This App is the Safer Uber Women Have Been Waiting For
A new app called DriveHER is on the market, and it proposes to lower the assault dangers of Uber and Lyft for female passengers.
In the city I once called home, I was blessed to have met women from many walks of life. One of these women is now a filmmaker, and has just come out with her own miniseries on YouTube. “virgins!” explores the lives of four 20-something East African women navigating love and relationships as virgins.
In viewing the promotional video and photos for the miniseries, I stumbled upon mention of the new app DRIVEher, which appears as both a sponsor and a service featured in the episodes. One short click on the website left me with all the information I needed to know. I was instantly a fan.
Black-owned, based out of my hometown and consisting of an entirely female clientele and staff, this ride-sharing app seemed perfect. I was especially grateful to find it as a woman who often uses ride-sharing apps alone at night, and who has read the horror stories like this and this that have taken place at the hands of Uber employees.
Despite all of its apparent pluses, I knew others would find something negative to say about it. I knew at least one man would be appalled, despite at least 6 other popular male-dominated ride-sharing apps gaining traction on the market in the U.S. alone. I went to check the comments, and the very first one confirmed my suspicion.
“Sexist? If I was to start an all male taxi women would flip out and cry foul!” read the first line.
This reaction was inevitable and I knew it, but for some reason, it didn’t sit right with me. Despite all the ride-sharing apps that exist, most of which have a larger network, more longevity and more employees than DriveHER, you still found a reason to complain? Why must they always feel entitled to every space? I thought to myself.
Although one of my biggest pet peeves has always been the “what if it was your daughter” sentiment — one that measures women’s existences, once again, by their proximity and/or relationship to men — part of me still wondered: do men not even see how this app could be a godsend for their daughters, wives, or mothers?
This series of thoughts brought me to what is perhaps the most impactful thing about DriveHER. The company’s CEO, Aisha Addo, recognized a real problem that is plaguing our society and used technology and innovation to enact social change. While doing so, she also reminded us that rape is still a threat to women’s every day lives, and that we still have a lot of work to do.
Columbia University professor Sharon Marcus’ piece “Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention” discusses this very idea. The personal is political, and rape should not be conceptualized as something that only takes place in dark alleyways or house parties. It takes place most often in intimate, private sectors of our lives.
As she explains on page 399, “[a]ntirape activists have often criticized the false demarcation between an inside and outside of rape in terms of geographical space: rape culture spawns spatial contradictions by warning women not to go outside because of possible rape, but most rapes occur inside women’s homes. Denaturalizing this myth unveils the boundary between inside and outside and indicates the irrelevance of this inside/outside distinction for fighting rape”.
What Marcus is alleging, in a nutshell, is that if rape can occur “inside” — a house, a building, or in this case, a car — then “inside” can no longer be understood as a place of shelter and safety, or contrasted with an imaginary unsafe, external realm. The distinction is rendered obsolete. Therefore, to fight rape, we need to focus less on the “inside/outside” terminology and more on how a subject of violence acts on an object of violence.
Then, most importantly, we need to work on prevention. We need to change the culture so that rape in any form is universally understood to be a grave violation of a person’s well-being.
This will not come without glitches, of course, nor will it happen overnight. Many more innovators will have to propose alternatives, technological or otherwise, to combat the social ills that continue to plague women in both the “inside” and “outside” realms of their lives. And it can’t stop there — we need to keep working in all the ways we can to create a more just world for everyone else, too.
But don’t get me wrong: a by-women, for-women ride-sharing app is certainly a kick-ass start.
