When I complained this morning about having Toni Bentley review Katha Pollitt’s new book, I hadn’t even seen the interview yet with Deborah Solomon. (Hat tip.) God, now I am, if it was even possible, in an even bitchier mood about all this. I realize that Solomon’s schtick is to be painfully aggressive and try to put the interviewee off her lunch, but sometimes the result is that Solomon’s questions sound like she’s trying to win an award for aggressive stupidity. Like this:
As a political columnist for The Nation and one of the country’s most eloquent feminists, you’ve just published your first collection of personal essays, “Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories.” Why would you choose to advertise your lifelong fear of driving when it reinforces old stereotypes about female ineptitude and ditziness?
I will point out that the incorrect premise she’s working from one is a common one. A lot of people seem to believe that feminism is about castigating women to achieve inhuman perfection in order to be taken seriously at all. But in actuality, the belief that a woman owes to the world her unwavering perfection to be given the same respect as men is known as sexism. This notion—that we can extrapolate the failings of an entire sex from an eccentric flaw in one member of it—is known as sexism, which I do believe is the exact opposite of feminism. Pollitt’s notion that women shouldn’t be held to a higher standard than men and that it’s okay for women to be different from one another and that women are human and have personal failings is not a sign that she’s failed as a feminist, but that she is a feminist.
I do realize that this is confusing. I mean, it shouldn’t be. It should seem simple to argue that one does not define feminism as “pandering to sexism”, but when it comes to women, that urge to enforce impossible standards kicks in and next thing you know, it’s considered feminism to hold women up to a sexist standard. But we have to, as a nation, get over our easily confused notions.
44 Responses to “Sometimes the simplest concepts are the hardest to grasp”
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Does anybody blink about women drivers anymore? For a woman, it’s more strange not to know how to drive than to know how to drive. (BTW, I don’t know how to drive, and I feel I should)
My father-in-law was from New York, didn’t know how to drive (what for?). He was stationed in South Texas at one point during WWII, met my mother-in-law and decided to stay. That’s when he finally learned to drive, though he never liked or enjoyed it. So what does not knowing how to drive prove? That was a crap question, although to be expected. Katha Pollitt is human, wow what a suprise.
It always seemed to me that the whole “women drivers” thing was one of those tics by which you could immediately identify either a dinosaur or a sexist loser.
It is too bad, though, that Pollitt didn’t give more thought to how she might appear as a credit to her race, oops, gender, before daring to open her mouth in public. The fact that, living as she does in an urban center where driving oneself is both unnecessary and dangerous, she doesn’t like to drive immediately discredits all the well-reasoned arguments she has ever made. To think otherwise is as absurd as believing in the principles of the declaration of independence after having learned that Jefferson wasn’t a proper christian.
Deborah Solomon is a twit, and I wish I understood just what the Times thinks they’re accomplishing by publishing her interviews. It’s all oooh, look at the clever questions! I can make people look silly by reducing their life’s work to superficial nonsense! Wow!
I thought Pollitt came across as level-headed and generally not thrown off by Solomon’s nonsense, but then I think Katha Pollitt is one of the smartest, clearest writers around, so what do I know?
BTW, a bit OT, but why the yin-yang symbol? That’s one of the most sexist concepts ever conceived of. I know it has a folk “Asian Wisdom” connotation in the West of something different, but if you go back to the original texts it means men are active and lead, women are passive and follow, world without end, amen. And this is built into the very fabric of the cosmos, so forget about reforming it.
Sorry to vent, but I did doctoral research on the early development of Chinese cosmology and the misuse of the yin-yang pair has always irritated me.
GREAT POST AManda!
THis concept is so simple, yet so easy to be confused about. This needs to be on the Feminism 101 page!
The whole “women are worse drivers than men” thing remains alive and well, unfortunately. What blows my mind is the number of people who will take my husband’s and my respective driving records (both been driving 22 years. He has four accidents and half-a-dozen speeding tickets. I have no accidents and one ticket), as evidence that he is a better driver than I am. Apparently my lack of accidents means I’m overly cautious, and hence a worse driver.
Of course if our driving records were reversed, I’m sure my accidents would be evidence for my bad driving.
I bet Deborah Solomon and Maureen Dowd hang out together all the time.
