One of the songs I can’t get out of my head for days after hearing it is Rumer’s version of “You’ve got to Accentuate the Positive, Eliminate the Negative and Latch On to the Affirmative…”
It really should be FOXY’s signature tune in this unregulated motor industry.
It can equally apply to a lot of gender-based news this month.
1/ Sports
The good news is that the men won The Ashes this year, even if it was a close call. Hurrah. Whilst we surely would have wanted the women to win their Ashes, they get less attention here yet the likes of Olympian Jessica Hill-Ennis and other winning female athletes in Beijing seem to command similar admiration compared to Mo and Greg in their respective disciplines.
That’s the positive nature of sporting success of course, regardless of gender.
I wonder if the gender Ashes tables will be turned in Australia after their women won the summer trophy in Hove?
2/ Music
There’s no positive news about music if you’re a teenage fan of One Direction this week. It’s all negative, unless you’re a member of the band of course, wanting a more normal life at just 22.
Any female who’s had male crushes (mine was Rod Stewart) knows how all consuming this adulation can be although I don’t feel the need to either accentuate or eliminate this far lesser emotion nearly thirty years on. I don’t think males feel the same, unless it’s about sporting role models perhaps?
3/ Education
If you’re female or looking to recruit graduates in future, you might want to big up the gender statistics that more young female students than male ones are off to university this year. This makes women the future gender target for many graduate recruitment agencies and will surely add to her shopping profile as the independent and wealthy gender responsible for some 80% of household shopping.
In the USA they say that women buy or influence up to 90% of all car sales and that is where we’re headed it seems. That’s serious gender buying power and yet so many females don’t think that motor manufacturers are accentuating the positives of cars with women in mind. That’s a mistake and the ones that get their cars and dealership service levels right (not just the promotions and advertising) will surely get her custom ahead of the rest.
4/ Radicalisation
Yet another Muslim Mum is thought to have taken her four young children to Syria this week. Clearly she doesn’t see the positive of life in Great Britain and has been misled by those doing a better job about Syria? With such negative consequences for her innocent children.
5/ Train safety
Maybe this event encouraged Jeremy Corbyn to suggest a way to keep solo women travellers safer in a women’s only railway carriage at night?
This has caused the usual gender divide between those who see the positive of this and those who think this is a patronising and a negative step backwards.
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As readers of my blog know, I run a motoring club for women so I have a feminist business agenda here, operating in what is perceived to be a mainly masculine world, even today.
As a result of putting my head above the parapet here, I am occasionally accused of discriminating against men or patronising women, simply by helping women enjoy a better motoring deal wisely whilst steering clear of the bad ones.
Yet these comments are often from a woman who’d buy cheap car insurance from us, but can’t see that many females like her worry about being ripped off/intimidated in car showrooms and garages.
The positive impact of information…
The fact is, we’re all different and we surely deserve informed choices, especially when these influence our personal and family safety. I use the word ‘informed’ with care. Surely no ‘informed’ Muslim Mum would take her children to Syria if she knew the facts? Were she to be better informed she’d be less likely to be brainwashed or radicalised as it’s called today. As would be the case were she informed about tyre safety rather than the high numbers of us found driving on illegal and unsafe tyres when caught in a roadside check.
Which is what FOXY does of course. We exist to inform and empower women drivers of all ages, across the UK, to do with their car safety. Having explained the risk of buying cheap in an unregulated industry, time and time again, we help Club members save money wisely without cutting safety corners. It’s this very information and female oriented message that enables us to cut the cost of car insurance for 9 out of 10 members. Because the women who join the Club are either (or soon become) safer motorists – they aren’t boy racers but they are more interested and better informed about safe motoring choices than others…
… versus gender negatives we’d rather eliminate
Sadly there are some females that we wouldn’t want in the Club and our Club Rules are designed to reflect this if need be.
For example, I don’t want to travel with females like the foul-mouthed pair of drunks who were in the same train carriage as me from London to Lancing late one night recently. Not only were they unsteady on their high heels, their language was offensive, they left a most unpleasant toilet for others and after changing trains at Hove, one was sick all over the seat and floor behind me.
So Jeremy, whilst in principle I support any objective to provide a safer and more pleasant train travelling choice for women at night, please make this a female choice and consider ways to hold ‘women behaving badly’ to account.
How sad we need to do address this negative consequence of gender equality – presumably these women didn’t learn about the Suffragettes at school?
Much as FOXY ‘outs’ the bad garages and car dealerships who treat women badly– it’s increasingly the case that some women are letting the rest of their gender down in their motoring dealings and/or car neglect.
I’m thinking about those women who think it’s clever to tell me they simply put fuel in their cars and sell them on before their first MoT. Which might explain why so many cars fail their first MoT and so many female motorists don’t know how to check their tyres for themselves…
Another group FOXY needs to be talking to, but I’m not sure how, are those women who say ‘My husband takes care of this for me’.
These are the same ladies that are totally lost and vulnerable to do with their car when he isn’t there to do this for them or the car safety penny finally drops at accident time; that he didn’t check her tyres properly or regularly.
At which stage she realises that she, the driver, has to accept full responsibility for the consequences of any accident that the condition of her car might have contributed towards. And which might never have happened had she known…
In short, there is no excuse for ignorance when there’s a service dedicated to helping women drivers become more aware re car safety and so they might save money wisely. The ‘doing something about car care ignorance’ needs to be the positive outcome here.
Now, how do we get that message out to more women drivers, Rumer?