Oh, to hell with it anyway. Why is it that I can state the obvious truth that men are not in touch with their feelings with no sense of terror, but when I declare the equally scientifically demonstrable truth that the most incompetent, discourteous, unseeing and stupidest drivers on the road are invariably women, I can sense the cold steel of the sisters' gelding shears approaching?
Of course men cause most accidents; but for pure bad driving, women take the blooming biscuit. If you see a car being driven at 25 m.p.h. in the fast lane, its driver making animated hand gestures to amplify the intense conversation going on within, look no closer. Here be woman. Flash your lights, and you flash them in vain because the last time she looked in her rear-view mirror was when she was going to her niece's wedding last Easter and she was checking if her mascara had smudged. (It hadn't).
Male aggression
Sound the horn and you get the angry, incredulous, oh-you-arrogant-men look, the one that declares: "Typical. You men think you own the road."
We don't. But we should. Aside from all the obvious things about male aggression in cars which women tend to go on about - after, that is, they've exhausted the topic of men not being in touch with their feelings, and how men are emotionally illiterate, and can't talk seriously about inner selves (all of which is, thank God, perfectly true) - there are other truths about male drivers.
They are more skilled on the road. They know the width of their car, approximately, and don't take half an hour reversing or parking. Women park as if they were docking the aircraft carrier USS Dwight. D. Eisenhower in a berth an inch wider than their vehicle and with their first-born lashed alongside as a buffer. There they are in supermarket car-parks, inching backwards and forwards, their tongues between their teeth, until the operation finally comes to an end when the woman has nicely straddled a car-park division or two or even three. Content with her seamstress-like parking skills, she vanishes into a supermarket, chatting there for hour or two with a friend, their trolleys blocking the aisle nicely. Outside other cars can't park because her car is filling three spaces.
Now either you can park or you can't. That's a legacy of our neolithic days. The girls stayed at home and gathered grasses and cooked things and the chaps went out and hunted. I remember a couple of years ago seeing in the Guardian a feminist illustration of early humans in which men were portrayed as sitting around the fire while nearby a group of women were hunting animals for food. What happened to that tribe? Starved to death of course.
So we know women's brains are differently constructed from men's, and that watching them throw things is as mortifying as watching a horse type a letter. That's in the genes. Just as genetically men are - thank God - not in touch with their feelings, women are not capable of assessing distance or of using their arms to propel weaponry. But what explanation is there for the fact that women in traffic hardly ever give way?
Gap in traffic
Oh to be sure, if they are with companions they are probably so busy talking that they don't see you trapped in a side-road trying to get out, or waiting for a gap in the oncoming traffic in order to turn right. But what about the woman who is completely alone and cruising slowly towards you in a line of cars, and you want to turn right, and you catch her eye, yet still she doesn't give way - indeed, she might put her foot down all the faster to make sure you don't escape?
Is this a conscious decision? Or is it the work of the deeply powerful female sub-conscious, which was programmed in early infancy to know that men are just beasts and if you give them even an inch they'll take the full six? But no, it couldn't be, it's not a male-female thing, because any woman I've spoken on this topic agrees: women hardly ever give way in traffic. In fact, quite the opposite; they tend to close gaps in order to prevent other motorists getting out.
Basic courtesies
It's hardly surprising, given the pathological attitude of so many women motorists to other drivers, that they are unaware of the basic courtesies of roadusing; such as, for example, if someone does give way to you, you acknowledge it with a wave, or a big cheesy smile, or flash a thank-you with the hazard lights. I'd say 90 per cent of women for whom I've given way have accepted my courtesy as a natural right for which no expression of gratitude is due.
"Why do you do it?" my wife always asks me in despair as yet another witless cow drives into the gap I have created for her without so much as the cerebrally challenged, bovine eyelid flickering in courteous acknowledgement. And the answer is, of course, that I don't know. I give way either because I know what it is to be stuck when no-one else will let you in, or, more likely, because like all men, I'm not in touch with my feelings.