Wang Xiaohua

(Professor, School of Humanities, Shenzhen University)

Recently, the discussion of "female drivers" has been incessant, resulting in a flood of negative representations and a series of comical gender images. In the resulting discourse field, the combination of woman and car is treated as a disaster. However, the speaker, though seemingly righteous, could not stand the test of his words.

In cultural contexts that are still far-reaching today, men and women seem to have opposite attributes. According to the ancient positioning of the Zhou Yi, one yin and one yang is the Tao: if it is said that men should be robust and vigorous, then "quietness is the natural duty of women". According to this positioning, the "woman driver" is undoubtedly an anomaly: the car implies speed and passion, while the woman is a still life; the former is a product of civilization, while the latter is often relegated to the realm of nature (e.g. "the earth"); driving a car requires rational control, but most women seem not to be good at logical thinking. For many who hold such notions, women and cars are two worlds apart, and the two are by nature contradictory. Even if they cross paths occasionally, they should be passengers in their own right. Because of this, when "female drivers" began to proliferate, they were often dismissed as clumsy boundary-crossers. This bias has since been challenged, but continues to this day. In the West, where car culture has been on the rise for more than 100 years, mainstream society still emphasizes, under the guise of "scientists", that women are more likely to be the perpetrators of traffic accidents than men. To justify themselves, men search for, track and capture the driving trajectory of "female drivers". Once an accident is discovered, it is documented, presented as evidence and exaggerated. As a result, many of the mistakes that male drivers also make are often attributed to women. As a result, people have developed the stereotype that "female drivers" are constantly demonstrating their gender inferiority by changing lanes, reversing overtime, breaking the steering wheel, and so on. After countless such "arguments", they have been the protagonists of satirical comedy, and the dominant gender has won the predictable victory.

However, such arguments are all caught in a "vicious circle", and there is no legitimacy in them: there is no lack of evidence when the premise is set against the "female driver" in advance. Women were first judged to be static, irrational and clumsy beings, before the negative rhetoric surrounding "female drivers" came into play. It does not have the legitimacy that some are convinced of. In fact, as early as the birth of the car, the female driver has already debuted: in 1886, when the German engineer Karl Benz made the first car in public view, people who are used to the carriage issued a burst of mockery, have denounced it as a useless monster; because his car often broke down, Karl Benz is afraid to make a public spectacle, do not dare to drive it in public; in order to respond to the ridicule of social opinion, his wife Bertha in August 1888 led two sons to drive the car, overcoming a series of obstacles such as oil, water, brake damage, and finally arrived 144 kilometers away from the family; because of this historic test, the reputation of Mercedes-Benz car like a day, Bertha also became the first test car in history, and four years later has the earliest driving license. As Berta exemplifies, women are in complete control of the car. To date, they have caused far fewer traffic accidents than men. According to recent statistics from the United States, female drivers are 20 percent safer than male drivers once they pass the test, and in 2014, statistics released by the Jiangsu Provincial Public Security Bureau's Traffic Police Headquarters showed that female drivers were responsible for less than 10 percent of the more than 21 million motor vehicle drivers in the province. Obviously, if women seized such irony, it would be easier to draw comic images of "male drivers", and a satirical comedy with a roadkill theme would have to change its lead. Understand this and we will find the absurdity of the topic of "female drivers".

The French woman writer Beauvoir once pointed out that woman is not a biological being but a social construct of a particular period. Ultimately, the negative rhetoric about "female drivers" expresses lingering gender biases and reflects deep-rooted masculine centrism. It is contrary to the contemporary spirit of equality for all and deserves to be reflected upon and debunked.