I am woman, hear me whimper!

I like to pride myself on being a strong feminist. I mean, I shave my legs and everything, but I identify with the feminist movement and their former struggles and the current challenges and all that. I am offended by society's expectations on women with regards to age and beauty. I baulk at the unfairness in the workloads expected of working mothers compared to working fathers. I empathise with my sisters-in-arms who still suffer from atrocious treatment in other cultures and countries.

So, with my feminist qualifications established I can now proceed with my story.

I am generally good with directions in traffic and maps. Like most women, I probably need to rotate the map to work out what direction I am going, but as a generall rule, me and maps get on. But, I don't seem to remember street names. Never have been able to. In my home town, I know very few street names, and tend to know how to get to places by pure gut instinct or just years of practice. When I moved to Melbourne 6 years ago, I didn't know the place and had to learn quickly. Time has passed, and my skills at getting around have improved, but mostly only in the inner 6km ring around the city. Getting around for me has often meant me printing out a copy of directions from whereis.com and then proceeding to drive and read at the same time. I believe that this is only a little safer than texting whilst driving.

So in the interests of road safety, I bought a GPS system for the car. It has proved to be fantastic in guiding me around town, and also fantastic at annoying me when I "may" go over the speed limit by alerting me gently*. But I have issues with the system (oh, feign surprise!). The choice of voices for me to listen to are limited. Since I want it to announce the street names, I have to use a computer generated voice, rather than the slew of available celebrities that have lent their vocal chords to GPS systems of the world. And of course, I don't want to pay for any voices. So, I am left with the free, computer generated voices. And then we add in my issue, and where the preamble to this post comes in.

As much as I love women (but not in the physical down-and-dirty sense), and admire all that they can do, I really don't take direction from women well**. A female GPS voice telling me when to turn and so on, just makes me want to scream at her and then throw the unit out the window. A male GPS voice might rile my anger, but not to fits of violence. I am not sure what in my psychology has made me manifest this anger in this way. I reckon it must be my mother's fault. Yeah, that's it.




* The selected tone is a cow mooing, which is somewhat disturbing - but effective.

** Although some might say, I don't take direction well from anyone....but that would be just harsh and uncalled for!