#buangBung may have been the best hashtag Malaysian Twitterers may have coined so far in 2011 , but the feeble logic of Bung Mokhtar’s original comments will live on in infamy. It will also live on in endorsement, as it turns out. The April 3 Sunday edition of both The Star and The New Straits Times addressed the Malaysian MP’s pearls of wisdom with slightly differing angles, but both attempt to further cleave the so-called “differences” between the two sexes with articles like ‘Are women safer drivers?’ and ‘What drives the sexes?’
You don’t need me to tell you how local print media perpetuates simplistic stereotypes and is implicated in all kinds of shallow discourse about race or sex and various socio-cultural issues in order to interest readers and sell more copies. The framing of both these articles – pitting one sex against the other – already undermines the very discussion it purports to foster. If Bung Moktar claims that women are sucky drivers, then well, The Star is going to tell you that women might be safer drivers. Both articles relied on the statistics of the Malaysian Institute of Road Safety Research (MIROS). I don’t know if it’s my background in humanities or my inability to talk to numbers or have numbers “speak” to me – but statistics are always liable to be skewered in favour of research objectives, goals, and the bias of researchers.
As far as I can see from the statistics cited in these articles, most women drivers are good drivers – until they aren’t. Conversely, most men drivers are also good drivers – until they aren’t. But the MIROS experts interviewed seem to unproblematically premise their expert opinions on what they seem to think are inherent differences among the sexes that are “scientifically-proven” by – well, more statistics:
“Generally, women are good at multi-tasking. As driving will also require action and reaction, a multi-tasker may, however, tend to slip up and this may result in being errant in driving,” says Dr Ahmad Farhan.
“Perhaps, this may be the reason, why we witness some women drivers making slip-ups while driving.”
Men are known to have better psychomotor skills, making them highly-confident and, at times, too confident, he points out.
“As a result, a man has the general tendency to drive at high speed, to take chances and to be a greater risk (factor) on the road.”
Women are also known to have poorer spatial ability compared to men, making a woman driver more hesitant with manoeuvres that require space and distance estimation, like entering and passing a junction, overtaking and parking, he adds.
“Hesitation will either make you slowly dangerous, or inadequately and dangerously daring. Both make you a risk to road users,” he notes.
But as Cordelia Fine, author of Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society and Neurosexism Create Difference argues, the apparent differences between men and women’s brains doesn’t neatly tally with the attendant conclusions that a lot of research tries to pass off as “natural differences”. As she says in this interview in Salon:
We look around in our society, and we want to explain whatever state of sex inequality we have. It’s more comfortable to attribute it to some internal difference between men and women than the idea that there must be something very unjust about our society. As long as there has been brain science there have been misguided explanations and justification for sex and inequality — that women’s skulls are the wrong shape, that their brain is too small, that their head is too unspecialized. It was once very cutting-edge to put a brain on a scale, and now we have cutting-edge research that is genuinely sophisticated and exciting, but we’re still very much at the beginning of our journey of understanding of how our brain creates the mind.
“Neurosexism” is just another way of passing off traditional, conservative, status quo-maintaining beliefs about innate differences between the sexes under the guise of scientific credibility. And how do intersex, transgender and transsexual people fit into this debate of binaries? In this Guardian interview, Fine says:
“There are sex differences in the brain. There are also large sex differences in who does what and who achieves what,” she says. “It would make sense if these facts were connected in some way, and perhaps they are. But when we follow the trail of contemporary science we discover a surprising number of gaps, assumptions, inconsistencies, poor methodologies and leaps of faith.”
And, as Fine further points out, the fact that popular media gloms on to these so-called revelatory studies and statistics – to me, it always seems like most of the scientific research concerning sexual and gender difference are more of the same old, same old, dressed up in new language – to further perpetuate some mythical male vs. female chasm is, in effect, harmful:
Gender equality is increasing in pretty much all domains, and the psychological effects of that can only be beneficial. The real issue is when people in the popular media say things like, “Male brains are just better at this kind of stuff, and women’s brains are better at that kind of stuff.” When we say to women, “Look, men are better at math, but it’s because they work harder,” you don’t see the same harmful effects. But if you say, “Men are better at math genetically,” then you do. These stem from the implicit assumption that the gender stereotypes are based on hard-wired truths.
