The Missing Link : Behavioral experts agree: Men do lack the ‘shopping gene.’ The reasons, they say, go back to childhood--and beyond. Women may want to think twice before dragging their mates to the mall.

When Henry Cho’s girlfriend begs him to take her to the local mall, the Hermosa Beach resident responds with a verbal sucker punch--way below the belt: “If I want to be around clothes that have never been worn, I’ll sit in your closet for an hour.”

Cho also claims he can run and play basketball all day long, but if he goes to a shopping center, he’ll be “dead in half an hour.”

“It should be part of a triathlon,” he suggests. “Make a guy swim a mile, ride a bike for 30 (miles) and walk through a mall with a girl. Ain’t a man alive who can do that. And it’s not worth the T-shirt anyway.”

Cho is a professional comedian, but according to social scientists, personal shoppers, marketing researchers and authors who have studied behavioral differences between men and women, he makes a critical point: Many men lack the “shopping gene”--at least when it comes to clothing and other personal items.

So if you’re contemplating accompanying your significant other on a shop-a-thon, you might want to consider the following unwritten rules of the game:

* In general, women and men both shop for items that help them feel sexy. But women tend to buy clothing and accessories whereas men prefer big-ticket items like cars and stereos.

* When it comes to clothes and personal-care items, women want a lot of choices; men typically take the first thing that fits.

* Women frequently hang out in malls for recreation; men want to accomplish their goal--and get out.

* If a woman attempts to turn a shopping trip into a “makeover” session for her mate, watch out for the power struggle.

* Even if men really wanted to spend an entire day mall crawling, the excursion would probably be less than satisfying: Studies show that most stores and malls are devoted to women’s items anyway.

Want more evidence? Read on.

The cliche is true. Men like shopping for cars and women like shopping for clothes. I only like cars because they take me to clothes. I look at a car as something that gets me from place to place, and clothes as glamorous. Men look at clothes as something to take them from place to place, and cars as glamorous.

--Comedian Rita Rudner

“For both sexes, shopping is related to what they feel pleases the opposite sex,” observes Warren Farrell, author of “Why Men Are the Way They Are.”

“For instance, women know that looks please men, so a lot of women’s shopping is related to improving their looks through cosmetics, fashions, high heels and so on. Men know that success pleases women, so a man’s purchases symbolize ‘I’m a success.’ Men will shop for stocks and bonds . . . and for bigger items: boats, cars, computers, houses.”

Farrell adds that men also like to shop for anything that helps them “lubricate relationships with women.”

“Most men know that if anything happens in a relationship, they must take the initiative, particularly at a sexual level,” he says. “In initiative-type purchases, he’ll take her out to a nice dinner, pay for wine either at the house or the restaurant, he’ll buy flowers and get a nice stereo so that when he invites her back there’s music to hear. He will tend to buy things that they can both use, whereas her purchases are almost exclusively used by her.”

But don’t clothes also make the man? Doesn’t the goal of appealing to women motivate men to shop for clothes?

“Most women like to see well-dressed, well-manicured men,” Farrell allows. “But only if the man is already successful or going to be successful. It works if it signals success, but the moment it moves over a gray line and into pampering and narcissism, that’s a negative for her.”

A man doesn’t have the shopping gene. He has the hunting gene. And unfortunately, since he doesn’t have to hunt for meat any more, he hunts for flesh. When he really gets in trouble is when he brings it home on the hood of his car.

--Comedian Lotus Weinstock

While humans have evolved way past the hunting and gathering phase, a desire for shopping actually has some historical roots, says David Stewart, a consumer psychologist and professor of marketing at USC.

“In most societies,” he explains, “and it’s true of ours today, a man’s role is to be the breadwinner. Women have historically been the shoppers. It goes back generations, and shopping is a skill women are taught in very early childhood, while men are carried along as excess baggage.”

That’s not all men and women learn early on. Daphne Rose Kingma, a Santa Barbara psychotherapist working on a book about men, points out that many men dislike shopping for personal items because of negative childhood experiences.

“When (men) are taken shopping by their mothers, they feel like their power is being taken away,” says the author of “True Love: How to Make Your Relationship Sweeter, Deeper and More Passionate.” “Clothing is an expression of a child’s identity, and if all the choices are the mother’s then when he grows up, he might say, ‘I’m never going to submit to an experience like that again.’ ”

Kingma found that many men have been so dominated by their mothers in childhood that when they “encounter anything that smacks of someone wanting to change their image,” they back off. “It reminds them too much of the negative feelings they felt when their mothers made similar demands.”

But don’t little girls get the same sort of treatment from their mothers?

“Yes,” says Kingma, “but a mother and daughter are the same sex. Their preferences are likely to be more similar. Also, a girl looks to identify with her mother, while a boy seeks separation from her.”

Part of it is that guys just don’t have the patience. We’ve got some sort of prehistoric thing. We just want to bag it and drag it back to the cave as quickly as possible. We don’t like the browsing aspect. . . . Actually, that’s not true. We don’t like to shop with women and browse for these things we have no interest in. But if you look at men at car shows, boat shows and gun shows, you’ll see guys looking at stuff all day and going, “Look at this gun! I can put it on my boat! I can fish and hunt at the same time!”

