Maybe I’m tailgated so much because I’m a girl

I’ve always found driving a lot like Twitter. It’s painful, angry and exhausting and almost always involves a semi-constant level of shouting. I quit Twitter years ago because I figured that if I wanted to be constantly harassed for being a bleeding heart leftie then I’d just visit my aunt. And if I could quit driving I would – but UberEats doesn’t yet deliver toilet paper or $8 bottles of sav.

So for years I kept on trucking (well, crawling) in my fourth-hand middle-aged white-woman car, the 2001 VW Beetle. And I just resigned myself to the fact that the motorway was a cruel no-man’sland, where society’s deepest, basest frustration and loathing towards fellow humans played out.

Like every other Kiwi I accepted that we have a problem with road rage, and our default driving style is that of a coked-up Vin Diesel escaping a stampeding hippo.

But then I realised that something strange was happening. It wasn’t just that I was getting cut off and flashed at a lot, although I certainly was. It was the tailgating. It happened all the time. Not like once or twice a week. I mean every time I left the house.

Now admittedly I drive in Auckland, and to the speed limit, but this was crazy tailgating. The type where I’d slow down to try to force them to back off, and they’d slow down and stay exactly as close as before. So I’d slow down again, and they still wouldn’t back off. So I’d do it again . . . and again. Eventually it’s just the two of us crawling along being outstripped by passing grannies.

I’d get tailgated on empty roads with ample overtaking space. I once got tailgated for 45 minutes while driving through a mountain range at night by a man in a red 4x4 who stayed so close behind me he could have licked the nervous sweat dripping down my back.

I couldn’t work it out. Either the rising fuel taxes were really taking a toll on our already nonexistent driving manners, or something was going on here. Slowly it dawned on me that it might be something to do with my car.

Like I said, I drive a Beetle. It’s a girl car. It’s a mum car (in fact it was my mum’s car) and there’s no mistaking which gender that ornamental plastic daisy in the dashboard is intended for. Could it be that people were picking on me because of it?

So I decided to borrow the family peoplemover. It’s a hulking, shiny black thing, about the size of a school, with thick, midnight black tinted windows. It’s the sort of car you’d drive if you were a drug dealer but also had extensive family commitments.

And as soon as I started driving it the tailgating dropped off.

I still drove in the same, sedate and sensible way, I averaged the speed limit and indicated for three seconds. And yet people didn’t tailgate. The number of people who cut me off halved, the number of errant honkers dropped, and other motorists definitely stopped pulling up alongside me for a sneery sideways look at the lights.

Although when I pulled up at the police checkpoint, my co-ordinated pineapple print activewear ensemble got a helluva shocked look from the officer.

But that’s just it, isn’t it?

We expect the person in a black, hulking peoplemover to be a big, hulking man. It’s a man’s car – especially if it’s got tinted black windows. No-one expects me and my pineapple activewear.

So we play it safe, we stay away, and we stay at the mild end of dickish at which Kiwis hover while driving. But back in the Beetle, drivers can see it’s a girl – and a dainty middle class one to boot. They know she’s not going to do anything to stop them venting their road rage. There could be six rugby players with baseball bats in a people-mover. In a Beetle, it’s just me and the pineapples.

But maybe it’s even just because you’re a girl that you’re a target for rage and frustration. If the internet taught me anything, it’s that there’s a whole lot of barely concealed anger out there at women, which only needs a keyboard to unleash itself. Could it be the same on the motorway?

And after all, it’s a well-accepted theory that Kiwis are ruder drivers to more expensive cars.

Could we have a similar, sadistic bent for girly cars too?

Ladies, I need to know! Calling all drivers of Suzuki Swifts! Convertible Mini Coopers! Any Beetle driver ever . . . Holler at me! Have you had the same experience . . . or do I just seem to attract the very worst type of driver?

It’s a wellaccepted theory that Kiwis are ruder drivers to more expensive cars. Could we have a similar, sadistic bent for girly cars too?