Howdy, Instapundit Readers! I apologize for being slow to clear comments – Typing and driving is a bad idea.
So, the van pulled into an Autohof in Germany and we parked a little distance from the cafe/coffee shop/restaurant/news-stand/playground. We needed to stretch our legs, since we’d been on the road for several hours and would be driving for a few more. As we strolled to the Hof, the driver pointed to the parking slots right in front of the doors and shook his head. There were the usual handicapped places, and then two, pink, “Women Only” slots.
Not pregnant women, not elderly women, not women with small children, just women.
Oh come on! You have to be kidding me. What became of Grrrrrrrrl Power!? What became of “I am woman, hear me roar”? Women are so delicate that we need parking slots even closer than the designated handicapped places?
Ye gads and little fishes. That’s the kind of thing that makes me want to turn in my second X chromosome.
And no, the slots were not wider than the others, so no jokes about women drivers and inabilities to park.
Cat Rotator's Quarterly 
Women are completely equal to and in every way identical to men, and as such, require special rights and privileges to protect them from and make them equal to men.
How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb? That’s not funny!
Ah, now I understand why lightbulbs were outlawed in the EU!
Related rant – this year, the Secretary of the Navy noted that an insufficient number of women (none) were graduating from Marine Corps infantry officer’s basic course. So he instructed the Corps to reduce their standards so that women would pass.
The Corps refused. The SecNav directly ordered. The Corps held by their principles. They did not lower their standards – they eliminated the standards entirely. “There shall be realistic performance standards, or there shall be no standards at all. Choose.”
Good on the Corps. You do not raise performance by lowering the standards.
Do some digging into flight controllers in the U.S. and the impending disaster affirmative action is going to cause.
https://moonbattery.com/affirmative-action-applied-to-air-traffic-controllers/
At the risk of an elbow or swat, I’ve seen a number of vehicles with the “well- mannered women …” bumper sticker being unable to park in one spot. Dearie, it’s between and not on the lines, especially on crowded days. You’ll make traffic court, not history.
I sense a Teutonic Efficiency moment. It’s an effort to reduce accidents of several kinds, by providing those with smaller bladders a few more seconds’ response time. It runs in my better half’s family, with no pun intended.
(Duck and cover)
To be fair, there are all too many alleged men who can’t park worth a [DELETED] as well. And that’s straight-in or angle, not parallel, mind.
most people don’t care if they park correctly…they think they should only have to do it once and then receive a trophy for “trying”
I’ve seen pictures from South Korea and Japan where the ‘women only’ spaces are bigger or easier to get in and out of, or both. I’ve never seen the spaces in person.
In the USA, I have seen pregnant women spaces or spaces for parents with children; they are usually either at churches or at maternity or children’s clothing stores.
No slots for “Zhe” or other Sitzpinklers?
Speaking of which, when I was autobahning my way to Bavaria I stopped to visit the Herren WC, and as I stood at the “water wall” women were running back and forth behind me visiting the stalls in the back because the Damen facililty had a line out the door.
Thank God for male plumbing!
p.s. Saudi Arabia has long had separate women’s places for everything, including Fuddruckers. Now that they have legal women drivers, I wonder if they have separate parking spaces for them?
Wouldn’t surprise me. Probably at the rear of the building, or at the far end of the parking area.
When I worked at a post office, the union folks said us few part timers had to park back of the garage… out of sight, not the main lot where any suspicious activity might be noticed. BUT.. that was also the executive parking area (during the day) and the garage had outlets on the outside back wall. And my car had a block heater…. so when the Great Cold Snap happened… they had ‘banished’ me to the ideal spot.
But can any of them, male or female, get bacon on their burgers when they go to Fuddruckers? That’s a far more important, and fundamental, question. 😛
I’m gonna go with “no”.
I had “turkey” bacon in military mess halls in the ME, but not outside of camp. I doubt the Saudis of the past 50 years would even allow the word “bacon” to appear on the menu no matter what it was made out of. MBS is shaking things up to modernize the Kingdom, but I don’t see “bacon” as being a hill he wants to die on.
Dying on a hill of bacon doesn’t sound that bad…
I seem to recall a muslim somewhere getting all offended by the turkey bacon because “it says bacon!” But I can’t recall where that was.
(Of course, I’m offended by it, too. If it’s made out of turkey, it’s NOT bacon, and they should be sued for fraud for even using that term. IMHO.)
