Dear Car Bros,
The short version of this letter is:
Stop being an unrelenting dick.
But I’ve told some of you that to your faces, and you haven’t stopped, so it’s time for the long version, which is this:
I’ve had a pretty automotive week. It began with my fiery car video with Jalopnik going up on Youtube. And ended just now with a local cars & coffee meet up. I’d never been to this particular meet and two guys told me some variation of “it’s really unusual to see a woman involved in cars. Why is that?”
Car bros.
That’s the answer. That’s why. Now the guys who asked were not car bros, and they know it. This letter is not for them. It is for you, car bro. You’re not hard to spot, car bro. You ask me if my car problems are because I didn’t know how to check my oil level. You ask me if my husband knows I’m driving his car. You say ‘more money than brains, typical woman driver.’ You say ‘bet all you cared about was the paint color’. You tell me what engine I have under my hood and then add ‘but I bet you didn’t know that.’ Often, you drive a Mitsubishi Evo.
You’re a dick.
I knew before my Jalopnik video went up that my various online inboxes would be visited by car bros, and I was neither wrong nor shocked by their content. The decent car guys in my life, however, were wide-eyed. I have nearly as many messages from car guys apologizing for car bros as I do messages from car bros waxing poetic and profane about my physical appearance and oil-checking ability. Regular car guys, you don’t have to apologize. People who don’t pee on public buses don’t have to apologize for those who do.
Car bros, your problem with women is two-fold. First of all, you assume female ignorance. When I made a joke about a “Greg light” in my video, you decided that instead of a joke, I genuinely didn’t understand what my warning lights were. The truth is that my automotive experience is pretty public knowledge, but you decided to spend your Thursday evening crafting me a message about being a bimbo instead of typing my name into a search engine. Could I have avoided that criticism by listing off my automotive pedigree in the video? Probably. But if I’d been a dude, I wouldn’t have had to. You would have seen that I was putting a shit ton of money into modifying my car and assumed I had at least some idea of what I was talking about, no matter if I called it a Greg warning light or not.
Your second big problem with the ladies, car bros, is that you deny women the privilege of being automotively curious but inexperienced. When car bros swept into the comments of Jalopnik to question my credentials, car friends that I’ve met through my automotive journey leapt quickly to prove my chops. Yes, I’ve had a lot of cars, yes, I’ve done a lot of stuff in them, yes, if you’re an average American, I can probably drive your car better than you can. Yes, I’ve earned my place in this conversation.
But it shouldn’t have to be this way. Men are allowed to fumble and study their way to automotive knowhow. They’re allowed to be curious and ignorant, curious and wrong. With a woman, to show any failing in automotive knowledge is to be marked as a floozie whose interest is flimsy (“you’re only showing off for your boyfriend”). There is no entry level for women in cars when car bros are involved: it’s all absolutes. Girls are either arm-candy in an automatic red Mustang, or they swagger in and prove they belong by doing rallies and track time and repairing their alternator by the side of the road. Nothing in between. No teen girls learning to change a tire because no one showed them growing up.
Why are there no women in cars? Because you car bros spend all your time in smug superiority and misogyny thick enough to stop that rattle in my Camaro’s passenger door.
I’m into cars because I grew up with car guys like the ones at the car meet today. Decent car guys. People who are into cars and want to share that. People who were curious about me being a woman in an old car, but not judgmental or stupid about it. People who don’t say “the truth is that girls aren’t really into cars.” People who, back when I didn’t know a lot about cars, showed me how to change spark plugs and check my oil and told me what an air filter did and how fuel injection worked and, later, how to do a Scandinavian flick and parallel park from sixty miles an hour. These car guys are great. Fist bump, decent car guys. You know who you are. Thanks for letting me be an apprentice. Thanks for letting me ask questions. Thanks for telling me questions that I didn’t yet know to ask. Thanks for knowing the only reason why girls aren’t into cars is our arbitrary culture.
I get asked a lot by my lady-readers how to get into the auto world. They confess that they know nothing; they’re intimidated; they think they’ll be judged.
The sad thing is that they’re right, car bros. Because you bros are often standing in front of the decent car guys. The truth is that you drive people away a lot better than you drive your car.
So I’m going to ask you again, car bros, because — let’s face it — you’re tired of me flipping you off and I’m tired of flipping you off. Stop being a dick. Once upon a time, you didn’t know anything about cars either. We get it. You’re so clever; I loved that story of the one time you rebuilt a Honda Civic into a 1200 hp beast using only twist ties and a jar of crunchy peanut butter. Now shut up and start building a generation of people who love the things that live on our highways.
Stiefvater
