To Men Who Stop to Watch Me Parallel Park
Microaggressions, Stereotypes, and Women Drivers
My dad works on large equipment for a living: commercial airplanes, Cat heavy machinery, stuff like that. When it was time for me to learn to drive, I didn’t get cute little orange cones I could smush until my timid heart’s content. I got an obstacle course of excavators, graders, and bulldozers.
He’d take me out on a Saturday when none of the employees were on site, and demo the course he’d designed for me. “Parallel park in these spaces. I made them small so you can learn to get in and out of tight spots.” “Go up this (intensely steep) dirt hill and stop completely. Then, down shift and take off without stalling, without grinding yourself in deeper. Make it smooth.” It was stuff like that.
He’s a security-minded guy. He wasn’t going to have his daughter stuck ineptly on a dirt road or unable to take the car keys from a potential drunk date just because she couldn’t drive a stick.
He’d leave me to practice while he went to work, and come back in a few hours to watch my progress.
It was a “you break it, you pay for the repairs” situation, but I didn’t mind. He was demonstrating his respect for my autonomy, his faith in me that I was up for the challenge, and his trust that he could leave me alone with the task.
That’s the opposite of what the crowd of dudes who’ve stopped their conversation to gawk at me are doing right now. They’re enjoying what counts as restaurant patio seating in a town where real estate is at a premium, so basically it’s four guys sharing a two person table on a sidewalk drinking happy hour tequila specials.
I’m parallel parking in an unfamiliar car: a Honda CRV. It’s bigger than the Camry I am used to, but it hasn’t occurred to me to be concerned. There’s no special obstacle here. It’s a perfectly normal parallel job, but to these men, seeing me behind the wheel is the height of entertainment.
They are out of their seats, pointing and cheering, as I line up my wheels to the car in front of an empty space. Two other guys passing by stop to join in the fun, adding their condescending encouragement from the sidelines. Because my insufficient little female brain apparently needs their emotional assistance to accomplish something I do every day as part of living in a city where I drive a car.
I’ve driven everything from a Nissan 300ZX that used to be my dad’s to a 25 person van that I drove for work. I’m not exactly a motorhead. A late ’80s Honda Accord was the best car I have ever owned. It felt custom made for me. The gear shift, controls, and radio were the perfect length for my arms. The seat had the most comfortable headrest of any car I’ve sat in. I could see in every direction. (I don’t ask for much.😊) It was well past 300,000 miles when I sold it to someone who was willing to play amateur mechanic to its burgeoning old age clunks and rattles. Worth every cent of the $1,800 I paid for it.
As for being put on the spot by these clowns, my regular readers will know, I’m no wallflower. I don’t have a problem performing under a spotlight before live audiences or speaking in front of large lecture halls. I don’t get stage fright. But the arrogant and domineering parade of men who feel the need to patronize me in this situation actually does get to me.
It’s a fairly common occurrence: guys who know jack shit about me frequently interrupt their day just to make a big display about how unfit to parallel park I must be. They exchange ostentatious high-fives in mock celebration of me overcoming the obstacle of my own petite girly spacial reasoning.
They don’t expect someone who looks like me to pull off this mundane task, so they assume that I am riddled with anxiety over it, too. Or that I should be. If I don’t have the good sense to feel unnerved by the undertaking itself, then they are happy to apply some social pressure to put me back in my place, to remind me of who’s allowed to feel comfortable operating heavy machinery.
It’s a microcosm of the many small ways men try to intimidate and tear down our confidence. Maybe I’m walking from this interaction into a final job interview to negotiate a salary or into a meeting to earn back the trust of an unhappy client or into some situation where I have to come from a place of my own power and present my best face. I’m still going to do those things and do them well, but additionally, today, the patriarchy has left me a little gift, in the form of these petty antagonizers, to just to say “Hey girl. Saw you were doing ok, and I want to say, in case you’ve forgotten, fuck you. You’ll always be some dumb bitch to me. LOL. Byeee 👋 “
Shit like that is not going to end my career, but it’s a sexist microaggression that makes moving through this world just a little bit shittier and for no good reason.
The margarita bros are bonding with each other over some shared sense of dominance. There’s no win for me. If I so much as have to pull forward a little at the end of my parking job, they’re going to act like brutes and if I don’t they are going to jeer in order to reinforce their superiority. It’s a small slight, a dumb insult, one that I can, and do, shrug off. I shrug it off a lot because it happens a lot.
However, rolling our eyes and getting on with our day doesn’t stop the inevitable cumulative impact of all the derogatory sexist bullshit that we deal with from cradle to grave.
This kind of mean spirited mockery is a drop in the bucket of a lifetime of unearned negativity and hostility we get just for going through our lives. Each individual incident isn’t a big deal, but a steady drizzle adds up. Eventually, you want to tell the person doing it to fuck off. That’s when you get called a crazy bitch for “over reacting.” Your anger might seem disproportional to someone who only witnessed the current taunting.
To the men, this is a single interaction, one they will likely forget about before they close their tabs tonight. For me, this is a recurring pattern of contentious treatment that I will never be free of.
I don’t tell them to fuck off. I don’t botch the parking job. I accidentally laughed at their buffoonery as they sarcastically applaud me. I’m sure they take that slip as me condoning their bullshit, but whatever. Their education in this moment is not my job.
If I’m thrown off my stride and over thinking this parking job, then how much worse is it for women who didn’t grow up playing with excavators and performing in front of theatre audiences? When a group of shallow pests puts this kind of preemptive pressure on a woman they don’t even know and induces an anxiety that interferes with her performance, they consider their point proven. They use it justify perpetuating their ass-hat-ery on the next lady driver they see.
Male condescension: it’s one thing my dad didn’t include in his driver’s training course. How could he have known?
So what I’m saying is: maybe don’t do this? Maybe don’t be one more drop in a bucket of shitty things people do to random women on the street. It doesn’t gain you anything to treat us this way, if you and your boys are going to forget it the second it’s over. So just stop and think for half a second if being unkind to strangers is really the role you want to be playing in society.
You can’t personally stop every injustice to every person who #MeToo-ed on your social media feeds. You can’t singlehandedly dismantle a patriarchy or save every damsel in distress. But you can take half a beat and think about how to be a little less shitty in small interactions that you have with women every day. Even if that just means shutting down your mate when he’s being a shit.
If my dad could leave me alone when I was 14, driving his car on a training course packed with way more expensive equipment than I could ever afford to pay for repairs on, then you can drink your half priced sugar liquor and mind your own business for 15 seconds while I slide into this space.
