In
the good old days of about 50 years ago it was accepted that men understood
about cars – real men anyway. Girls knew things like how to iron a shirt and
the difference between plain and self-raising flour. The best ones could sew on
a button as well and were handy for push starting if you were stuck with a flat
battery, but I can’t remember much more in terms of specialist knowledge. For
men mutual respect and masculinity derived from understanding the pathology of
the internal combustion engine. A strange knocking noise would be discussed at
the bar with attention focused on when it happened – under power and it was a
big end, on the overrun and it was a little end. Or it might have been the
other way round. Carburetters (spellcheck says not but I’m sure it used to be
–er) were updraught or downdraught, single choke or twin choke and a pain to
adjust. We knew about loose tappets and slipping clutches, pre-ignition and
blown gaskets. It was fundamental stuff that came not from any formal education
but from necessity. You had to get to work, take your girlfriend out and have
time for the pub and there was not enough money to pay anyone else to fix it (a
high risk course of action anyway in those days). Inevitably the occasional
weekend had to be sacrificed to serious work (I once changed a camshaft on a
Triumph Vitesse) and it had to be represented to your girlfriend as a sort of
virility demonstration and evidence of marital suitability if you had plans in
that direction.
No
more. Apart from being much more reliable the modern car is barely susceptible
to owner maintenance, largely because of the way it is almost entirely
controlled and kept healthy by electronics, and nobody worth talking to in the
pub understands electronics, nor are electronics susceptible to owner
maintenance. What the modern young person does understand though is the
benefits and manifestations of electronics. The shortest route to being an
outcast, useless for any kind of social intercourse (and thus probably the
other sort as well) is to be unable to grasp, intuitively for there are no
instruction books or Haynes manuals, how to connect with everyone via Snapchat,
Whatsapp, Instagram, Facebook or Twitter. You must upload your photos and
irreplaceable documents to the cloud as easily as you would blow your nose,
download apps and their updates in your sleep and understand the difference
between Netflix and iTunes (if indeed there is any) in the same way we knew the
relative benefits of crossply and radial tyres. The ability to read a wiring
diagram has been replaced by knowing how to connect things to wi-fi, without
the need for wiring, how to use your computer as a TV and feed the TV from the
computer.
In
all this no gender distinction exists. My granddaughter hooked me up to
Instagram in about half a minute flat and my wife scorns my inability to find
the right button on the Sky remote. In this welcome equality how does a chap
assert his masculinity among his like?
