TODAY IN STUFF WE'RE SUPPOSED TO BE WORRIED ABOUT.

Streetsblog's Angie Schmitt frets about the angry countenance of pickup trucks.

Why have pickup trucks morphed into such huge, angry, and dangerous presences? Traffic safety experts, commentators on U.S. automotive culture, and social scientists have suggested a range of forces behind truck bloat.

Some of it is the aesthetic preferences of urban weenies, which is probably provoking militancy from Normals.  Some of it, though, dear reader, is the unintended consequence of feel-good regulations.

The U.S.’s perverse regulatory and tax environment contributes to this arms race. Ford’s heavy-duty F-250, for example, benefits from its regulatory status as a commercial vehicle, unlike the slightly smaller F-150. The same goes for other heavy-duty models like the Ram 2500 and Silverado 2500HD, which aren’t classified as passenger vehicles, but as work machines, and are thus exempt from EPA fuel economy reporting regulations.

Did anybody seriously think that effectively banning station wagons, which is what the fuel economy standards did, would not induce substitutions that might have surprised the na​ïve? And that such substitutions might be more common when motor fuel is cheaper?  That, though, is the mundane logic of the price theory seminar, and it doesn't lend itself to deplorable-shaming.

To [car historian Dan] Albert, the booming appeal of bigger and more brutish trucks reflects “a crisis of masculinity,” he says. “Nothing could be more emasculating than driving a minivan. So you want the vehicle that’s going to maintain your performative masculinity.”

The fact that supersized pickup trucks were often deployed as political props (and weapons) during the Trump era did not escape the notice of scholars like Cara Daggett, a professor of political science at Virginia Tech. In a widely shared 2018 journal article, Daggett coined the term “petro-masculinity” to describe flamboyant expressions of fossil fuel use by men (and some women as well, but mostly men) as a reaction against social progress. To these drivers, “the affront of global warming or environmental regulations appear as insurgents on par with the dangers posed by feminists and queer movements seeking to leach energy and power from the state/traditional family,” she wrote.

Petro-masculinity helps explain not only these vehicles’ confrontational styling, but the often equally belligerent way in which they are operated.

Put another way, some expressions of authenticity are more desirable than others? Sad.