Is driving a stick shift a dying masculine art? Is a woman who drives a stick shift some kind of badass unicorn? Recent news suggests both. A 20-year-old woman in Columbia, South Carolina, proved as much when, walking to her apartment parking lot to get into her car, she was met by a trio of gun-wielding dudes who robbed her and forced her into her car to take them to the nearest ATM. When they realized the car had a stick shift, one of them fled. Later, realizing the robbers wouldn’t be able to get very far without her behind the wheel, the woman threw the gear into neutral at an intersection and bailed.
The story satisfies because it operates on two typically held, largely unscrutinized assumptions: All men are able to drive stick shifts; all women who drive them are rare and impressive. Look deeper into the stereotypes about the sorts of women who can drive a stick, and you’ll stumble onto another presumption: They are probably also good with your dick.
Like the gal who can shoot a gun or run a pool table, the woman who drives a stick shift is not just a Hottie, but a Capable Hottie—a rare, exciting breed of woman who has crossed over into a male-dominated activity and succeeded by being good at a thing she is not supposed to be good at, which is surprising and erotic.
In a Reddit forum asking if guys “really think driving a stick is an attractive quality” in a woman, user twotoneskapunk replies:
It’s a rare quality. Women stereotypically have no clue about cars. When it comes to exercising control and knowledge over a large piece of machinery, women are, again, stereotypically inept. Although I know these stereotypes are not always correct, (my mother and sister both know how to drive a standard) the fact that this knowledge and control is so rare, it becomes sexy. It’s almost taboo for a woman to have that much control over a stick… Huh… I wonder why…
Women “stereotypically” have no clue about cars because for most of history, men have tended to monopolize them—particularly the driving of them. And it’s taken women more than a century to catch up: In 1910, women were only 5 percent of drivers; today they hold more driver’s licenses than men.
Yet even today, we associate driving with manliness, and at least anecdotally, men still prefer to do the driving on dates and road trips. That’s generally attributable to leftover notions about men guiding courtship from behind the wheel. They ask you out; they take you on dates; they open car doors; they pick the makeout spot. This extends all the way down the stick shift, aka, the dick shift. (Coincidentally, Urban Dictionary defines dick shiftin’ as a dude who is masturbating while also driving, further complicating this whole business.)
“What is definite,” Anthony Kim Jr. at Afro Autos writes, “is that manual transmissions are part of being a man.” He continues:
Shifting a gear is considered a manly act and has given a lot of ladies a lot of trouble in the car. This is because, ignoring all multitasking debates, the ladies find it difficult to concentrate on the road and still shift the gear perfectly, making it an art that only men have mastered to perfection. This is not to say that there are no women who can shift as good as the boys, but the latter make a bigger number.
Men and women even see the gear shifter differently, he argues. Men just see a gear, and women see some kind of weird labyrinth:
This is, of course, ground zero of ludicrousness. Obviously, stick shifts are harder to drive than automatics on account of how you have to do some extra hand/foot coordination with the clutch and the gear. But all they require is a little bit of multitasking, which studies show women are actually better at.
That aside, the real question is, if a woman can shift a gear, does it also mean she can shift a dick? According to the internet, yes. In a Yelp forum titled “Chicks that drive a stick shift are so hot!!” we learn from a user: “And usually low maintenance too. And seriously, I bet they know how to play well with the other stick shift too.”
Hey guys, if this is what you want a woman to do to your dick, you’re in luck. ::winks::
That’s not the only post online suggesting that stick shifting translates to dick shifting. “Last year I gave a male friend of mine a ride for the first time, and mid-drive he paused and said, “So, you drive a stick-shift, huh?” Anne Befort writes at Invoke Magazine. “As if this was revealing information he’d just discovered. I swear he looked at me differently after that. I mean, I get it. I’m in the driver’s seat, I’ve got a phallic symbol in my hand, and I know what I’m doing.”
At Reddit, another woman tries to get to the bottom of this sticks-are-dicks mystery, and asks why driving a stick is seen as so masculine. “Only a guy can ever drive their own dick correctly,” one user responds. “The car is obviously an extension of their machismo/phallus. The stick shift represents their dick. Thusly, only a guy can drive a dick right.”
Another user chimes in more succinctly: “Stick shift is phallic. <=====3.”
Also, this thing happened on the internet one time:
It’s true that the gear shift is a long cylinder with a bulbous head, and often so is a penis. It’s also clear that men are very, very immature. But what remains to be seen is whether any self-respecting stick-shift-driving woman has ever found her gear-shifting skills helpful in the bedroom one-on-one. Perhaps a study will get to the bottom of this, but in the meantime, women who drive sticks should go forth reaping the deep respect and admiration that comes with being able to do something that isn’t that hard and that no one seems to care about doing anymore anyway: handjobs.
Tracy Moore
Tracy Moore is a staff writer at MEL. She covers all the soft sciences like psychology, sex, relationships and parenting, but since this is a men’s magazine, occasionally the hard ones. Formerly at Jezebel.
