I've joined the iPod squad

MEN have always measured success using a variety of yardsticks.

Might be the size of our bank balance. Might be our postcode. Could be our girlfriend. Or - and this goes back a long way - the size of our biceps.

Once, all that mattered to us was the size of our cars. We measured our success, our prowess, our influence by what we drove. Might have been a Merc.

Might have been a Beemer. More recently, it was probably an Audi.

But we don't seem to care about cars any more. Not in our office, anyway.

No, in the GQ office, water cooler conversations are about what iPod we've got, and what's on it. Towards the end of last year conversations had begun to veer away from reality TV and football towards gadgets. Suddenly, we couldn't get enough of them. We bragged about our BlackBerrys, mobiles, any cordless wonder we had in the hope of keeping up with our peers.

Unsurprisingly, it was the iPod that really caught our attention, especially the number of songs we had on them. And while you might have thought it was perfectly acceptable casually to admit you only have, say, 1,200 songs on your memory box, for a few weeks it was very easy to become an object of derision. There was a quantity- over-quality issue, a sort of digital penis envy How many David Bowie songs have you got on yours? (I've got 118, enough for eight hours and 10 minutes exactly.) How many Beatles songs? (I've got 268 which, played continuously, would take more than half a day.) Right now, my laptop - a 12in PowerBook G4 - contains 4,777 songs, enough for nearly a fortnight, from 4Hero, the Fifth Dimension and 10cc right through to Zero 7, the Zombies and ZZ Top.

Capacity is paramount in the world of the iPod. When I finally decided to buy one, 18 months ago, I didn't muck about with any of the smaller machines - 15GB? Are you mad? 20GB? What do you take me for? No, I went in big and opted for the Big Daddy, the 40GB. Anything less would have been an embarrassment.

And, just recently, on a trip to LA, I bought the mother of all MP3 players, the 60GB iPod, which probably has enough room for every song I will ever like for the rest of my life. Friends have invested in the iPod mini, but I'm not convinced: when you can squeeze a lifetime into a machine, why settle for a decade?

After getting my machine, I began slipping into a predictable pattern of conversation, trying to force everyone I met into some sort of opinion on this technological manifestation of the future. Did they have an iPod and, if not, why not? If they did, what was on it? And after a few polite minutes where I would pretend I was impressed by their esoteric taste ("Oh, you've uploaded all the Police albums.

Interesting "), I'd drop the Big Question.

"So, which version do you have?" And if they pretended not to know, or were vague, I'd push some more. "How many songs can you get on it? You know, HOW BIG IS IT? Your iPod?" Then I'd get the downcast eyes, and the shifting from foot to foot. "I've, er, got the middle one."

"The what? The 40?" I'd reply. "No, the 20," they'd say, "but I can get loads of songs on it and how many can you really listen to at any one time? I really got it for my girlfriend and she only likes what's in the charts anyway " I would let them blabber on, then mutter "amateur" under my breath and move on to my next victim.

AND although this was a very male thing, ironically I had always thought the iPod was asexual. It has, of course, an innate, tactile sexuality, but I'd never thought of it as gender-specific. It is such a thing of beauty, an abstract object of desire, yet it is somehow above all that. Until I heard someone refer to it as feminine, that is.

He - this man! - was describing the JBL On Stage speaker system, a discshaped port in which your beloved iPod nestles, and which " charges her up for the day". Her? Her? When did the iPod suddenly become feminine? I think it was fairly obvious that iPod minis, in all their metallic pastel glory, were aimed at the female market, but was this chap really saying my chrome 40GB 3G monster wasn't masculine, that he was somehow "not as other hardware"?

And so overnight my iPod became male, just because someone had said it was feminine. Pathetic of me, I know. But in France, it's le iPod, not la. It is a boy's toy, after all. At least mine is. Like my car, my BlackBerry and my mobile. All of which, I might add, are much bigger than yours.

. Dylan Jones is editor of GQ and author of iPod, Therefore I Am: A Personal Journey Through Music, Weidenfeld Nicolson, Pounds 12.99.

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