There is a very important Something Else that is obfuscated in favour of sensationalist reporting and myth-peddling, and in this scenario it’s the laws and policies that make road safety an itinerant nightmare in Malaysia. Lax implementation of road safety laws and penalties means that the law operates like a Jusco sale: you’ll be able to get a “discount” on your traffic summonses if you settle it by a certain date. If so many people are being slapped with a summons, you’ll either have to re-evaluate your laws (is it practical?) or your drivers (why are Malaysian drivers acquiring speeding tickets, fines, and summonses at such a high rate?). Which in itself is interesting, because I don’t drive and I’ve been told more than once what I freak I am for living in the Klang Valley without owning a car or being able to drive. I did sit for my driver’s licence examinations right after SPM, and the irony of this is that I’m the only one among most of the people I know to have passed the driving examination without having bribed the exam official. And people need to bribe officials to pass their driving exams in order to drive and then proceed to take out loans they can’t afford on Milo-tin can cars (oh wait, we’re not allowed to make those jokes about Kancils anymore?) that are crushed into smithereens during road accidents killing everyone inside because there isn’t decent, integrated public transport not just in KL, but in other cities.
In the New Straits Times article, it was only the respondents interviewed who mentioned the infrastructure problems, like badly-maintained roads, that contribute to road accidents regardless of who is behind the wheel. The articles itself never framed these issues as something worth commenting on in a “debate” on driver behaviour in Malaysia. But as long as we keep thinking in these terms (men vs. women) and allow this particular type of discourse to go unquestioned, we’re going to find it harder to see past our own internalised bigotries with regards to gender issues.
In response to the April 3 coverage on the issue, the April 10 edition of the New Straits Times carried letters from readers. This one by one Andrew Lo starts off with a similar premise as my own (gasp), and it’s even titled ‘Statistics that miss the point’, before falling into reductive hysterical generalisations about women drivers. “How many times have we seen a woman driver not entering a roundabout until all three lanes are free?” he laments.
How about this:
Who takes longer to move their cars out of car parks even if they know there is a long line of cars waiting for them? Instead of starting the car, they will rummage through their oversized handbags for I don’t know what, and adjust the rearview mirror to look at their face.
WHO, WHO, WHO DOES THIS, Andrew Lo cries out in pain.
And whose cars are more likely to be covered with teddy bears, pillows and sun visors, thus creating blind spots?
And who cannot align their cars at drive-ins without going backwards and forwards a few times?
I have four sisters and a wife. All have been involved in accidents, almost always hit from behind by male drivers.
As for myself, I always knock into the back of cars driven by women. At this rate I will be knocking into my sisters or worse, my wife soon!
“I have four sisters and a wife. All have been involved in accidents, almost always hit from behind by male drivers. As for myself, I always knock into the back of cars driven by women.” I mean, read that again. And again. This, people of the world, is an example of male privilege. You think it doesn’t exist – it’s almost a myth, like a unicorn. Well, read that sentence again. “I always knock into the back of cars driven by women.” Lovely.
This is Andrew Lo’s world in a nutshell: “All the women drivers of the world – that is, five of the women I know personally – have been hit from the back by men drivers while they were driving; ergo, ALL WOMEN DRIVERS SUCK.”
As for these “male drivers” who keep HITTING OTHER PEOPLE’S CARS? Well, carry on. Don’t ever stop to think about what you do wrong, or how you contribute to accidents. THE WOMENZ ARE PUTTING ON THEIR MAKEUP AND THEY HAVE, LIKE, TEDDY BEARS AND SHIT. Male drivers, however? You are defenseless amidst the onslaught of the womenz drivers. Because the cars were made for you. Hell, the roads were made for you, too. You know, even the world? It was made for you.