OH, SHUT UP.

Look, if you don't want to go cruising with the Beach Boys, don't hang out at the drive-in.

In a study accompanying the [French] campaign, researchers found that familiar toxic masculine stereotypes “are easily reflected behind the wheel” among male-identified drivers, including disturbingly violent beliefs about appropriate ways to express their frustration with other people on the road, as well as men’s “natural aptitude for driving” — even when they’re drunk or traveling at dangerous speeds.

Respondents, for instance, often agreed with statements like “[If another driver] annoys me by wanting to overtake me, I won’t let him” “and “I go a bit fast, but I’m in control,” as well as “Two drinks won’t change my behavior.”

Give. Me. A. Break. "Male-identified drivers???"  It's not that there's anything new about the nation's sissy classes attempting to impose their aesthetics on everybody else.

Likely, dear reader, long before Ken Galbraith whined about "mauve and cerise, air conditioned sedans" as a way of contrasting private affluence with public squalor; or George Carlin worked the Volvo diesel sedan with a bumper sticker into a send-up of poseurs, there were people reading Important Things into drivers' choices of cars.

Of late, though, the nation's sissy classes have positively been wetting themselves over "toxic car culture."  Common Dreams contributor Stan Cox, in escalating the wetting, gets off what might qualify as a Friday short take.  "White nationalism feeds on gas, gunpowder, oil, and testosterone."

In so doing, those aesthetes only ensure that the anger among the last subset of the population that it's safe to mock grows.  To Streetsblog readers, though, such subtleties are lost.

[E]ven more lives couldn’t be saved by researching the complex question of why, exactly, men are so likely to spend so much time and take so many risks on the road — and taking action to address those root causes.

In an interview with the Guardian about the new French campaign, sociologist Alain Mergier postulates that the car has become “a symbolic object of masculinity, male identity and virility” in French culture, and that young males are often called upon to “prove [themselves] by ‘mastering’ a vehicle, such as accelerating or breaking speed limits to show, ‘I’m a real man.’”

Whether those hypotheses are true for male-identified people around the world, of course, isn’t clear yet, nor is it clear whether education campaigns like the new ad will have an effect in uprooting such deeply-embedded cultural beliefs. One PSA alone probably won’t have the same impact as, say, fining automakers who produce car commercials that explicitly tie masculinity to owning a big truck and driving it dangerously (yes, even if that car is electric), incorporating education about common toxic masculine stereotypes into mandatory drivers’ education programs, or even simply recognizing that roadway aggression is often a symptom of a larger cultural and emotional problem, and expanding access to therapy for men to help address it.

Should we start by recommending therapy for anyone who uses the expression "male-identified people?"  No, and a Common Dreams contributor, in the course of reinforcing the Franco-Streetsblog argument, actually recognizes the root root cause.

Aggrieved manhood is reactive: the gnawing feeling that “real men”—especially the straight white Western Christian kind—have been getting a bad rap and shouldn’t take it anymore.

DeSantis is one node in this booming backlash, which reframes any awareness of “toxic masculinity” and “white male privilege” as itself victimizing white men. Sociologist Michael Kimmel called this clever reversal “aggrieved entitlement.”

It's not a "clever reversal;" it's simple understanding of whose transgressivity gets a pass, and whose does not.  That there seems to be substantial overlap between the sensibilities of the urban cosmopolitans and that of the church of intersectionality only makes the pushback, particularly among Normals, greater.  You'd think that people interested in building political coalitions would get that.

Aggrieved manhood is everywhere these days, a throughline linking many confounding recent events: COVID anti-masking and lockdown protests, insurrections (now plural), climate denial, election denial, mass shootings and other supremacy crimes, and the spate of recent anti-trans bills and other “parental rights” scares. So why have so many pundits and commentators failed to recognize it for what it is?

Go ahead, make my day. Insulting voters is not an effective way to win them over.  "Tell voters you hate them often enough, and they'll believe you."  That's as true as the guy with a decked-out pickup truck as it is of the single cat lady.  What Ben Domenech advised his side is equally true of the rely-less-on-cars side.

Their repeated denunciations of single women as sad homebound “cat ladies” send a clear message: your life choices are bad, and you should feel bad. Don’t vote for us or our candidates, under any circumstances. It’s honestly a bizarre approach to people who purportedly want to be successful at politics.

The extension to pickup trucks, or country living, or getting around to the drive-ins is immediate.

We'll leave the failures of other Nanny State policies, such as lockdowns, vaccination and mask mandates, deinstitutionalization of crazy people, and school board follies, for another day.