My junior and senior years of college I spent my summers working on a grant to develop the Whitewater Gorge in Richmond, Indiana into a public space. This meant that for the first time in my life I was living on my own, or rather, with the four other students renting a dilapidated brick house with me—or maybe it was five; people came and went. One of my roommates, a year ahead of me, decided that he would teach me to use drive using a stick shift (I’m still not sure why). This was 1989, and new cars with manual control were already becoming scarce. He had a beat-up ten-year-old AMC Spirit1, and I would drive down the quietest road we could find while he talked me through the gears, and I tried (in vain) to not destroy his transmission. Each time I shifted, the car would lurch forward like the ghost Samara from the Ring exiting a television. Not knowing what to do, I would instinctively brake, which of course meant having to shift back down to first. I think I successfully made it to third exactly one time. Eventually I called the project off because I did not want to be on the hook for buying a new clutch.
Years later, in the early 2000’s, I read a comment on a bulletin board site that was something like: I don’t get these dumb kids today. If you don’t know how to drive manual, you don’t have the basic skills to be a man. Print was still a thing then, and around the same time male “lifestyle” magazines like Esquire, Men’s Health, and Maxim2 had a cottage industry producing listicles of the manliest things every man must do to call himself a man3, and some version of “learn how to use stick” was usually an entry. This gendering of transmissions was one of the last hold-outs from a postwar era that saw skills and consumer goods as belonging to men or women exclusively. Women had been driving (and engineering) cars from the first days of the automobile, but the popular view in the early 20th century was that cars were for men. That changed after the First World War, in which women drove ambulances and delivered supplies. So the gendering shifted (no pun intended) to “real” drivers vs. those who merely used their cars for utilitarian things, like running errands, transporting children, or, you know, going to jobs.
The most egregious example of this is the Hurst “dual gate” control, which was sold as an aftermarket shifter in 1963. It featured two tracks for the stick, one of which had a drive setting that was automatic, and the other of which was a ratchet shifter that could manually bump up or down the gears one at a time in order. Not necessarily a bad idea, but its marketing labeled the manual side as “his” and the automatic side as “hers.” Additionally, one could only engage the manual side by using a key, which was labeled as “his only” in a magazine ad for the control—because the “little lady” can’t be trusted with not “over-revving” the engine.
Yes, this is all very silly. But when you look past the machismo, the performative maleness of things that a man should know, there remains a legitimate conundrum. What knowledge should a competent adult have to be an adult? What abilities should be considered basic? There are an endless number of skills one could learn, but you have only finite time, energy, aptitude, and interest. To the BBS complaint I mentioned earlier, I posted a reply: But do you know how to sew a button on to a shirt that needs one? Some skills might be more useful than others, and a lot of the most useful ones are the ones that have been traditionally coded as feminine: how to cook, how to knit, how to tend to people’s feelings.
The other question that stick shifting suggests to me is, what gets lost when you automate things? I became a web designer back when the way you made websites was you learned to code HTML (and later, CSS and Javascript) and you wrote your pages by hand. Then you stuck them on a server, which optimally you maintained, and registered a domain name. There was a common job title people had, Webmaster, that meant you did all the things. And even now, in these days of drag and drop content management systems, I am glad to have had all those years of coding, and I think it makes me a better designer. But should kids today learn HTML? If AI is really going to replace us, what’s the point in learning to do anything? I believe that even in a world where everything is made or done for you, developing proficiency or understanding has value in itself. Sure, there’s a utility in having the skills to survive the collapse of civilization4, but more importantly, knowing how and why, and being able to do, is a reward to itself.
So what I’m saying is, if anyone out there has a junker with a stick shift, I’m ready to try again.
- I think? Listen, I’m not a car person, as is probably evident from this post. ↩︎
- Yes, In my 30s I occasionally looked at Maxim, don’t hate me. ↩︎
- I wrote a parody of these features a few years ago and I think it amused only me. ↩︎
- Or zombie apocalypse, whatever. ↩︎
