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Riding in Cars with Boys—
Don’t Do It!
A director of Diamond Car Insurance, one David Stephens (a man, I’m guessing) is on record as saying "Young men in cars are very dangerous." Perhaps it was on purpose that he didn’t say "young men behind the wheel," because a quick perusal of the Darwin Awards (www.darwinawards.com—honoring "those who improve our gene pool...by removing themselves from it") shows that men manage to be dangerous in cars even when they aren’t driving. See the story Modus Operandi Misfires. Keep reading, and you’ll find that men are also dangerous on cars, under cars, and anywhere in the general vicinity of cars. Thanks heavens that in these circumstances, they’re mostly just dangerous to themselves.
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We all know the myth of the woman driver. She’s the ditzy broad who can’t parallel park, is forever getting into fender-benders, and pulls away from the gas pump with the hose still inserted in the vehicle (see photo, undoubtedly doctored, at the blog URL http://www.szilagyi.us/images/woman-driver.jpg). But does she exist?
Luckily, this is one myth that can be dispensed with using the most respected factual evidence in our society: moolah. Money is the signpost pointing in the direction of truth. Follow the money, and you’ll find the facts. And what money says is this: the auto insurance premium for a perfect physical specimen of an unmarried 25-year-old male is about ten times that for a one-eyed, 80-year old woman too short to see over the dashboard. *
Could that be because women are the bad drivers? If there’s any industry in the world that’s refined the act of making money into a science, it’s insurance. They know perfectly well who is and who is not likely to come careening down your road like the Tasmanian Devil on wheels and speed away wearing your mailbox. They have an actuarial table for that exact scenario. If an aged female cyclops pays less for auto insurance than a buff, young GQ model, it’s for one reason only: she’s a better driver.
And it’s not just American women who are better drivers. A few years back there was a controversy over a Diamond Car Insurance ad in England (see the sidebar for more from Diamond) that insinuated that women are better drivers than men and showed a man getting dolled up in a beauty parlor in a desperate attempt to get the lower auto insurance premiums awarded to women. There were complaints about the ad from outraged men. Unfortunately for the complainants, the Advertising Standards Authority (the agency charged with the task of ensuring that the UK’s print ads are truthful) determined that the ad was substantiated by statistics. Urp! Nothing is as unpalatable as eating your words along with your pride.
The argument is sometimes made that men have higher accident rates because they do more driving than women and drive longer distances. I can believe this is true, because any woman who’s been in a steady relationship with a man for longer than a coffee break has learned there’s no argument so futile as the one in which she tries to convince her guy that she should drive when they go out together. Of course men drive more: they won’t relinquish the steering wheel. They refuse to occupy the passenger seat, as if people would point and laugh at the sight. As far as I can tell, this is just another one of those weird power/control issues that men have and women will never understand.
This insistence on driving seems especially strange to me because in my family—and I’ve got to be very careful not to identify anyone specifically, because I’m treading on really thin ice, here—only males have gotten into car accidents serious enough to generate an insurance claim. One male took out a mailbox (you thought I was joking about mailboxes as auto apparel?) when he was distracted temporarily by a cat on his face. He was trying to deliver the poor creature to a veterinarian. He gets points for good-heartedness, but unfortunately, those points don’t count on a driving test.
Another male in my family attempted a Vulcan Mind Meld between a Ryder truck and a Ford Explorer. It was successful from a physical merger standpoint, but the resulting "hybrid vehicle" had poor road performance. It was also, I might add, still attached to a gas pump. (See photo again and mentally delete the letters "wo.")
Interestingly, even on the rare occasions when women, too, do stupid things behind the wheel, they still don’t generate insurance claims. Consider the case of the Georgia woman driver who swerved across three lanes of an Interstate highway to park under an overpass so rain wouldn’t ruin a sofa in the back of her pickup truck. She caused a 24-car pileup, but there wasn’t a scratch on her vehicle.
Despite the fact that all my personal experience confirms the insurance industry’s assessment of the relative abilities of women and men as drivers, the myth of the woman driver is so pervasive that even I was temporarily misled by it. One day, my husband K— came home complaining about being tailgated all the way to and from work. He said, "What flabbergasts me is that the worst tailgaters are women with kids in the back seat."
After he said this, I started paying more attention to women drivers, and initially it seemed like he had something there. The most egregious tailgaters and speed limit violators are frequently striking blonde women in sunglasses driving gigantic black SUVs—often with kids in the back seat. They always scowl, as though being a picture-perfect, sunglass-wearing blonde driving around in a $45,000 vehicle is a gruesome fate for which they find everyone they meet on the road personally responsible. And I, failing to recognize the true tragedy of their circumstances, am guiltiest of all.
Were these women just the inevitable exceptions to a rule, or was I altogether wrong? And why did all these babes strike me as Stepford Wives? I gave it a lot of thought, and here’s my theory. These blonde, scowling, sunglass-wearing, expensive-SUV-driving women may not really be women at all. Think about it. Aside from the scowling part, they’re too perfect. Isn’t it more likely that they’re really men in drag? Every woman knows that drag queens are far more beautiful than actual biological females. Look at RuPaul. No woman can compete with that, because RuPaul is no more a real woman than a mannequin, with which we also can’t compete. One reason mannequins are even more desirable than RuPaul is because they have removable heads, a feature men regard as a real plus, but that’s a topic for another TMF.
And what about the kids in the back seat? Inflatable, I’m guessing. Guys who dress up like RuPaul might also want to try motherhood on for a few hours. How would I know?
I haven’t been able to prove or disprove my theory because it’s not all that easy to tell a real woman from a manufactured version, even when the image of her (him?) is seared on your brain because she’s (he’s?) been aggressively tailgating you for 20 miles at a distance normally reserved for intimate bodily functions. Disagree? Test yourself like I did. Take the female/shemale quiz at this web address:
http://b3ta.com/femaleorshemale
For the record, I got 11/16, but I would have gotten 14 had I not started to second-guess myself, so my advice is to go with your gut.
What would make the test easy is if each photo was accompanied by a printout of the person-of-mystery-gender’s driving record. Of course, then there’d be no challenge at all. The shemales would be the ones with long lists of accidents and insurance claims.
So maybe the tailgating "women" K— and I observed are shemales or maybe, just like the Diamond Car Insurance ad, they’re men willing to try anything to get a lower auto insurance rate. One thing’s for sure: they’re not women. You know the old saying, "If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck." Well, somewhere under those blonde tresses, behind those dark glasses, concealed by that scowl, and laid completely bare by that atrocious driving, there’s a duck.
* Figures only slightly exaggerated.
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