--Comedian Ritch Shydner

Not only do men and women differ in the types of items they like to purchase, they also appear to have distinctly different preferences for the ways in which they like to shop.

For instance, in studying sales personnel and customers for a new book he’s writing on salesmanship, author John T. Molloy has found that women adore plenty of options in shopping for personal items but men generally do not.

“We found that women want a choice; they like to look at what’s out there,” says the author of “Dress for Success” and “The Woman’s Dress for Success Book.” “Women will look at every similar product in the field. . . . They like to compare and look, they enjoy the activity. Men don’t.

“If you’re selling to a man, the trick is to be the first one (who gets to him). Men don’t spend time picking clothes, which is why men’s clothes seldom change. A man will say, ‘Hey I like this blue suit, I’ll get another one just like it.’ ”

Despite his expertise, Molloy still does not relish the shopping experience in the slightest. “My wife can spend all afternoon looking for clothes, but I can’t. . . . If I walk through a store on my own, I’ll cover several aisles in 2, 2 1/2 minutes. If I’m with my wife, it’ll take 15 minutes.”

According to John Gray, author of “Men and Women in Relationship,” such time differences are easily explained.

“Men shop to purchase a particular item they need in their lives. Women shop to feel better,” says Gray. “Shopping is a way of relaxing for women. They forget all their responsibilities and enjoy the possibilities of what they could purchase.

“When a man is focused, he’s energized. Shopping with women drains men. What wears him out is that she shops for a variety of things instead of for a particular thing.”

Consumer surveys confirm that about twice as many women as men shop for recreation, says USC’s Stewart.

He has also found that a woman is far more likely to be what retailers call a “marketing maven” or one who knows where and how to shop for the best merchandise and the best deals. “A male often doesn’t have the social network to help them know where to shop for what.”

The men’s department in a department store is always on the first floor, two inches from the door, so hopefully they’ll see it from the parking lot. I think a drive-through store for men would be really good. They could just drive up and say, ‘Yeah, gimme a couple of shirts, 16 1/2, 32, and some pants!”

--Rita Rudner

Rudner’s on the right track. Experts believe store and mall designs are a critical factor in attracting--or repelling--male customers. That’s why department stores usually locate their menswear departments on the first floor. It seems most men would rather submit to a root canal than climb an escalator and search for suits.

“Men are impulse buyers,” Molloy explains. “They’ll go into a store, and if they see something they like, they’ll buy it. Going up four flights to a certain department seems like a lot of trouble, and they won’t do it.”

(Not even bars and sitting areas, can keep men in stores. Molloy recalls that some years back, a few well-intentioned stores offered both as an oasis from shopping. But he believes they didn’t work.)

Even if men would like to linger over ties and oxford-cloth shirts, their choices are limited. The amount of merchandise in menswear departments does not begin to compare with what is available to women. What’s more, the same can be said for entire malls.

To see just how big a difference there is, Farrell commissioned a study for his book on men. The survey examined the seven major shopping malls in the San Diego area and confirmed his suspicions.

“We found that there was seven times as much square footage devoted to female personal items as male personal items,” he recalls. “We also found that the more valuable the square footage in the store, the more likely it was to be devoted to female goods.”

Retailing consultant Carl Steidtman says men are well aware of this state of affairs. “Most men do view department stores as havens for women’s apparel,” says the Ohio-based vice president and chief economist for Management Horizons, a division of Price Waterhouse. “Before you even get to the men’s department--at the back of the first floor--you’ve got to walk through all this perfume and cosmetics. That’s a little off-putting.”

USC’s Stewart says numerous marketing studies reflect such concerns, but they don’t address the chicken-or-egg conundrum: Is the lack of men’s items because of the fact that fewer men shop--or do fewer men shop because they’re not given as many choices?

I consider it a given that men don’t like to go shopping. I remember seeing the look on my dad’s face when we went to a mall. It said, “Kill me now.” It’s the same look you see on the faces of POWs. Theres’s so many other things I’d like to do with a guy. Why would I make him go shopping and spoil the chance for doing what I want to do with him later?

--Comedian Carrie Snow

The experts agree with Snow. Women who want to take their boyfriends or husbands shopping for clothes--for him or her--are flirting with disaster.

“Some men love to shop with women,” therapist Kingma points out, “and they really value their taste. But sometimes it becomes a power struggle when women assert their preferences. Men need to resist that to maintain their dignity and retain their power.

“I think women who take the trouble to be aware of a man’s preference are on the right track. A lot of times women will choose (a style) that they’d want for themselves. But men have their own images of what success and maleness is. A woman needs to be encouraging of a man’s discovery of that.”

Despite such advice, women have been trying to change the way their mates look since man roamed the Earth in animal skins--usually without success.

“If (women) want to buy clothes for a man they should look at what he has in his closet and buy him the same things. Half the women who say they want to change their boyfriends’ or husbands’ style are better off leaving him alone,” Molloy warns.

Brenda Ferreira, an image consultant and owner of the Nova salon in Santa Monica, similarly suggests that women adopt a path of least resistance: Leave the guy home, “buy (stuff) for him and lay it out.” Then offer encouraging comments such as “This makes your eyes stand out, this goes well with your hair.”

Granted, it’s not quite like taking him shopping. But a relationship may be saved and he might even toss out those Bermuda shorts he wears with black socks and sandals.