I admit I wasn’t a huge fan of Solomon’s questions, but isn’t part of the job of an interviewer to ask questions, even dumb ones, that her readers are likely to be curious about? If you interview, say, Echidne for Pandagon, then you can afford to not ask her feminism 101 questions, but if you’re interviewing her for, say, the New York Times Magazine, then it might be better to ask her such questions to give Pollitt an opportunity to head such concerns off at the pass, no matter how tiresome they are for veteran feminists, than to let readers think they see some self-contradiction where none really exists.
Or so it seems to me.
This is something that quite a few women I know believe–that feminists want “too much” from them, that they’re suppose to be career pirates and motherhood ninjas at the same time. And as we all know, pirates and ninjas just don’t mix.As a male I can make all kinds of choices and who cares if I don’t live up to anyone’s expectations? I don’t really need to jump through hoops to get a basic level of respect. But we expect women to be superheroes just to get that same amount of respect…are we mad?
And I thought the NYT had taken its swipe at Pollitt with that pos review*.
Katha Pollitt is, of course, a marvel and handles that stupid interview with grace it doesn’t deserve.
*Any reviewer who equates Oscar Wilde with Elfriede Jelinek needs to find another line of work.
“women are worse drivers than men”
Uh-huh. Just ask your insurance company.
Oh for cryin out loud…
My head is about to explode…rural here.
We’ve been shuttling non-drivers for the last thirty years, (multiple church outreach program…yeah, yeah, I go to church) and at least half are men..elderly, epileptic, physically/mentally challenged…and yes, a very few are simply afraid to drive, though they technically possess the ability to do so.
For fuck’s sake…not everyone can drive a stickshift…or an automatic.
Uh-huh. Just ask your insurance company.
Ya think? Only female in a household of five, and it sure as hell wasn’t MY driving record that “adjusted” our rates.
Sorry for the 2nd post, but it is all so dumb.
But we expect women to be superheroes just to get that same amount of respect…are we mad?
Uh, who’s “we”? Feminists, or people trying to make feminism look bad by spreading lies about it? Because the feminists I know want all women to be treated as people, not just the superheroes. Which was the point of the damn post.
Solomon is a mental midget completely out of her league:
” Why would you choose to advertise your lifelong fear…?”
Telling the personal truth in a book of personal essays yes, indeed, what’s THAT all about? Hmmm…honesty, what is this thing called honesty?
Katha is a marvel of integrity, poise and above all congruence, something so pure and novel Solomon can’t find a reference point. But you know it has to be bad because a feminist leader does it. What a twit.
I think this should go into the Feminism 101 blog. I’ve let bullshit like this slip past me before. It is common enough that the counterargument bears repeating.
I do sometimes remind my husband to use gender-neutral swears if he’s not actually sure of the sex of the person whose driving upset him.
And as for being afraid to drive, I consider it infinitely better than being unafraid and bad. When I was young, I didn’t like the idea of being in control of a 2000 pound, self-propelled bullet. It wasn’t until I developed vertigo from other causes that I noticed it also kicked in when I was trying to practice the visual scanning practices of a good driver. But I had subconsciously realized early on that something was not right, and avoided forcing myself into a dangerous effort just to fit in.
Capisce?I’d be afraid of driving too if all I knew was the driving of the average NYC cabbie.
in addition to the general idiocy of the questions, doesn’t it seem like Solomon is running the gamut of “she’s a feminist, let’s ask her (completely random) girl questions!”? the hillary thing was a bit obvious, but nail salons? Ms. Pollitt seems to go for just tangential author association in her answers after that, to awfully good effect, I must say.
by the way, I found the times review rather incomprehensible. i guess it makes sense, since I always hope that trying to knock a feminist for being a human with idiosyncracies makes you look like a moron…
So right on — I was disappointed to see James Wolcott, someone I normally admire, say that probably “the feminists” would be disappointed by Katha Pollitt admitting to various human flaws in her latest volume of essays, some of them relating to men and romance… arrgghhhh (beating head against wall).
How many times do we have to hear that backhanded shit — “*I* liked this book, but probably “the feminists” won’t” — about phenomena that wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for, emmmm, feminism?
ahunt - I think Ron was pointing out that car insurance is more expensive for males than for females with similar driving records.
dwight- i think ahunt was agreeing.
