Why Does The Man Always Drive The Car?

And if he’s the passenger, I don’t want to admit what I’m thinking.

Photo by DANNY G on Unsplash

“Why does the man always drive when a woman and a man are in the car together?”

My teenage daughter and I are walking down the street and I say out loud what I’m thinking, which I’ve been thinking about more lately. Maybe because I’m separated now, and I seem to notice such things. When for most of my life I barely gave it a thought. For so long, if I was with a man I’d step into the passenger’s seat. Without thinking.

I talk about these things more openly with my daughter now. She’s 15 and why pretend that the patriarchy doesn’t exist, as if we must only speak of it when she’s a grown woman and wading through the muck herself, wondering why things aren’t otherwise.

“They don’t always drive,” she answers.

“Look.” I point out a passing car. A man is behind the steering wheel, the woman sitting next to him. Nothing remarkable to see there. Then another car. Then another. Same thing over and over and over. Man driving. Woman being driven.

”But women sometimes drive,” she says, still insistent, or hopeful, that my grumpy declaration is a false narrative.