![barcody tote carry barcody tote carry](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/pOeDg9YJGxI/maxresdefault.jpg)
I believe men should feel comfortable doing the same – and after decades of settling for backpacks and briefcases, perhaps the right bag was always just an NPR telethon away.Īpart from convenient storage, the tote bag can function in the city as a similar kind of social semaphore to cars in the suburbs, signaling who you are, where you’ve been, or just how much you hate using the plastic bags at Trader Joe’s. Women have a long tradition of being able to chuck everything into a big, beautiful bag, and the fashion industry supplies the goods. No amount of Apple Watches is going to change the burden of having to carry around wallets, keys, ChapStick tubes, headphones, and whatever else for days and nights out in the city. But everyone has a lot to carry around every day. An entire industry has grown around purses. These days, we’re more likely to be carrying a book and a spare sweater for the incipient cold weather than ice, but tote bags are no less useful. LL Bean designed the modern tote’s first ancestor in 1944 with the Bean’s Ice Carrier, a hefty bag made of reinforced cotton for carrying giant blocks of ice from “ car to ice chest”. Yet tote bags were originally as manly as could be. “I am afraid to just carry the in my hands as I am worried it would look like a handbag,” writes Baby Pink, a username that seems like it would carry even more, uh, baggage about effete anxiety. Even Styleforum, that den of menswear fashion, has gotten in on the embarrassment. “Is it gay for a guy to carry a tote at school?” wonders a user at Yahoo Answers. The tote has “feminine connotations”, according to Reddit. Somehow, a square of cloth sewn shut into a pouch and given arm-straps and maybe a logo has inspired a deep current of anxiety in the male population. It is time for gentlemen everywhere to embrace this necessary vessel and overcome their shame, to shout from the rooftops: I’m a tote bagger, and I am proud. Don’t call it a “murse” or a “man-bag”, two derogatory terms for what is clearly its own practical, potent genre. With apologies to Freud, my tote obsession has nothing to do with purse envy.