Male Privilege and Cars

Ok.

First, let me say that I'm not talking about car repairs or car purchasing (and although I could TOTALLY have held my own when I bought my new car yesterday, it certainly helped having my husband there even though he didn't say a word and was generally a buttface on purpose the whole time to mess with the salespeople). I finally, after like ten years of trying to find one, found a car repair place that won't try to fleece me because I'm a woman and I probably don't know what I'm talking about. Stories for another day (like that time that a repair place told me that I needed $1500 in repairs for my car to pass inspection when my car actually only needed a small repair that cost me about $100. As soon as they talked to my dad, they caved.).

In September, I was away at a conference and my husband called me to let me know that he was broken down on the side of the highway. It was at the end of the day on a Friday, and it was pretty busy on the road, but he was stranded. Alone. I was three and a half hours away by car, and I freaked because I assumed danger.

(Sorry, honey. I'm going to call you out here. Though we won't get into the circumstances under which this happened and I WILL NOT GLOAT because I was right that you should have started to look into trading it in when I said.)

I have been talking about trading in my old car, a 2013 Nissan Juke, for months. Because I was painfully upside down in my financing, I was pretty sure it wasn't going to be an option for another couple of years. And yet...

When the weather gets warm, that car gets GRUMPY. Like, stalled at a stoplight a few times grumpy once late spring came around, and a few times in the morning I've had to really coax it to start. I had none of these problems in the winter, which is weird, but I didn't. It did this last year too a couple of times, and I tried to figure out what was going on at that time, to no avail. So I just let it go.

When things like that start to happen, I start to get nervous. Maybe my car isn't as safe as I thought. I hope I don't get stranded by the side of the road. I hope I don't get stuck somewhere like a sitting duck.

When women get stranded, it's not just stressful. It's dangerous. The last thing I wanted, having been through the experience before of being stranded on the side of a road (luckily, I had someone, a male, with me at the time), it was certainly not an experience I wanted to repeat, least of all running the risk of being stranded alone, which has a much higher likelihood of happening now than it did 15 years ago when it happened the first time.

So a few months ago, I started looking for a car. I went to a dealership that I know well, and they said to me that I'm too upside-down on my car to finance anything new at this point. Fair. So I waited a few months, made a few more payments, and the dealership that I ended up buying from was having this HUGE trade-in deal. Like, $4000 over trade-in value for used cars. I decided to jump on it to see what I could get. To be fair, my husband has been very understanding. And, when it comes to car safety stuff, maybe I do have a hairpin trigger (which I know is part of the equation - I've had a difficult relationship with cars in the past that has been much more stable over the past decade), but in a way, so does every woman I know, as they should. I've heard this a few times from other men that I know too - it's just being stranded on the side of the road - call a tow truck! It's no big deal. Stressful? Sure. But no big deal. Has every man been like that? No. But the vast majority of them have been. It's just this lack of awareness that I sense that it's easier for men in that situation than women because there's a lot that men don't have to worry about if they find themselves stranded on the side of the road.

So, most men in my life, I need you to dig down deep with me and check your privilege on this. It is a privilege to be stranded on the side of the road and to not worry about the person who pulls over to help you and whether or not they are safe, or if they will try to assault or kidnap you. (This worry happens no matter the expressed gender of the person who pulls over to help you.) It is a privilege to be able to call a tow truck and know that the person who is towing your car isn't going to try to assault you. It is a privilege to be able to just call an event "stressful" when the women in your life might characterize it as dangerous.

But luckily, because of my totally badass negotiation skills, I won't have to worry about that for a while. I just bought my first brand new car (it had 41 miles on it when I pulled out of the lot! Snort! It has a nice smell too! And no more hummus stains on the floor of my car when I made a very stupid decision to eat chips and hummus while driving and then had to stop quickly!), I negotiated it all on my own, and I feel really good about the outcome. It's a looker, too, with a kickass warranty. The best part, though, hands down? NO FOB. I STILL HAVE A KEY. FOBS ARE BULLSHIT, FOR THE RECORD. And because I'm Dave Ramsaying the heck out of my debt lately, it'll be paid off a few years early so that if I start to have this problem in five years again, I'll be able to trade in with confidence because my car will be paid off. I've got a great plan.

So now, I have to get schoolwork done while my awesome car sits in our parking lot, just waiting to be driven. :)