A 2003 study from the United Kingdom noted that while men and women both enjoy psychosocial benefits from access to automobiles-feelings of autonomy, protection, and prestige-only men derive measurable increases in self-esteem.
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Now you can often customize a nav system to speak in either a male or female voice, or with an American or British accent-because, of course, we don't mind being told what to do by Simon Cowell.Becoming a driver is also an enormous landmark in a man's life - his mechanical bar mitzvah, if you will.
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The carmakers had inadvertently picked a scab of longstanding male resentment about being told how to drive by women. BMW once recalled its GPS systems because some owners would not take instruction from what they perceived to be the computer's nagging female voice. It's also true that the car is a masculine space. A recent University of Minnesota study uncovered two reasons why men crave their wheel time: the appeal of asserting masculinity through technology, and the appeal of being in control of our own "destiny." Whether our cars put us in control of our destiny is arguable, of course, but they certainly put us in control of our destinations. Scan the vacationers pulling into rest stops-it's almost universally dads at the wheel. It's the one machine that defines our tribe. Young or old, gay or straight, hair-highlighted hipster or bush-bearded loner, guys dig cars. They are fun and loud and empowering and dangerous at a time when society conspires to take those manly thrills away from us in a thousand subtle ways. They look sexy, and make us look sexy (maybe). We get this, don't we? If you have testes jangling in your jeans, you understand that guys love cars, even if you can't quite articulate why. I stepped back to appreciate the MGA, now completed and sitting expectantly under a single buzzing shop light, and realized the heartache was gone.
I remember the final night of these labors, as I struggled with the windshield's soft brass Whitworth screws (a positively idiotic design that made me marvel, and not for the first time, how the British ever won the war). It took me 4 months of obsessive labor to disassemble and reassemble her, endless hours of cursing and fiddling and knuckle busting. As if directed by a survival instinct, I went to the garage, pulled off the canvas cover, and started taking my perfect MGA apart again, nut by bolt, wire by bulb, for no particular reason. By the time I was finished, she was exactly as I wanted her, my Galatea.Īnd then, in the wake of marital disaster, a weird thing happened. Roller rockers, ported and polished manifold, racing headers, high-performance clutch, the works.
I reupholstered her in cathouse-red leather and transplanted a bored-out motor from an MGB. From headlights to taillights, from master cylinder to drum brakes. When I bought her, she was a trembling, stinking pile of rust, a fuse-popping, mouse-bitten, oil-spilling mess, with the air of shattered beauty that only fallen angels have. Somebody in her checkered past had crushed her right front fender and, like a person who'd had facial reconstruction, her features never lined up exactly plumb again. She was born in Abington, Oxfordshire, in January 1960, and by the time I met her in the late 1990s, she'd been passed around a bit. Pathetic, I know, but there's a scientific reason for it. In the finest tradition of wounded animals, I retreated to my lair, the garage, to spend time with the one faithful thing in my life, a lovely girl with big hips and beady eyes-a red British sports car, an MGA. This negatively impacted our relationship. Eight years ago, I discovered that my then-wife had been cheating on me in lurid and public fashion.