Are you still carrying around a normal sized water bottle and needing to refill it throughout the day? You stupid bitch. You complete idiot. You absolute buffoon. You’re supposed to be carrying around your entire day’s worth of water in one massive jug. Didn’t you get the fitness hottie memo?
you heard it here first: big bottles are in pic.twitter.com/4aCyGTjtgo
— internet baby (@kirkpate) March 12, 2021
As a recent deluge of paparazzi photos reveal, big water bottles have become something of a status object. They’re even making headlines on their own, with an InStyle headline from early March reading, “Dakota Johnson Just Made a Case for the Instagram-Famous Gallon Water Bottle.” But what case is that, exactly?
Surely, there’s some utility to knowing precisely how much water you’ve consumed. Many of the popular ones on Amazon carry an entire gallon, featuring markers with timestamps and corny, encouraging phrases like “1 p.m. — KEEP CHUGGING” to bully you into staying hydrated. Some people do indeed require around a gallon per day, with the recommended average daily intake for men being 3.7 liters, or .97 gallons, according to Healthline. Particularly active people living in hot climates may want to drink even more than that.
For most of the celebrity women seen carrying the cumbersome bottles around, though, their daily water needs are likely much less. There’s no real harm in drinking an excess of water throughout the day, so long as it doesn’t reach extremes. There is, however, no real point in it, either. You can obviously just carry a normal sized water bottle and fill it up as needed. But that wouldn’t be as stylish.
Like most fashionable objects, then, the gallon jug likely represents something else besides simple hydration. Carrying one of these giant water bottles demonstrates a commitment to one’s fitness, particularly when spotted doing so while wearing athleisure. That itself is rather bourgeois: When you sport these bottles as an accessory, you’re saying that you have the luxury of time to devote yourself to these concerns. After all, if you were simply just worried about getting enough water, you’d carry the plastic milk-style gallon you can buy for $1, reusing it until it no longer has any physical integrity left.
Even if you don’t exactly have a lifestyle in which you’re regularly photographed leaving the pilates studio at 2 p.m. on a Wednesday, you’d probably like to. And so, carrying the water jug is a means of pretending.
There’s obviously nothing wrong with wanting a big water bottle. Some of them even come with straps and phone holders, which does seem quite handy. You’re not to be blamed for the desires that consumerism thrusts upon you. But maybe don’t let yourself be tricked into lugging around several pounds of water for aesthetics. Maybe let yourself be tricked into lugging around these dumbbell-shaped water bottles, instead. Or just, you know, use the fucking water bottle you already have.
Magdalene Taylor
Magdalene Taylor is a staff writer at MEL. She covers internet culture, sex and the online adult industry. She lives in Brooklyn but is from God's Country, Western Massachusetts.
