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Is there anything to the stereotype about women and backseat driving? I had not given the issue much thought until I read this in the Babylon Bee:
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https://babylonbee.com/news/look-out-shouts-female-astronaut-as-orion-gets-within-5000-miles-of-moon
When I read this article, I was immediately reminded of both my mother and my ex-wife. Despite many polite and gentle reminders that unsolicited advice on the road is generally distracting and unhelpful, neither of them are that great at resisting the urge to backseat drive.
Is backseat driving really a gendered issue? And if so, what is it about female psychology which makes this so common among women? Perhaps it's just more common for couples to go places with the man driving; that if women were driving it would be men who are stereotypical backseat drivers. From personal experience, I can say that neither my father nor myself do much in the way of backseat driving.
I am asking this question in the culture war thread because female nature is a culture war issue; there is a societal taboo against putting women as a group in a negative light. I am interested in peoples' thoughts independent of the taboo.
Edit: Having had a chance to think about this, I have a hypothesis to throw out:
Backseat driving is driven by an instinctive desire to assert control over a situation. Thus, both men and women have a tendency to backseat drive since pretty much everyone has this kind of instinct. But there are a couple of differences: First is the social expectation for the man in a couple to drive. Second, women are much more averse than men to taking responsibility. The result is that rather than back-seat drive, a man is much more likely to just drive.
Here's a thought experiment: Suppose a couple is driving along and the woman starts back-seat driving. The man might say something like "Ok, why don't you drive?" (And this really happens.) In these types of situations, the woman typically declines the offer. By contrast, a man is more likely to say something like "ok, sounds great, pull over and let's switch places."
Couldn't part of this just be that men are riskier and more aggressive drivers? Women experience more minor fender benders but men get into major crashes way more. The fatal crash rate for men is almost twice as high as women apparently.
I've always suspected that a material portion of the fatalities are suicides.
True, but sufficiently advanced risk-taking is indistinguishable from suicide.
This is most apparent in war zones; as the designated war gender, men are a bit more instinctively accepting of this.
Interesting, I'd never encountered it written out so well, but this is a concept I ran into (somewhat) recently. I had a friend who committed suicide, which caught every one of his friends and family by surprise. Cliche about how he was always the most lively person in any setting where he was, and how much better he was at socializing and bringing people together than anyone else applies in full here. One of the many things he was known for, though, was being an incredibly reckless (and yet somehow also wreck-less) driver. Almost everyone I met who had been driven by him once (including myself) sweared off ever being driven by him again, for fear of death, and he regularly drove his moped for hours through snowy/rainy/stormy weather day or night, ostensibly just to visit us or other friends. After the fact, some of us in his friend group started wondering if his driving behavior was a form of passive suicide that he was seeking out. He never left a note or confided in anyone who has spoken out (closest we've got is multiple of his ex-girlfriends noting how different and dead he appeared in private after the many social events he would both organize and improve through his presence, but no one ever considered this notable until after the suicide), so we'll never know (and even he might not have been privy to his motivations at the time).
Also interestingly enough, despite owning both firearms and vehicles, his way of going involved engineering a contraption to suffocate himself with helium, something which seemed to have taken some planning and execution over some hours, if not days, for procurement. I imagine there are likely many other people who had similar mindsets who made snap decisions during driving that appeared as accidents rather than suicide.
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