When I Quit Cutting My Hair, I Learned How Men Treat Women On American Roads

From Road & Track

The fifty-something man in the aging Lexus SUV was red-faced from screaming as he pulled up next to my motorcycle and lowered his passenger window. I caught fragments of every nasty word I'd ever heard my Catholic-school classmates whisper to each other during recess. Then he slowed the torrent of abuse long enough to enunciate the next sentence clearly: "Bitch, I am going to get out of this car and beat you until you can't stand up."

"Alright," I said, removing my flower-covered Arai "Oriental" helmet with its mirrored visor and shaking out my hair, "let's get this started. I have to be at work in ten minutes." His mouth froze, and he floored the accelerator, nearly striking a pedestrian as he squealed around the corner. Apparently the guy thought I was a woman. I'd like to tell you that I was surprised, but I wasn't-because this, or something like this, has happened to me nearly a dozen times in the past few years. Allow me to to explain.

Around my 33rd birthday and after reading Robert Bly's outstanding book, Iron John, for the third or fourth time, I decided to end my decades-long habit, acquired in my teenage years as a BMX racer, of using a quarter-inch clipper on my hair once a month. For a while I kept it above my collar, but in 2012, when I got a job where they didn't expect me to "look corporate," I let it grow without restraint. It's now down past my shoulders in true Allman Brothers, or at least Foo Fighters, fashion.

Strictly speaking, this shouldn't be enough to let anybody mistake me for a woman. I'm six-foot-two, 240 pounds, and have a full beard. Even if you walk up behind me, I'm pretty broad-shouldered, and I stand up straight, which is something `none of the taller women I've ever dated can bring themselves to do. But there are two things that apparently confuse people. First is my motorcycle helmet. It has flowers and koi fish and the "Great Wave" graphic on it. I think it's neat, and so does my YZF-riding girlfriend, who wears a plain silver Arai herself. The second thing is that I have a couple of cars-an Accord coupe and a Boxster S-that tend to be preferred by women.

As a consequence, over the past few years, I've been involved in several incidents where male drivers decided to threaten me or shout abuse at me right up to the moment that they realized that they were dealing with someone who, from the front, resembles the Geico caveman more than any lady on this planet.

The usual scenario goes something like this: I do something to upset another driver, like squeezing in front of them on the freeway (in my car) or lane-splitting past them in traffic (on my motorcycle). They can only see the back of my head, so they assume that some woman has gotten the better of them somehow. This leads to them breaking the laws of traffic, sanity, and sometimes even physics to get up next to me, blaring their horn and shouting. I then either look over at them (in my car) or remove my helmet (on my bike). At that point, they immediately stop what they were doing and either drive off or commence to looking straight ahead like nothing's happened.

In the case of my friend in the Lexus, I'd slipped my VFR800 past him as he sat in a line of cars waiting to enter a parking garage. I was actually going to park at the meters past said garage, and there was a two-foot gap between his SUV and the curb for me to exploit. This was an insult to his manhood that he could not permit, so he decided to chase me down and kick my ass . . . again, until he realized that I wasn't a woman.

Two days ago, I performed an otherwise ordinary "zipper" merge onto a crowded freeway in front of a Prius C that was trying to stay directly behind the car in front of him in his lane. I might have forced the issue a bit, but I was making a legal move, no doubt about it. He started flashing his lights and honking. Then he swerved onto the shoulder and pulled up next to me, waving his fist. I looked at him. He hit his brakes and came to a halt on the shoulder before pulling back into the lane twenty cars or so back.

It took me a while to figure out what was going on. I'm not a particularly scary-looking dude, and aside from a bit of martial-arts sparring across various disciplines in years gone by, I'm not anything close to a brawler or a would-be tough guy. In fact, my decision to grow my hair out was a direct consequence of a decision I made to try being a friendlier and less confrontational person in my late 30s and early 40s. That, and I wanted to make my friends who were going bald just a bit jealous.

So it doesn't make any sense that people would want to fight me until they see my face. It isn't like I'm Danny Trejo. I'm told I have very friendly blue eyes and dimples. It was my six-year-old son, of all people, who clued me in to the problem. "Dad, not to make fun of you," he said, clearly intending to make fun of me, "but you look like a girl. A really big girl. Until I see your face."

Which made me think about an incident from before I started growing my hair. I was the third car in line to leave my office parking lot and enter the main road. The first car in line wasn't pulling out despite having several opportunities. I laid on my horn. The guy driving that first car got out, walked back to the second car, which had a rather frightened young woman behind the wheel, and started beating on her driver's-side window.

At that point, I got out and explained, as politely as I could, that I was the horn blower, not the lady in the car between us, and that I really needed him to return to his car and pull into traffic so that we could all go home. It was before I had my Iron John-related spiritual awakening, so I was kind of forthright about it. He got into his car and did what I asked. That night, I lay awake thinking about what it must be like to be the kind of person who will threaten a woman in traffic but meekly acquiesce to what another man tells you to do. Uncool doesn't begin to cover it.

Putting my son's statement and my memory of that old incident together made everything clear: There are some men out there who, given the chance, will take a traffic incident as an excuse to harass and threaten women. Listen, I'm not what they call a "social justice warrior" searching for wrongdoings, but the evidence of my own eyes-and hair-is too strong to refute. As a woman on the American road, you really are at more risk of road rage or abuse from your fellow motorists than you would be if you were a man.

When I tell these stories to my friends and fellow motorcyclists, they always say, "Dude, just go get a helmet that isn't so, you know, girly." But I like my helmet, regardless of what other people think. And I also like my long hair, and my Honda coupe. I'm not going to change any of these things just to avoid the occasional run-in with some misogynistic douchebag. In fact, I'd like to think that every one of these incidents offers the other person involved a chance to change their behavior in the future, and to treat female motorists with respect and consideration.

A few weeks ago, I was an auto auction and I saw a Yamaha R1 on the block that had been painted bright pink. I sent a photo to my girlfriend, and she laughed in response (her YZR is blue and silver), but I considered buying it for myself. Why not? If I rode it around for a few years, I'm sure I'd have countless opportunities to surprise cowards who think it's OK to harass female drivers just because they're women. Pathetic.