PunkAssBlog.com

Via Twisty, someone, somewhere has finally clued into the fact that women also drive and purchase cars, and would prefer not to be treated like children while doing so. Twisty gets to the heart of the matter:

AskPatty.com isn’t just a handy website of “automotive advice for women.” Here men , too, may take advantage of the perpetually shocking information that women actually buy cars by learning from an actual fake woman (’Patty’ appears not to exist, at least in human form) how to communicate with the alien sub-species. AskPatty.com sells car dealers a book called How to Get Rich Selling Cars and Trucks to Women, a training course, and an exam. Dealers who pass the exam get ‘certified’ as ‘female-friendly’.

…A search produced the disheartening result that there are no certified female-friendly auto dealers — not even, alas, Aston Martin, Lotus, or Porsche — within 100 miles of the Twisty Bungalow, or I would certainly have gone out and bought a car just so I could report back on the experience.

…God forbid the readers of the Clarion-Ledger should think DeVere is one of the Humorless Hairyleg Army. Comfortingly, AskPatty.com was founded by and is currently CEOed by a dude.

And is immediately spammed by askpatty.com, where their eMarketing Manager takes a break from effective marketing to reinforce every stereotype about Marketing that has ever been featured in a Dilbert cartoon:

Thank you for posting about Ask Patty! I want to let you and your readers know that although Patty is a figurehead, we do have 24 automotive expert women who are real and will answer any automotive-related question you might have.
On our panel there are women who work in all aspects of the industry, including dealerships, sales, financing, auto care and maintenance, as well as certified technicians. So send in your questions and we would be glad to help!
Also, if you don’t find a dealer near you that is Female Friendly certified, let your local dealership know about us. We are certifying dealers continuously and would be more than happy to pass along information to newly inquiring dealers.

Thanks again!
Breanne Boyle
eMarketing Manager
AskPatty.com, Inc.

Now, let’s ignore for a second that painting something unisex, like car advice, with pink and purple and girling it up is not going to help evaporate the sexism that runs around the automotive industry. In fact, it may just make it worse. My dad, a former mechanic who knows that ignorance of cars is rampant in both genders, absolutely hates my sister’s turquoise tool set (”Barbies first tool kit,” he calls it) and was very pleased when someone gifted her with a superior, grey toolset that was a smidge less flamboyant. There’s a reason tools are metal-colored, you know: it’s because if you’re using them at all properly they’re going to be filithy and scratched in a manner that makes a shiny pink frufru coating kind of silly. Having a set or girlie tools advertises to all know know what they’re doing with a tool that you have no freaking idea what is going on. Get a used set of tools if you want to impress people. If you need to, lay them next to your pink set and stare at them until you are satisfied that they are the exact same thing.

And I don’t think I’m the only vagina-American out there who would scoff at a certified “female-friendly” auto dealership or repair place. My local Monro Muffler and Brake features a “Ladies Day” every week (I think it’s Wednesday) - they even have a banner! And that’s fucking hilarious because when I was 17, I went to a different Monro for an exhaust system problem and their mechanics pointed and laughed at me through a window while I was staring at them then called me back to look at the car. The bigger of the two Monro Muffler and Brake employees began whap on a pipe with a wrench, causing a gasket of some sort that was clearly missing a fastener to spin around the pipe, making a shrrring! shrring! sound. Without even trying to maintain a straight face, the guy told me that that sound was my catalytic converter which would need to be replaced right away or else it would explode! I insisted on taking the car back and, the ignorant 17 year old that I was, had to resort to a higher male authority (”I wanna talk to my dad first”) before I could wrest the car from their evil clutches. Considering the area that we lived in, the mechanic (and I use that word in the loosest possible sense) probably thought that my dad was a lawyer or businessman or something, and instructed me to tell him exactly what I told you probably in the hopes that I would return a few hours later with my frightened father’s credit card. So I did, and dad said exactly what I thought he would (”Bullshit.”) and I decided that I would have to abandon my dream of getting my tiny little problem fixed quickly. I turned the car over to the septuagenarians who ran an autoshop near the Monro Muffler and Brake, and when they were damn well good and ready they replaced the pipe and the gasket that were giving me problems.

The point of this still-hilarious story is that my experience was so bad, and reflected not only deeply ingrained sexism but also deeply ingrained (and probably even unofficially encouraged by corporate) dishonesty, that nearly a decade later I can only interperet “Ladies Day” as a cynical attempt to get women to feel a bit more comfortable with how badly they’re about to be reamed by the assholes in the store. I don’t, for a second, think that the smug, condensending sexism that I experience at (mostly franchise) auto repair shops reflects how they treat women, exclusively. It’s just a little extra icing on the cupcake they serve anyone, male or female, they think is an easy mark. Of course, the sexism declares all women easy marks where men may get a cursory once-over before the reaming, but still.

So when I read this:

To be certified, members of a dealership’s sales team must read a book on how to communicate with women, titled How to Get Rich Selling Cars and Trucks to Women, and take a training course. Then they must pass a 134-question test, which takes about an hour to complete.

my first reponse isn’t “Well, thank god things are finally going to change!” it’s “134 questions in about an hour??!!? I got more time per question on the GRE.” Somehow I doubt that askPatty’s exam is a probing examination into the success of the course in changing the attitudes and assumptions of the men that lead to their industry-wide piss-poor reputation as a bunch of sexist dishonest fucks. Between that and the title of thier text, I am going to have to assume that a “certified female-friendly by askPatty.com!” certificate on the wall means exactly jack-shit. In the meantime, I will continue to use the only method worth a damn for finding a reputable dealer or auto repair place: word of mouth and reccommendations from trusted mechanics.