Man Bags & Lady … Er, Luggage

“By the same token, the handbag may only be a shrewd invention on the part of patriarchy to keep women enslaved. The dead white male who invented it knew that it was an accessory that we wouldn’t be able to resist.

I think this author has been reading my mind. Or, at least, my blogs. Since I’ve recently been mildly obsessing about the contents of my purse — now dramatically scaled back — and we’ve snickered at Certain Persons’ Man Baggies — which just sounds SO much worse than the equally tasteless ‘man bag’ — I’ve come to my own conclusions about bags and the reasons for them.

I refuse to believe I carry a purse because of a nesting instinct. Having everything you need always to hand doesn’t mean you’re nesting, it means you’re READY. Ready, just in case this is where you have to live for the rest of your life. I prefer to think in terms of Girl Guides and always having a length of string, a book of matches and a safety pin in a film cannister in your pocket, in case you have to build a fire, catch a fish or set a rabbit snare. Semper Paratus! The only think I can’t figure out how to take is my hatchet and my TP…

The author made a broad statement — “A recent survey states that the average American woman buys at least four handbags a year.” That makes me really wonder… who the average American woman just might be.

In school we learned that Average is a bell curve that looks like a C. There just aren’t that many people at the top of that ‘C’ curve. My guess is that the so-called ‘survey’ took place in one of those goofy women’s magazines that has quizzes “Are You Hot Enough for Him?” “Thirty Ways to Know If You’re A Gossip. Take Our Poll!” In the name of completely unsound research, I refuse to believe it. Nobody buys four purses a year. And anyway, I’m totally skewing any poll they might take anyway, because, get this — I’ve never bought a purse. EVER.

My first purse — was a dark navy cotton bag with a one inch wide strap, and rainbows embroidered on it. I left it on a train. In Mexico. In one of those blindingly ridiculous but world-affirming occurrences, a couple who found it and found my address inside sent it back. If they were looking for a reward, I’m sure the experience was less than world-affirming for them – there wasn’t any money in it to begin with, and I was all of fourteen. And shocked. I’m sure I wrote them an appropriately sticky-sweet letter, however.

Subsequent purses have been rejects from my mother, dug out from my grandmother’s Salvation Army stash (once she died, anyway — nobody wanted to dig through that rabid pack-ratting rottweiler’s possessions while she was still alive to leave teethmarks in your arm for looking at them too hard), and fashioned from — florist baskets, and don’t laugh until you’ve seen them – I think they’re perfect. I managed to hook someone who likes to shop for me — he’s bought me a couple of purses, the most expensive ones I’ve ever owned. But buying four a year? I wouldn’t – and I sincerely hope he wouldn’t — know where to begin.

Men get by with carrying less, the author fumes, and wonders why. I don’t know why either, really, except that it seems that women are really willing to take things on — requirements and requests that no one has stated, that no one has made of them. They’re ready to carry aspirin for the world, should the world ever have need. It usually doesn’t and so one has a bottle of four year old aspirins forever rattling down there with hair clips and old eyedrops and the permanent paranoid mental state that is Justin Case. I hate to say I’m going to become more like a man, and have it mean a positive thing –because I’m just categorically against the idea that there is a “like a man” and “like a woman” way to be, but I think that at least as long as I’m in the middle of a city with shops every four feet, I’m going to stop carrying things that people can pop into a chemist’s to buy, and certainly I’m not carrying anything for anyone but me.

No one died and voted me Mother Theresa, after all. Here’s to further general mean-spiritedness. I see your man bags, and raise them my lady luggage. Huzzah!