What do men carry around in lieu of women's handbags? Enter the manbag: a whole new category of social life I have rediscovered to be not only a function of fashion and utility, but also a performance of gender and politics.

Women have their Chanel 2.55s, their Birkins and their Baguettes. And men have their briefcases and rucksacks, or so you think.

However, at a recent dinner-table conversation with self-identifying 'males', I have been humbly re-educated on the resurgence of the not-quite-fashion-but-not-quite-utilitarian genre: the manbag.

To be sure, it all only began when I tentatively mooted the idea of writing a column on this item and was greeted by a slew of defensive rants.

N, my metrosexual-intellectual dude friend, was annoyed.

'Don't you have better things to write about? Like Obama and Palin? Why manbags? Why not just 'bag'? Why such a big deal? Why should anybody have any opinion on manbags?'

To which, N dashed immediately into a lengthy and infuriated ramble on the subject, a hot-button topic on which he clearly had more than six different opinions.

'Men have used bags for the longest time. There's nothing new. It's not a fashion thing. Is it so important to look at their bags now? Must a manbag look like that leather saddle thing on Genghis Khan's horse in order to qualify as one? Can't you call a briefcase or rucksack a manbag? Or a sub-category of a manbag? Or just a bag?

'We use messenger bags. But they're not limited to men, so you can't say it's a manbag. Gender equality.

'By attaching the prefix 'man' to 'bag', are you implying that men are finally liberated into the existence of being allowed to own one? That bags have always been the territory of ladies? But who cares anyway?

'Maybe the disparity in the bag industry will speak for itself. Why are there so many more handbags than manbags in shops? Bags and ladies have that unique bond which men apparently don't have.

'It's not a sexist thing, it's just the economy speaking - it's a market conspiracy on how men are encouraged to think they have different bag habits from women and, you know, all these stupid projections about men's issues and women's issues being separate things and all that talk about commitment-phobia and biological clocks and menopause...'

Whoa. I have no idea how we moved from manbags to menopause, but clearly the issue of manbags has become a delicately negotiated performance of gender, ego and politics.

Notice, for example, how men, when asked to hold their wives' patent things made in the name of Prada, wield them like they were dead animals.

Not so manbags. These are not held. Rather, they are utilitarian extensions of clothes, which are themselves extensions of the hu(man) body as, simply, a vehicle of thought and will.

'The operative word is 'functional',' says another self-identifying male, S, who recently appointed himself a smug professor of bagology after completing a doctorate in musical anthropology and getting married, thus having his lovely wife take over all his shopping, including the purchase of bag-type items.

He muses: 'Manbags are the same thing as pockets in cargo pants and jeans. But you end up chronically misaligning your spine if you sit on your wallet all day.

'So you have manbags. And manbags have to have pockets too. Lots of them. For our gadgets and Swiss army knives and black notebooks and things, you know. Things. Function. Utility. Things.'

Obviously, I am going to argue here that this 'function-utility' nonsense is just another unwitting performance of macho-ness: Men are vain enough to want to perform their apparent lack of vanity in deliberately choosing minimally styled carry-alls.

Otherwise, why not just use a generic hemp sack, or indeed their wives' shiny things from Coach instead?

A quick and unscientific survey I conducted among more males revealed that manbags have to have the following non-functional characteristics:

1. They have to be square or rectangular.

2. They have to come in shades of grey, khaki, green, black, navy blue or bright orange.

3. They have to be slung diagonally across the shoulder and cannot hang on thin straps, most certainly not straps dangling vertically from the wrist or snug around one unbalanced armpit.

4. They have to contain 'man' things.

5. Acceptable manbag brands range from Mulberry (for dandies) to Freitag (not-too-poor-messenger boys) and Crumpler (strictly teenagers).

Now, if all of the above do not constitute a fashion manifesto, then tell me I am never going to be clued in enough to own my first Chloe Paddington.

But then, I have only just begun research from the tip of the iceberg. Whisperings among my select group of self-identifying male friends tell of a new socio-sartorial genre called the 'murse', or man-purse.

As far as I am concerned, the word alternatively brings to mind bulging pouches dangling alongside keychains from carabinas on belt-holders and old-

fashioned leather wallets with 25 different compartments used by waiters in Europe.

Technically, of course, I still have no idea what a 'murse' is. A male nurse?

I ask D, my cool-as-cucumber (male) landlord for advice.

'No comment,' he says, cleverly evading the issue, before barter-trading an impossibly large stack of DVDs housed in a Sainsbury shopping bag with me.

'Now, that is not a manbag,' he says, pointing knowledgeably at the sheaves of thin canvas enclosing Battleship Potemkin and other audio-visual delights.

'It's a shopping bag. Can't you tell?'

This article was first published in The Straits Times on Nov 6, 2008.