Amanda, there are two dimensions to solomon’s dumb question. One, as you rightly point out, is the sexism inherent in the fallacy of generalizing from one member. The other, though, is curiously hidden beneath the American blindness to their absurd transportation system. Absurd insofar as it is designed to accomodate 40 to 50 thousand deaths a year in transportation - something that was unheard of in the world before the auto-highway hybrid arrived.
The most uniformly patriarchal sector in this country, even more than the military, is the auto and highway complex. Autos have been designed mainly by military men since the forties, and mainly by men before that. In fact, perhaps I should amend that to completely by men. And highways, too, were designed by men - in fact, interstates were designed in the fifties with military purposes in mind, like quick evacuation from hydrogen bombed areas.
The joke that women are bad drivers, or afraid to drive, actually references the fact that the driving environment was designed to enforce a maximal male, or military male, environment on drivers. To be fearful of driving is simply to be aware of this fact. There is no better example of the self-selection of viewpoints that goes with patriarchy than the highway system. None. Nowhere has the division between men and women been enacted so ruthlessly in favor of men. And yet, it is as if the all male fraternity didn’t exist - it is as if the auto and its design, and the highway and its design, is immutable. In actuality, it is ridiculous. It is ridiculously bad.
Google and try to find one woman who has had an influence on car design. Just one. I’m not talking about doing drafting work or carrying out orders. They are all men, and they are mostly connected to the military. It is a disgrace.
Nowhere has the division between men and women been enacted so ruthlessly in favor of men.
That’s strange. Of all the sexist bullshit that gets under my fingernails every day, freeways wouldn’t get close to the top ten. I was a little nervous about freeways when I first learned to drive, but I was surprised at how easy and natural it felt, and how much less stressful than driving on surface roads. I didn’t know they were rigged against me.
“sunsin
September 24, 2007 at 10:30 pm
BTW, a bit OT, but why the yin-yang symbol? That’s one of the most sexist concepts ever conceived of.”
The symbol, especially bordered by the-Four as it is in the S.Korean flag is mind-bogglingly simple, balanced, even, symmetrical, harmonious & chunk full of lessons for life.
And you don’t have to look too hard.
I liked it and found it altogether appropriate.
Junk science, your experience is interesting. However, it isn’t really a killer argument against the self selection that has operated within the transportation (and related) industries that has put design absolutely in the hands of a few comparatively few men who are generally close to the military since about 1945. The argument isn’t that women can’t assimilate to this environment, but that there is a huge lack of influence in shaping it. I don’t know, that 40 thousand deaths and hundreds of thousands of injuries each year are acceptable to us might be - just might be - a sign of numbness and lack of imagination. As is the arms race in cars whereby, without any regulation or special licencing, the same people who can basically drive a go cart have carte blanche to drive some 16 foot long 8500 lb vehicle without anybody blinking - except, in fact, everybody blinks and tries to buy bigger and bigger cars to protect themselves. But that is just touching on being a whimp, surely - for we have the best transportation system in all possible worlds.
Except that it stinks, kills far too many people, is creating a planet wide atmospheric crisis, and has been in the hands of a small group of men whose main characteristic is designing for maximum organized violence, and so it has been for half a century.
BTW, a bit OT, but why the yin-yang symbol? That’s one of the most sexist concepts ever conceived of. I know it has a folk “Asian Wisdom” connotation in the West of something different, but if you go back to the original texts it means men are active and lead, women are passive and follow, world without end, amen.
To point out that sexism is the opposite of feminism. Displaying =/ approving.
Interesting argument, roger. As someone who’s fond of the intersections of feminism and environmentalism, I find it tempting to go with your point. As someone who learned to drive (stick shift, no less) at 13, I quarrel with the idea that there’s something self-evidently masculine with driving. I quarrel really with the idea that something is self-evidently “masculine” in such a way that women are naturally repulsed by it. Masculinity is a construct, you know?
Amanda, I don’t think you are quarreling with my point at all, since apparently you have misinterpreted it. Since my point is not that women can’t drive, which would be a self-evidently stupid point, but that women have had no participation in designing the space of driving - either roads or cars - which is a self-evidently true point. So you think that Larry Summers remarks about women in engineering came out of nowhere? Tell me, then, Amanda, look up the engineering and design crews of the car companies. Look them up for the last fifty years. You name one woman who has hnd an influence - except as a consumer - on the design of the auto. Ditto on the design of the highway. But you think this all male array - which, in addition, is heavily militarized - has produced a gender friendly space?
