Boys on Girls and Their Bags

    "Designer bags and their increasing cost seem to arouse a universal hostility in men. (Even gay men don't care much about handbags.) Freud interpreted them as - yuck - female genitalia, but they are really more like households or dowries, signs of possession and responsibility and flaunted power which we women - always foragers - carry around with us and display to each other.

    I thought about my first Kelly bag, presented to me a long time ago by a Japanese business associate of my husband's. With a flourish, he put the orange box in my hands, and my husband looked on in a jealous rage. Soon afterward my husband found an excuse to ban the exchange of gifts with clients."

- from "Bag Lady" by Andrea Lee, The New Yorker, September 25, 2006 

Ms. Lee definitely has something here, however I will state that while straight men may not like handbags, gay men most certainly do appreciate them. Working where I do, I am often beseiged by colleagues bearing sumptuous samples, pointing out the luxurious details, and a final, decisive, prompting commentary of "So good!" that seals the item's placement on the proverbial list of must-haves. Their infectious excitement about the beauty of the piece inevitably makes me excited too. Make no mistake, gay men love handbags. Maybe not as much as women, who as Ms. Lee alludes to, give dagger-eyes the moment they spy someone else toting arm candy better than their own. I love getting dagger-eyes. It means I'm doing something right for a change.

On the other hand, when I graduated from fashion school a few years ago, I decided that I wanted to treat myself to a really nice high-fashion item to mark the momentous occasion. After many lunchtimes perousing Maiden Lane, I finally chose a Marc Jacobs Collection East-West Satchel in black leather.  I made the purchase one Saturday as my boyfriend and I were out shopping. I vividly remember the eyes popping out of his head when he heard the price. I never understood his objections - I chose it, I was prepared to pay for it. I didn't ask him to buy it, although I'm sure it embarassed him when my friends saw my new bag and kept asking him: "Oh! Is that from you?"  Poor guy, he never saw how quickly his stock took a nosedive; between the moment over the East-West Satchel, and his "what's the big deal?" question over the red croc Kelly bag in Le Divorce, I knew it wasn't going to work out between us.

The objective is to find a straight man that appreciates handbags, maybe not as fervently as a gay man, but enough to present them as gifts from time to time, (orange box would be very nice,) and who will lovingly chuckle at my squealing excitement at the extravagance. Maybe he thinks its crazy, but he knows what I like, and might even think it's normal in a girl.