A woman and her handbag are never parted

I will be the first to admit that writing about women can be a tricky endeavour. In my experience, it’s like walking a thin line hung over the Victoria Falls gorge. And we are not talking bungee jumping here. It is very difficult to write positively about females without raising the temperature of males and vice versa.

However, this life is about taking risks and without doing so one achieves little or nothing. After 16 action packed years of marriage, I now know why John Gray was motivated to write his bestselling book, ‘Men are from Mars, Women from Venus,’ and yet he has never been an astronaut!

The so-called Battle of the Sexes seems to have no bounds, particularly when one broaches the subject of women who have risen to positions once exclusively male. For centuries we (meaning males) have - and deceptively so – maintained the false impression that there are things only men can do.

That myth has been blown to smithereens with women now wondering if there is any use for men at all – except perhaps in procreation. The danger of men becoming extinct should be taken as seriously as climate change or global warming.

A comedian once said that behind every successful man is a baffled woman. The implication being that with all a woman knows about her man’s weaknesses,  it’s a miracle that men can achieve anything if left to their own devices.

Unbelievable as it might seem, there are men out there who appreciate the fact that the creation of Eve was a stroke of genius on God’s part.

Where there is the feminine touch there is supposed to be eh, order. However, having mentioned all the niceties about the fairer sex, I would hold my breath when it came to what I will call the psychology of the handbag.

Men will never understand the attachment women have to their handbags. Far from being the fashion item it is purported to be, it’s an enigma. The handbag represents everything about a woman and more. It’s about the capacity to hold so many different things but not being sure when to use them.

This explains why it becomes so difficult for women to locate things they have unconsciously chucked into their handbags. Women take ages in finding an irritatingly ringing cellphone, car keys, the code to unlocking nuclear weapons (with apologies to Michelle Obama) diaries, pins, needles, the family pet, telephone directory…lunch… take your pick.

This dilemma is so critical that the person who will invent a gadget that makes it easy for women to locate items in their handbags will be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Apart from eliminating the single most contentious issue between males and females, we would hear much less of the frustrated expression, “I am sure I put it in my handbag!”

A husband once remarked that the way his wife misplaced things in her handbag, he feared that she would lose the Mini Cooper he bought for her birthday … IN HER HANDBAG!

In the age when we now have women presidents, men shudder to imagine where we are all headed if women were to manage countries the same way they did their handbags.

But then in the wider scheme of things, handbags and clueless males fade into the cacophony that is everyday life. As positions that used to be exclusively male are ‘feminized,’and vice-versa, men have to face the grim reality of the male species headed for extinction. Particularly when we witness the fashion entry of... wait for it... HANDBAGS FOR MEN!