Part of feminism is seeing that gender segregation works by making you simply accept institutions of gender segregation while arguing that women can accept their end products as well as anybody. I’ve read your stuff enough to know that you don’t think that about, say, sex, but somehow you seem to think it about the transportation system. I don’t see why.
PS - check out this link for the first woman designed car by a major car manufacturer - which happened in 2004, let see, almost 90 years since Ford started mass manufacturing cars:
http://www.wired.com/cars/energy/news/2004/04/62991
You’ll notice that Volvo, getting maximum publicity out of their gimmick, has no intention of actually manufacturing the thing.
And thus it becomes a source of pride when women take classes to learn to change their own oil, change a flat, etc.?
I dunno. Let me play lightning rod for a second. My girlfriend grew up on a farm and is, IMO, rightfully proud of the vast array of mechanical shit that she can troubleshoot and fix, not to mention the massive and sometimes ornery animals she can manage, the hard hours she’s accustomed to working, and so forth. So is this bad because men designed the tractor and developed the techniques for roping bulls (or whatever)? I thought it was good to prove that biology != destiny in arenas like that. And until now I had no reason to question whether or not this sedan or that coupe was “gender friendly.” I thought engineering was just engineering. What gives?
Wow. Petey, your comment is like, well, I know anorexia has nothing to do with skewed up and sexist body images in this country because my girlfriend can eat a big hearty breakfast. Sausages and biscuits! Shucks!
So, Petey Wheatstraw, all honor to your girlfriend and her oilchanging ability. All honor to Amanda’s stick shift abilities. However, the point, here, is -to go back to the interview with Pollitt - not that woman can’t drive cars, but that have had like zero, and I mean zero, input into the cars they drive in the transport system available to them. And if Pollitt expresses some fear, why, perhaps that has to do with the zero input, and perhaps in order to be part of the transportation order a certain thickening of the imagination, a certain acceptance that this is how it has to be, is in order. Perhaps there are other women and men with that same fear, sharing the same discomfort with a transportation sphere that they have to use, under threat of being excluded from a viable economic life in this country, but which has been designed to maximize a certain system of affordances - to use Donald Norman’s term for instrument uses - that are safety unfriendly, repair unfriendly, and have lead to a bizarre competition of car throw weights, as though the auto riders were stocking up on nuclear missiles - hence, the amazing Hummer.
If you read that link, Petey, I think the amazing thing isn’t your amazing girlfriend, the amazing thing is that Volvo got a story written about itself cause it had women design a car. In 2004. Like, it was a freak show or something. Like, this was unusual and a stunt. While, in contrast, more than half of drivers of cars are women. Hmm, sounds like something is going on here.
However, that woman-designed car sounds like a repair nightmare to me. *Everything adjusts itself! Automatically!* means that every time a sensor misfires or a chip gets screwy, the car becomes even less usable than the ones we have right now which have too many features.
We have a pickup, our only vehicle, which can’t get over steep hills without the sensors/controls for the air:fuel ratio going screwy, so that it stalls when we get back to lower altitudes. It also has had the idiot light on for at least 5 years; several shops have looked at it, and can find nothing wrong.
In the 70s, seemed like most people, if they cared to, could tinker with their own cars. Now everything is computerized and needs special equipment to trace faults.
And she’s going to magnify the problem?
Maybe they set her up to fail. Maybe they chose a female engineer who would be thinking expensive comfort rather than practical affordability. But you’ll find me looking for something small, fuel-efficient, and able to cope with hills the next time we shop for a car.
Roger, I get the issue with women not being allowed, until recently, to design cars. That’s not my question.
My question was whether or not this translated into a de facto hostile space that women have to “just accept” when they are driving, or if in fact engineering choices are made with respect to efficiency, low cost, etc. (ok, well, not if we’re talking about Ford, Chevy, etc., let’s be realistic).
If it is true that, say, Honda or BMW’s engineering choices come down to, I dunno, math or something, then unless you want to argue some kind of biological determinism I dunno how you can suggest that driving a car is not a level playing field, and everyone can access it (and, as mentioned before, what we find is that women are not encumbered by their cars but are in fact in many ways better than men, if insurance rates are any indicator).
