The Purse Predicament

I've noticed that the size of a woman's purse is a pretty good indicator of her load of responsibilities.

Some women strain under the weight of their makeshift duffels, some put their troubles behind them with the trendy if bulky backpack (sleeker versions now available to the stinking rich,) while others skip along with their elitist little pillbox purses with the spaghetti straps. Honestly, if all you have is a platinum American Express card and a lipstick, use a POCKET for goodness sake.

My purse is medium size and medium quality - putting me in prime position to make fun of just about everybody else. But my bag has seen worse life phases. Over my lifetime I expect pretty much hit all the extremes. From the fake-ID sized high school purse, all the way to the post-senior carpetbag of death.

Women with infants have just about the worst of it. Some of them even give over the dignity of a separate purse, and co-mingle their personal stuff with the likes of diapers and wipes and leaky jars of pureed peas. It's a sad, defeatist sight, but they usually have bags under their eyes, half-combed hair, and have recently spent the better part of a day spread-eagled in a hospital ward. Dignity makes the list right down there after "rotate the tires."

The only ones worse off than the infant-toters is those third-world women who carry large baskets on their heads. Now THAT's a load of responsibility! Besides cosmetics, they probably have 2 or 3 children in there, along with the family's wet laundry and a dozen or so chickens.

But it gives me an idea. We as a competition-based culture seem intent on taking any basic functional idea and making it all complicated and status-oriented. In the good old days, you got judged maybe, for how neat or sloppy your purse was, but not so much what KIND of purse you carried. Now, you can tell almost as much about a woman from her purse as you can from her groceries.

Instead of displaying purses by color or size anymore, you'll notice that stores separate them by cost category. There's:

• Doctor's Wives Purses (behind glass)
  
• Businesswomen's Purses ("Doctor's Wives Purse Irregulars")
  
• Hollywood Starlet Purses (they have to buzz you in)
  
• And the Proletariat Purses (usually in bins roughly the size, shape, and decor of your standard professional wrestling ring.)