Magazine Claims Women Don’t Have “The Driving Gene”

From the Department of Uncomfortable Reads comes this effort by Middle Eastern laddie magazine UMen to enumerate the top ten reasons why “Women Can’t Drive.” The conceit would be tricky to pull off even in a part of the world where women have the universal right to do so, but the Jordan-based Maxim imitator–by all appearances honestly trying to be provocative and funny without being antisocial–doesn’t let that hold them back. For instance, the list begins with this Wilde-esque observation:

10. Their Dogs Occupy the Front Seat - For some reason, women like to have their dogs in the car. And that’s ok, to some extent. But when it starts to become a distraction, then that’s the issue. [...] One bimbo riding on the lap of another bimbo equals one big reason women can’t drive.

It continues on to point out that the ladies don’t know the difference between a car and an iPod (”they don’t realize… pressing shuffle doesn’t automatically park the car”) and lack “the driving gene.”

It’s probably unnecessary, but we feel compelled to point out that women are actually safer drivers — in the US they die or suffer serious injury behind the wheel at less than half the rate of men (12,747 highway fatalities for femails compared to 29,722 for males in 2006, the most recent year for which data are available). On somewhat shakier ground there’s also this BBC story declaring “hormones make women safer drivers.”

The timing is kind of unfortunate, too — what with recent events reminding us of how dark the implications of Middle Eastern chauvinism can be.

Click on the image below (after the jump) for a pop-up, full-sized version of the UMen item.

UPDATE: A tipster suggests that UMen the stole the item from a posting at AskMen.com and rewrote it to make it more offensive by introducing terms like “bimbo” into the piece.