Seriously, help me unpack this, I’d rather understand what you’re talking about than remain ignorant.
Petey, if they came down to “math’, then of course it would be silly to ‘bitch’. But of course, math presents the broad space in which designer choices are made. The way that you turn on your stereo or tune your radio in a car, for instance, isn’t dictated by math - to use a nice neutral example. Or where the mirrors are placed, or the angles they can reach to, or the particular lighting in the car, etc., etc.
Design has been very slow to respond to feminism, but there are a few designers out there who have written books on this subject, including Leslie Weiman’s Discrimination by Design. The organization of our space isn’t inherently female or male, as Amanda says - masculinity is a construction - but it is a very socially real construct that socially reproduces itself in industries like the automotive industry (whenever the subject of sexism in that industry comes up, industry writers like to say things like ‘though Detroit is the last bastion of male privilege”, etc. - and they don’t mean that as a bad thing).
Here’s a quote from Where Stuff Comes From, by a design critic named Luskin Molotch, who, after noting that women make up only 11.5 percent of the IDSA, the industrial design association, takes a shot at possible gender differences in design:
“In terms of gender, some designers say that women not only tend to design different things – by desire or office prejudice they concentrate on textiles, graphics and housewares – but also design the same things differently. Not all designers think this way, and some outspoken women designers say gender makes no difference. Among those who think it does, one version is that men are more perfomance oriented – that is, they want the product to run faster or more powerfully or have more features. Women, in some degree of contrast, concentrate on the interface: how the product can be approached and satisfactorily used – its ‘affordances’, as they say in the trade.”
I think that this fairly states a hypothesis. Whether it is true won’t, however, be worked out as long as women form such a minority in the design of the industrial products that really shape our lives.
“Since my point is not that women can’t drive, which would be a self-evidently stupid point, but that women have had no participation in designing the space of driving - either roads or cars - which is a self-evidently true point. So you think that Larry Summers remarks about women in engineering came out of nowhere? Tell me, then, Amanda, look up the engineering and design crews of the car companies. Look them up for the last fifty years. You name one woman who has hnd an influence - except as a consumer - on the design of the auto. Ditto on the design of the highway. But you think this all male array - which, in addition, is heavily militarized - has produced a gender friendly space?”
Roger,
As a women civil engineer, currently working on a project with the port authority of NY & NJ and recently having left an international program with the DoD who graduated in a class nearly 50% female in ‘99, I’ll tell you respectfully that your information is several years out of date.
Personnally, I think you are an idiot. Our road system is based in the roads designed by Romans, often overlaid over animal tracks (deer, goat, etc). The designs of our interstate system are a mix of military needs for cold war strategy and fluid mechanics with the car as the particle in flow. Math and fluid flow are hardly “Masculine”. And just ask the thousands of female veterans if the military is really “masculine” in comparison with the wider culture of things deemed “men’s” work. My step-father’s aunt was a code breaker & an engineer. In WWII. My husband’s aunt was in the Army. In WWII. When women are allowed in, the military is no longer only male, and only while women are discriminated via limitation in it will it remain more male.
a) Women (in general) are actually better drivers than men (in general). That’s why our car insurance rates are lower.
b) “Personal Essays” indicates that these stories are of a personal nature, not a feminist nature. Real people are dimensional.
c) Amanda, I think you’re right to clarify the difference between sexism and feminism. I think many people do not understand the difference between key words like misogyny and sexism or reproductive rights and sexual freedom…
d) Her book title, “Learning to Drive and Other Life Stories” does piss me off though because it’s an homage to the car, the American symbol of independence. It’s taken for granted that the readers will relate since they also learned to drive, albeit not like she did, in her 50s.
We really need to move away from cars and more towards mass transit. We should hope our children don’t have the almost universal memory of learning to drive, since half (not just the New Yorkers) won’t ever have to learn.
The way that you turn on your stereo or tune your radio in a car, for instance, isn’t dictated by math - to use a nice neutral example. Or where the mirrors are placed, or the angles they can reach to, or the particular lighting in the car, etc., etc.
