The more I drive around the Seattle, the more I wish women weren't allowed to drive. Does that make me self-loathing?

Unless you also wish the men couldn't drive.

According to insurance companies, who stand to lose serious money if they're wrong about this stuff, the worst drivers are men, across the board, for every age group. The absolute worst drivers are teen males, then teen females, then elderly males, then elderly females, and then unmarried males 20-24, unmarried females 20-24, and then married adults and everyone else.

Why? Because men take risks. Not the best trait to see in a driver. Men are more likely to drive aggressively, to speed, to take other people's driving behavior as a personal affront (has a woman *ever* killed someone in a road rage incident?), and to refuse to give up their independence as a driver after they become unsafe.

So if you hate the women drivers and not the men drivers, then either you are a really aggressive driver yourself who hates anyone going slowly (which is disproportionately female, but also means you hate trucks), or you hate women but not men for things that men do more than women, which, yes, makes you a self-loathing misogynist.

BTW, for the record, I am a woman who speeds, and hates being stuck behind trucks. :-) But I don't take other people passing me to be a personal affront to my pride, and I have an excellent driving record -- haven't had an accident caused by me in 18 years, and the two accidents I've had in that time have both been I was rear-ended by a male driver who wasn't paying attention. My brother, on the other hand, has caused so many accidents they keep suspending his license.

And the drivers there are the worst i've ever seen in my entire life. So when men start on their misogynistic rants about how women can't drive i tell them all about the morons that drive there. They normally don't have anything to say after that. And that's my $0.02.

Friends, this story is not about DRIVING. It's about whether or not the Sauds will ever give up a most basic form of control over women: denying them mobility. Unless you are rich and can afford a driver, the ban is another tool to keep you from working, from going out on your own, from having even minimal forms of personal freedom.

The fact that this country around which so much of our foreign policy revolves won't even let Condoleeza Freaking Rice get behind the wheel within its borders says a great deal about what we, as a people, will tolerate with our allies. It's deeply disturbing.