get underway on my modernising project. Slapping the paint up and down the walls was fun for about ten minutes, but soon got tiring. I was also somewhat unprepared for quite how much effort is involved. I mean it looks so easy on TV...
In the end, I was pretty shattered, but it did leave me feeling emasculated and with a satisfying glow of achievement. The room certainly looked fresher and I was already visualising the wall art and rearranged furniture to help make it feel the way I wanted it to. There was just one thing holding onto the past: the curtains.
I've never been a great fan of curtains. As a child I eyed them with suspicion, fearing their many folds could hide all manner of creepy crawlies ready to pounce on me in my sleep. They also just feel intrinsically dated to me for some reason, like they're a relic of the past and only belong in retirement homes. Perhaps this comes from growing up in France, where curtains are less common than in the UK. These continental types tend to prefer the simplicity of blinds over curtains, and so, it turns out, do most British men!
A bold statement you might think, but I base this on the fact that when I went into my local DIY store to enquire about getting a nice set of blinds to replace my dated, ugly curtains, the sales assistant told me that it was always men who came in determined to "migrate" form curtains to blinds. Apparently, as a product, blinds were one of the most commonly picked up by single men shopping by themselves. To such an extent that this shop assistant thought it worthy of comment!
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| Blinds - The Man's Choice |
This got me thinking, what is it that makes blinds so favoured by the menfolk? Is there any one stand out reason that makes the simple perfunctory blind come out on top against even the most modern and trendy of designer curtain fabric? Or is it more of a collection of reasons that keep the male half of the population coming back to blinds?
For one thing, curtains are very often more detailed and, for want of a better word, frilly. Us men don't want frilly, we want functional. And it is this simple, straightforward functional nature of blinds that gives them such appeal. After all, a blind leaves less grey area when it comes to performing its duties. You want the sun to come in? Open your blinds. You don't? You close them. With curtains, unless you've gone for the heavy duty blackout variety, they don't often keep the light in or out. They'll stop people from peering in, sure, but if your aim is to lounge in front of your home cinema system with a Blu Ray or get in some serious PlayStation time, you want that screen obscuring natural light banished.
There's also a sense of appealing to the gadget lover in us all with a clean and modern set of blinds. It's almost like you're switching them on and off by choosing between open or closed. And yet you've still got that extra level of precise control, using the twisty wand to determine the exact angle of the slats you desire for your optimal screen viewing environment.
So it seems in plumping for blinds in my redesigned bedroom I was following a path well trodden by other men. And if you ever see a bachelor pad with curtains, I think questions must be asked!
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