So what’s the problem, exactly? Car interiors aren’t pink enough? Drivers’ seats are unaccommodating to vaginas? Side windows are too difficult to reach if you have short arms? Seriously, I have no idea how you think women would design cars differently, until which time women will suffer under the constraints of male-oriented engineering.
Helen you are a woman engineer who worked with the DoD who thinks it is idiotic to point out that the road system resulted from the intersection of the military and civil engineering in the fifties? Wow, that’s pretty brassy. I especially like the pretty story about the Romans and the tracking animals - I didn’t realize those tracking animals used to merge at sixty to seventy miles an hours. As for the math of traffic flow - well, Helen, I’ve read Prigogine’s book about traffic flow as well as anybody, and I’ve even read about Germany’s attempt to use an interconnected system of computers put in cars and traffic control posts that administer the distance between cars in that flow, and guess what? It wasn’t math that made Germany chose that system. It was choice. Just as you can make a dozen choices in creating the curve of an off ramp. That you don’t know that means simply … that you are a civil engineer, and not a designer. Re-read the quote about the difference between an interface centered design and a performance centered one, and then revisit your comment about math, and you will notice that you have assumed that performance centered design is the best. You have made a choice. The choice was not dictated by math. The choice couldn’t have been - math, once again, gives you the tools, but only human being build the structures.
Now, here’s something you might notice about your comment. You might notice that you don’t address one argument in the any of my posts with any facts or counter-factuals. You seemingly have no intention of actually looking up the history of the system you defend; you assure me that there are thousands of women having input into public space and industrial design, blithely skipping over the percentage of women in the premier Industrial Design association - the figure is from 1999 - as out of date. You cite no source for any of your comments, and frankly, your analysis of where road and highway design comes from - throwing in the animal tracks, for instance - pretty much sucks. However, your comment is a good example of just the kind of military mindset that has created the system we have: it uses one template and one template only to look at transport, the car system, and design in general, coming to the comfortable conclusion that we should just do what we have always done.
Fear of driving is actually rational when you start. You could get *killed* doing this. Of course, you could also get killed being a passenger, so what it boils down to is control and confidence. If you feel safer handing yourself over to someone else’s control because you lack confidence, you will prefer to be a passenger. If you feel safer controlling your destiny yourself because you are confident in your abilities, you will prefer to be a driver.
So, in our society, who is inculcated with the belief that they should be totally confident in their own abilities, and who is inculcated with the belief that they are incompetent and should let someone else run things for them?
Personally, I figured out as a teenager — while I was still personally terrified of driving — that women were vastly better drivers than men, because my parents could afford to add me to their insurance policy. As was explained to me by my parents, my driving instructors, my older friends who could drive, and the boys who couldn’t get their licenses because their parents wouldn’t let them, insurance for teen girls was about six times cheaper than insurance for teen boys, which, to me, was self-evident proof that girls are *much* better drivers than boys, and therefore probably women are better than men. Of course, at the time I had a naive faith that corporations would always do what benefits them as based on the math, rather than letting biases get in the way of their profits… but as it turns out, insurance *is* one of the areas where the actuarial reality trumped the personal biases. Women are better drivers than men. period, end. It is not refutable. Because the only definition of “good driver” that we can prove empirically is “how many accidents do they get into?” and by that definition women are better than men at every age.
Of course, now that I’m thinking of it, I wonder if some of the actuarial superiority of women is because they actually drive less, given that in most cases if there’s a man and a woman in the car the man is driving it. (Someone;s going to point out that most professional drivers are men, and therefore they have more accidents because they spend much more time on the road, but insurance companies can break out their data by how many miles the driver claims to drive per day, so I’m pretty sure they can separate out the professional drivers of either sex.) So women with driver’s licenses are involved in fewer accidents. Nonetheless, the differential is pretty overwhelmingly huge, to the point where in my hometown teen boys just didn’t drive. (We were in New York. Insurance wasn’t cheap for anyone.) And I went to Catholic school, not exactly a great bastion of pro-woman thought.
Honestly, I don’t even know why this stereotype still exists. It’s like, every time I see a man make fun of bad Asian drivers, I want to grab him by the neck and shake him. Especially if he’s a teenager. “*You*, sir, are by Allstate’s definition the WORST DRIVER ON THE PLANET, so how dare you insult other people’s driving?” There are few gender stereotypes that are so clearly refutable by so readily available facts that have such an impact on people’s lives, and yet all kinds of people who used to pay exorbitant rates to be insured as teenagers still think it’s funny to comment on women drivers.
