Psychologists at the University of East London have published research that seeks to explain the different ways in which men and women relate to their cars. I didn’t even know there was a University of East London, but seeing as it is located in the spiritual home of the London cabbie and White Van Man it certainly seems only right that it should busy itself with research into cars and driving rather than, say, mitochondrial DNA or the grammar of Old Norse.
What these cockney researchers have discovered, apparently (I can see them now in their pearly mortarboards, with a half-smoked roll-up behind each ear, peering into microscopes and thumbing ancient texts while whistling My Old Man’s a Dustman), is that men consider their cars to be an extension of themselves, whereas women “understand that their car is a separate entity”. Smart cookies, women.
You can tell that we men think of the car as an extension of our own bodies, says the BMW-funded report, because of our tendency to hold the steering wheel in one hand – these boffins concluding, presumably, that anything we grab confidently with one hand and waggle about, we consider an extension of our very selves. Which is not always true. Not always.
Women, on the other hand, more often hold the steering wheel in two hands, which is apparently because “they see the car as more detached”. It is not, as I had always assumed, because they are terrified of what might happen if they let go. My girlfriend clings grimly to the wheel with both hands at all times, and while I understand her motivations better now, it’s still a pain in the arse when I’m trying to turn right.
These superficial hypotheses completed, the authors of the report then move into more complex areas of gender distinction: “Women are more comfortable expressing their feelings directly, and see the car as separate,” claim the eggheads, “which is why women give names to their cars.”
Advertisement
Really? Is this also why they give names to their babies? Without my mother’s input, would my sister and I have been called “1.6i” and “Diesel Turbo”? (Come to think of it, isn’t Diesel Turbo the youngest Beckham?)
And so the report goes on, finding new ways of using old clich?s to sell German motors, until we get to where “men use chat about their cars as a way of expressing their own feelings”. Ye gods, can this really be the case? Have men advanced so little? Does “I need a bigger spoiler on the Imprezza” still mean “I’m sad, give me a hug”?
Does “The new Maserati can go at 207mph” mean “I’m lonely and scared, I’ve just realised what a small blot man is upon this vastness we call the universe”?
Isn’t the truth really that the sort of man who is that interested in cars is bound to be sad and lonely? Those blokes who stand in the background on Top Gear, for example, booing Japanese cars and being genuinely interested in whether Christopher Biggins can drive a hatchback round Silverstone quicker than Linda Lusardi.
Shakespeare, for example, did not use cars to express his feelings. Or perhaps he did. Perhaps his most famous sonnet originally began: “ Shall I compare thee to a Merc that’s grey?/ Thou art more lovely, and more of an Audi 8./ Rough winds do cause a bit of wobble when overtaking a truck on a flyover,/ But the new Toyota is completely gay . . .” and only thanks to a later female editor was the version we know created.
Advertisement
Perhaps this same woman was the one who got her hands on As You Like It and tinkered with Jaques’s once famous “All The World’s A Road (and all the men and women merely drivers)” speech.
Andrew Marvell, I grant you, heard Time’s winged chariot hurrying near. But he did not drop his own motor into third, floor the gas and run the bastard off the carriageway at the next roundabout. Nor, when he saw all before him deserts of vast eternity, did he think immediately what a good place it would be to go for the land speed record.
Motorbike bore Alf Tennyson, I suppose, kept trying to publish his “ Half a league, half a league, half a league onward, into the Thames Valley rode my Kawasaki 600. Traffic to left of me, traffic to right of me . . .” until a lady friend persuaded him to lever in a famous slaughter and wax mawkish.
And what of Robert Frost? Late for a meeting with his publishers, no doubt, and having been unable to write a poem in months, so excited was he by his new Lexus, he burst into the room full of excuses: “ Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less travelled by. But turns out it is less travelled by on account of a contraflow at the junction with Cromwell Road. And as for the speed bumps, don’t get me started on speed bumps . ..”