girl drivers (3)
Posted 20 August, 2004 in life shiz
santa monica, ca, summer 1991. i am sixteen, and i’ve just got my driver’s license. i’m coming down ocean avenue in my mom’s brand-new ford escort gt. ahead, a line of cars is turning left across my lane into parking spaces diagonal to the road. one of them turns when i’m too close, and i can’t stop. bam.
“paint it black” by the rolling stones is on the stereo. it is very loud. i turn it down and get out. i’m pissed. a woman in her late thirties gets out of her mercedes, which now has a large dent in the front. her young daughter is in the back, without a car seat or seatbelt. “whose fault do you think *that* was?” i say snidely to the woman. she shrugs. “i was just following the other cars turning.” she says. i resist the urge to beat her over the head with my registration and insurance papers.
there is a commonly held belief that women are bad drivers. i don’t want to agree with this without investigating it thoroughly. first, i’ll look at my own experiences.
aside from the mercedes lady, i have been in several other vehicular altercations and near-misses with other car-driving females. but i’ve also been hit by a couple of guys. the women outnumber the men, seeming to indicate that, for me at least, women are more hazardous on the road.
however, i’ve also hit my fair share of people, and i think the number of men and the number of women i’ve crashed into are pretty much equal. but i’m a woman, so maybe i should add my own accidents to my total so far. my completely unscientific research indicates guys are still coming out ahead.
some of the complaints i hear about women drivers are: they’re too timid, they drive too slowly, they panic too easily, and they make sudden, unconsidered maneuvers. this description fits my mom perfectly, bless her heart. she never makes left turns unless there’s a light. “kate, what are you doing?” she would screech if i was in the driver’s seat and we came to an unprotected intersection. she never drove above 20mph along the streets of london or l.a.
however, my mom was never as bad as the ladies of the los angeles suburb of brentwood, where i spent my teens. these women would pull out in their SUVs, completely unaware of who might be behind or in front of them, and proceed to tootle along at 10mph, stopping up the whole road. coming to an intersection and seeing a car approaching, they would freak, and pull out anyway, usually having not gotten the nerve to move until the last possible second. i hate to say it, but whenever a car made a stupid move and i turned to see who was in the driver’s seat, it was a chick.
but my female friends, on the other hand, are great drivers, if sometimes a little too creative. my friend jamie would have me steer for her on the highway while she dove in the back seat to find something, keeping her foot on the gas the entire time. i would tell her when to brake. she also liked to screech to a halt in the middle of the street if she saw a pedestrian she wanted to talk to, or if a passenger told her something particularly shocking. another friend of mine had a burgundy mustang 5.0 gt by the time we were seventeen, and liked to race guys on the freeway. several of my other girlfriends have new cars they fawn over. these girls love to drive, and don’t suck at it. but from what i hear, this kind of woman is rare.
is there something in american culture that makes women as a group generally worse than men at driving? are women taught to be afraid of heavy machinery, or are they more easily distracted, or do they just not take driving as seriously? are they unaware of or unwilling to accept that they are piloting a large, dangerous machine and therefore must behave responsibly and assertively? do they just not know they are such bad drivers?
i really have no idea. i love to drive. i don’t mind taking jobs where i have a semi-long commute–as long as i have a working radio in my car, it’s all good. i love road trips. i feel like i’m a capable and responsible driver, but i know i have some bad habits. o has pointed them out to me. i tailgate. i sit behind slow people instead of passing them. i’m alternately too mellow and too aggressive. so maybe i am part of the bad female driver problem.
or perhaps it’s just that the majority of people in the world suck, and driving is one of the many ways in which this suckage manifests itself. after all, there are plenty of bad male drivers out there too. maybe there are certain issues of suckage that are specific to males and females, and driving is more specific to females, whereas males are more prone to…i don’t know…shouting unnecessarily at salespeople, or something. or maybe it’s old rhetoric left over from sexist days gone by, where women couldn’t vote, or walk and smoke at the same time, or some such feminist-type shite.
what do you all think?