I was late yesterday morning. (To where isn't important). I wasn't the only person to arrive late. Some still-unexplained though not uncommon phenomenon had turned a twenty-five minute drive into an hour.
The equanimity of the folks arriving late was uncharacteristic of the modern world: enough so that people started talking about it. A lovely pregnant woman related how two thirty-something self-besuited males (I will not say men, though that is the word she used) shoved roughly past her and an elderly woman in order to get the elevator.
That got me to wondering how much the drive in had helped condition the attitude of the narcissuits.
One bit of fatherly advice I used to get regularly was that the good big man beats the good little man every time. It is excellent advice in general. But it has probably become less important since the advent of the Equalizer: a technology the function of which is to make the big man and the little man more equal:
The Equalizer
And what the revolver did for men, the automobile has done between the sexes. There is no more democratic environment than the roadways. Most of the time you can't tell what sort of person is in the cars around you at all. The enveloping machine puts everyone on exactly equal footing, erasing the distinctives of personal contact. Masculine and feminine are obscured in a sea of metal, fumes, rubber, paint, chrome, frustration, and middle fingers. The car, even more than the revolver, is the great equalizer:
>
The Equalizer II
And that ain't no way to treat a lady.
Comments (12)
Ehh... yes and no.
Aggressive woman drivers are flagrantly so, refusing to cooperate with other aggressive drivers the way men do. They ignore the unwritten rules of the road to which men (probably unconsciously) subscribe. To men, driving is a sport: while it's always preferable to score, coming up with an assist or to set a good screen that lets somebody else score isn't so bad, either. Woman drivers have no sense of this. Somebody smarter (or even more politically incorrect) than me can make analogies to the business world here.
All that aside, you are right in that regardless of our perception of other drivers, the way we treat them is the same. Somebody going slow in the left hand lane is simply a jerk (not actually, but in the minds of those sharing the road) who needs to be passed. Sex doesn't matter, our scorn is equal opportunity.
Final thought: what is the third equalizer that makes races more equal? I can tell you it ain't driving. The differences are even more obvious there. I can tell black from white from asian with astounding accuracy.
Or maybe I just drive too much.
Posted by Chris | May 10, 2007 11:28 AM
I always viewed explosives as the great equalizer. Any size/sex/race person can whop the big guy with a bomb (particularly a suicide bomb).
Personally, I class drivers as "squeezers," "speed-limiters," "fire-on-the-tails," and "blind drivers."
I can't tell the difference between "agressive female" and "aggressive male" yet. With time, maybe...
Histor
Posted by Histor | May 10, 2007 11:56 AM
Old: spinsters.
New: carsters
And you know the car is the supreme symbol of honor, especially for men who have no other.
Posted by KW | May 10, 2007 12:01 PM
I sorta came to doubt the relevance of the good-big-man rule after doing a lot of martial-arts stuff in my younger years, and a fair bit of brawling, some of it fairly extreme.
As the saying goes, it's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog. And that varies wildly.
Or to take an example, one of my friends had a father who got a medal in Korea. Essentially, he got it for rolling into a trench full of Chinese Communist soldiers in the dark and killing something like 20 of them with a sharpened entrenching tool. It took him about 5 minutes, and they were all awake and armed.
He wasn't particularly big or strong -- a wirey little terrier of a guy, below average height, less than 140 lbs. But he was a stone killer; he just _liked_ it. He volunteered for every patrol and raid because, as he said, "I was bored."
On the ship back, he tested some martial-arts moves he'd learned by throwing a CPO who annoyed him overboard. Fortunately somebody else noticed because this guy didn't say a word after the throw. He had no internal 'stop'.
Just as there are "aces" in air-to-air combat, so in any form of fighting apparently a small number do the majority of the damage.
Posted by S.M. Stirling | May 10, 2007 11:54 PM
I don't know, most of this may be altogether true, but still only serve to highlight the exception to the rule.
Certainly even a really talented fighter can get unlucky; and he'd rather get unlucky, all things being equal, with a small opponent than with a big one.
Posted by Paul J Cella | May 11, 2007 7:36 AM
My problem with examples of little guys beating big guys is that occasionally they are used (in what seems to me a very silly way) to argue that there are no ineliminable differences between men and women even in physical matters like warfare or football games. The idea I gather is sometimes that if you just trained the women to use martial arts, they'd be just as good fighters as the guys and it would be just as appropriate to use them as such. Which is false.
Posted by Lydia | May 11, 2007 8:20 AM
Agreed, Lydia. My wife was a two-year volleyball starter at a Div-I school, a far more gifted athlete than I; but there is no question that I could overpower her with little difficulty.
(Heaven me if she's reading: she might go and prove my boast wrong.)
Posted by Paul J Cella | May 11, 2007 8:27 AM
Aggressive woman drivers are flagrantly so, refusing to cooperate with other aggressive drivers the way men do.
I think that to the extent this is true it is becoming less the case; probably because many of the male homo sapiens sitting behind the wheels of those vehicles (who will later be pushing their way past pregnant women and little old ladies into elevators) are not men so much as cases of arrested development.
And on that note I think it is important to point out that a man acts nobly toward all women, even the basest whore, since women are that mysterious cradle of creation to which by nature we owe provision and defense.
Posted by Zippy | May 11, 2007 10:10 AM
Hear, hear to that last!
Posted by Paul J Cella | May 11, 2007 10:12 AM
To add to what Zippy said, and maybe I'm going on a tangent now, it is men that civilize the men. Women may domesticate them once they are civilized, but the older men must civilize the younger men or all is lost. Just look at the disasters of America's inner cities. Women are simply unable to domesticate uncivilized young men.
I'd suggest that the whole sexual revolution was a man-driven event, to get women to go along with the diabolical project to stop civilizing young men. Since life no longer has purpose, it was necessary to re-arrange life to maximize pleasure... In such a view, feminists are a reactionary symptom of something gone badly wrong.
Posted by Gintas | May 14, 2007 12:37 PM
I would call feminism less a reaction to those aspects of the sexual revolution than a continuation of them. Anyone who has heard about the sexual insanity being promulgated at our universities under the guise of feminism will know what I mean. Some of the "sex fairs" and what-not that I've read of under the auspices of women's centers would scarcely bear description on a respectable blog site. Nor is the emphasis solely on lesbian sex but rather on female sexual "self-expression" tout court.
All of which merely goes to show that feminists are fools, not realizing that they are setting women up for the very sort of exploitation they claim to deplore.
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