A Man's Shoe by any other name would still be black, brown

So I decided to navigate the stormy watery minefield of Father's Day gifts yesterday at the Robinson's Sale, armed with the co-gift-giver (The Son) and what I would regard as a fairly decent sense of personal style, honed by decades of, uh, dressing myself. And thanks to my quick wit and highly analytical thinking powers, we do not now own a Size 8 and a half pair of women's loafers from Geox. This is because, just before I made the purchase and after half an hour of browsing, I decided to ask myself. Self, how is it that in this women's shoe department, they have a single gorgeous pair of men's shoes for sale?

Having narrowly escaped a pointless useless expenditure of S$150, I adjourned to Timberland which I regard as the holy grail, absolutely foolproof, for men's shoe purchases, and lo and behold there appears before me this rather nice innocuous looking black pair for S$150 (after 15% off), for which they had plenty of stock, and for which I was just about to pay when The Husband arrived at the scene and refused to even try them on.

What's wrong with this pair?

These are hospital attendant shoes. People will think I am here to change the bedpan and shave between their balls for the vasectomy.

In what way are these hospital attendant shoes?

Just look at them. It's ... the shape. It's... the cut.

Yeah. So I'm looking at a pair of completely black leather shoes, with laces, with a normal rounded toe bit, with normal heels, with normal stitching. I'm no doctor, but don't nurses wear white canvas shoes? The shoe is shoe-shaped. And cut like a shoe. And it's black, so no one is going to look too closely at it anyway. If a whole bunch of guys were stuck in an elevator, looking down at each other's shoes, I can guarantee you no one is going to look at that pair and start asking for the bedpan.

Finally we settle on a brown pair. It's cut like a shoe. Shaped like a shoe too. And just as innocuous as the black pair, except this one is ... brown. Timberland, in its infinite corporate wisdom, has also decided to allocate this one the same price. But this one, this one obviously has some magic in it, because The Husband wants to buy this pair instead. And AMEX gives us another 10% off. And we are DONE for the year.