Hoever, as far as women feeling unconfident as drivers because “drivespace” was created by and maintained by men… no, I don’t think that’s it. Women feel unconfident doing *anything* that is dangerous, because being told you’re incomptent all the time doesn’t make you feel secure about your ability to protect yourself in a dangerous arena. And men, trained to have greater confidence in themselves than the situation actually warrants, die of reckless acts on the road in huge numbers, because they confidently attempt dangerous things they aren’t, in the end, competent enough to pull off. Perhaps a bit more judicious fear of driving would save the lives of a few thousand boys and men, plus the innocent other people of either sex who were riding as passengers or who were in the cars they hit.
Woo, does stuff in the mod queue literally disappear? On Feministe, you can see your own modded posts, they’re just marked.
I’m going to assume my post just went into mod queue and not repost it immediately, but if I don’t see it in a few hours, I’ll trye again.
Okay, I’m guessing this really disappeared, as opposed to going into mod.
Fear of driving is actually rational when you start. You could get *killed* doing this. Of course, you could also get killed being a passenger, so what it boils down to is control and confidence. If you feel safer handing yourself over to someone else’s control because you lack confidence, you will prefer to be a passenger. If you feel safer controlling your destiny yourself because you are confident in your abilities, you will prefer to be a driver.
So, in our society, who is inculcated with the belief that they should be totally confident in their own abilities, and who is inculcated with the belief that they are incompetent and should let someone else run things for them?
Personally, I figured out as a teenager — while I was still personally terrified of driving — that women were vastly better drivers than men, because my parents could afford to add me to their insurance policy. As was explained to me by my parents, my driving instructors, my older friends who could drive, and the boys who couldn’t get their licenses because their parents wouldn’t let them, insurance for teen girls was about six times cheaper than insurance for teen boys, which, to me, was self-evident proof that girls are *much* better drivers than boys, and therefore probably women are better than men. Of course, at the time I had a naive faith that corporations would always do what benefits them as based on the math, rather than letting biases get in the way of their profits… but as it turns out, insurance *is* one of the areas where the actuarial reality trumped the personal biases. Women are better drivers than men. period, end. It is not refutable. Because the only definition of “good driver” that we can prove empirically is “how many accidents do they get into?” and by that definition women are better than men at every age.
Of course, now that I’m thinking of it, I wonder if some of the actuarial superiority of women is because they actually drive less, given that in most cases if there’s a man and a woman in the car the man is driving it. (Someone;s going to point out that most professional drivers are men, and therefore they have more accidents because they spend much more time on the road, but insurance companies can break out their data by how many miles the driver claims to drive per day, so I’m pretty sure they can separate out the professional drivers of either sex.) So women with driver’s licenses are involved in fewer accidents. Nonetheless, the differential is pretty overwhelmingly huge, to the point where in my hometown teen boys just didn’t drive. (We were in New York. Insurance wasn’t cheap for anyone.) And I went to Catholic school, not exactly a great bastion of pro-woman thought.
Honestly, I don’t even know why this stereotype still exists. It’s like, every time I see a man make fun of bad Asian drivers, I want to grab him by the neck and shake him. Especially if he’s a teenager. “*You*, sir, are by Allstate’s definition the WORST DRIVER ON THE PLANET, so how dare you insult other people’s driving?” There are few gender stereotypes that are so clearly refutable by so readily available facts that have such an impact on people’s lives, and yet all kinds of people who used to pay exorbitant rates to be insured as teenagers still think it’s funny to comment on women drivers.
Hoever, as far as women feeling unconfident as drivers because “drivespace” was created by and maintained by men… no, I don’t think that’s it. Women feel unconfident doing *anything* that is dangerous, because being told you’re incomptent all the time doesn’t make you feel secure about your ability to protect yourself in a dangerous arena. And men, trained to have greater confidence in themselves than the situation actually warrants, die of reckless acts on the road in huge numbers, because they confidently attempt dangerous things they aren’t, in the end, competent enough to pull off. Perhaps a bit more judicious fear of driving would save the lives of a few thousand boys and men, plus the innocent other people of either sex who were riding as passengers or who were in the cars they hit.