Nobody is a medium

A seamstress in Dokki keeps a page for every customer. Shoulders, waist, the length of an arm, the way one hip sits a little higher than the other. After twenty years she has never found two pages that match.

The shop across the road sells the same blouse in small, medium and large. It is a sensible system. It lets a factory cut thousands at once and lets a shopper choose in seconds. Most people find something that fits well enough.

But the labels are a convenience, not a fact. No woman is a medium. She is a set of measurements that a medium happens to sit close to, some days closer than others.

Marketing runs on the same kind of label. Young urban women. Price-conscious families. Students in the regional cities. They help when you have to print one pack, choose one price, write one line. Use them while they are earning their keep.

The trouble starts when the label begins to feel like the person. When a shopper who does not behave like her group is treated as an error in the data rather than a reminder of what the data left out.

Look closely enough at anyone and the group dissolves. The mother who is supposed to compare prices and never does. The student who is supposed to want the cheaper pack and buys the better one for his grandmother. Each of them is perfectly normal in a category of one.

Sorting people is a choice we make for our own convenience. It is never a discovery about them.