Man Bag

Is It So Wrong For A Man To Carry A Bag?

Have you guys ever seen that episode of Friends where Joey buys a hand-bag and finds himself defending what he calls a "man bag" from the oh-so-witty remarks of Chandler Bing and co.? Is it really so wrong for Joey to want to carry a bag? Isn't it more practical than just carrying what you can in your pockets just to meet society's expectations of what a man should be like in public? Should a "real man" not feel the need to carry so much with him to warrant the need of a "man bag" as a practical measure? Why in a society which claims to strive for equality between genders do these boundaries as to what a man can - "masculine things" - or can't do - "feminine things" - persist to be upheld?

The other day I was out in the city and bought....




















.... a couple of DVDs (I hope those who know me well were not fooled by this ingenious little piece of misdirection) and as such found myself with a couple of plastic bags in my hands from the music/DVD stores I purchased them from, as you do. And then I thought... well, I'm carrying around this drink bottle in my other hand, why don't I just slide it into this plastic bag like so...and wait a sec - my pockets would be a whole lot lighter if I put my wallet and cellphone in there too, it's just practical... and before I knew it I had transformed my socially acceptable plastic bag into a "man bag" of sorts. It was only practical? Wasn't it?

Well, the story doesn't end there. A couple of days later I found that my two pairs of shorts that have pockets were both being washed. Afterall, as a man I spend as little time as possible in clothing shops and as such just have a few shorts, a few shirts etc. and cycle through them, usually wearing the same thing for a couple of days at a time or until I spill food all over them (basically the same thing). So I have 3 pairs. And 2 have pockets. Now, I was gonna go and see a movie, requiring:

• My wallet
• My cell-phone (If it rains I might need to get picked up, I'm still working on that license)
• My drink bottle (It's too hot in Summer to go for a couple of hours without a drink)

And I had no pockets. So my fulfillment of certain masculine obligations in being very "meh" about clothes in fact lead me to do a very "non-masculine" thing: I saw that same plastic bag still sitting on my desk and thought - if I don't have pockets, I may as well carry this stuff in the bag. I doubt I'll run into this situation again, and thus this was a one-off "man-bag" experience, but was it so wrong? Should I even be asking about it, bowing to the pressures of so-called social norms in feeling insecure about carrying a bag with stuff inside? Or should I have been impracticle and risked dropping and breaking my phone by trying to carry that and my wallet in one hand (with my drink bottle in the other) just because society says so? Is it so wrong to think that, as long as I'm not talking about carrying it around with it daintily hanging from a shoulder or filled with make-up and whatever-the-fuck else ends up inside women's handbags, men got the short end of the stick when it was being decided which gender was "allowed" to carry around a bag? Maybe the REAL manly thing to do is to step out and face the world and say: Hey! I'm carrying a bag and it's NOT just because I bought something - and I'm okay with it! So deal with it!

Now on that particular day I just spoke of, when I had just gotten home from seeing that delightful Hilary Duff movie at the cinema with my man-bag in one hand and my purse in the other, I looked at the mirror and noticed my figure would look much nicer in a cardigan and skirt and I wondered - is it so wrong for a man to...

On A Serious Note

Assuming you read that all in its intended tone and were not scared away before this last little bit :D just a reminder that Everybody Hates Chris and My Name Is Earl are premiering on Tv3 at 7:30 and 8:00 tonight repectively. If you like good television, I hear these are both very much worth watching. Finally 3 may have a Wednesday line-up to challenge Tv2's traditional dominace... or at least until Lost returns (which I hear is soon!).