As to women’s parking spaces, I can see this going nuts. Having to have a parking space for every possible LGBTQWERTY possibility. And non-intersectional people have to park waaaaaaaaay out on the fringes…….
Leading to a whole new industry in intersectionality placards for cars, and people to certify that, yes, indeedy, you most certainly are whatever the placard says.
(And to lots of glorious in-fighting as to which intersectionality gets closest to the door.)
(And to really large parking lots for every mini-mall.)
It was on an airline flight last month. There is a fatwa against turkey ham and turkey bacon because the mullah claimed they are “gateways to temptation,” leading people to eat the real thing. *facepaw*
Sigh… NOT going there… nope… zip…
Wise man. It takes me three passes to get a King Air backed into a hangar using a tug. At least cars don’t have expensive sticky-outy bits to keep track of.
Now wait a minute… that’s a combination of expensive bits and backing a two-axis trailer into a restricted space. Three passes for that combo is pretty good. Especially since rule 1 is “do not bend the flying thing.”
Always a question of, “Do I back it in, or back it out?” 🙂
Or, do I pay for a really expensive hangar spot where I have to do neither. (Those do exist.)
Yes, alert hangers, Strap in, close the canopy, open the doors, start and go. On the return taxi in, shut the doors, open the canopy and exit. Nice, especially in Goose Bay in -4o January.
Backed it in, so we could pull it out really quickly when needed.
It’s because women do the majority of the shopping, and therefore need to be closer to the door to aid unloading their grocery carts.
Sorry but the person doing the shopping is the person doing the shopping, regardless of sex…
So, because “women do the majority” it’s OK to discriminate against the man actually doing it today? Feminist logic. Another logic fail – being closer to the door has naught to do with unloading the cart.
The close-to-the-door parking spaces are a tacit acknowledgement that rape and sexual harassment have gone through the roof in Germany since Frau Merkel opened the gates to a million people who think any woman not in a black sack deserves everything she gets.
Given that they had them all over 20+ years ago when I lived in Germany and neither Merkel nor the current crop of “refugees” were a factor then, I’m going to have throw the BS flag on this one. Whether safety issues were a factor originally, I couldn’t say, but the current crisis is unrelated.
I’d just never seen one at an Autohof before. Since I tended to avoid places with lots of parking (go figure. No car, small towns), this was the first time they jumped out at me.
I was stationed in a fair-sized city (Augsburg) and like all Americans drove more than the size of the city (or ready availability of the Strassenbahn) really justified, so I probably spent more time in garages. I always assumed they were “really” for pregnant women or those with littles, so never used them myself (was usually with spousal unit anyway) but they were definitely there. Just one more thing I filed under “ways Germany is different” and never thought much more about them to be honest.
For those who’d like to research this more, Youtube has numerous videos on the topic. Just search for “women only parking.” Lots of interesting comments too, particularly when the ‘women only’ spaces are larger.
One justification is that men are simply better at spatial skills like parking. Make the women-only spaces larger, and women park better. Make women-only sections separate, and they damage only the cars of other women. Maybe men should support this idea.
Here is an example of research suggesting that male-female difference is wired into our brains.
“Men consistently outperform women on spatial tasks, including mental rotation, which is the ability to identify how a 3-D object would appear if rotated in space. Now, a University of Iowa study shows a connection between this sex-linked ability and the structure of the parietal lobe, the brain region that controls this type of skill.”
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081217124430.htm
That makes particularly good sense when your realize that the most valuable use of spatial skills is in warfare. Whatever you fight with—clubs, swords, fists, rifles, machine guns, warships and fighter aircraft, you must use spatial skills quickly and well. And war has always been a male activity.
Given how difficult three-D mental imaging is for me (see: flying instrument approaches, drawing three view blueprints from one view), I can easily believe it.
Let’s offer the proper context here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_parking_space#Germany
“In contrast to disabled parking spaces, women’s parking spaces are not designated in the German road traffic code (Straßenverkehrsordnung) and are therefore only allowed in private parking areas. However, as landlord, the operator of the parking facility can insist that these spaces be used only by women as long as it is not claimed that the parking facility falls under the rules of the federal road traffic code.”
Hmmm, private parking areas. Sounds like a case of freedom of association.
Mentally replay the scenario late at night and add a couple of vans with vibrant balkan-europeans or wirr-schaffen-das-immigrants to the parking lot. The parking garage for some hotels I have stayed in Germany have dedicated parking places for females: extra wide, close to the entrance, cameras and lots of light at night. Reality has this nasty habit of intruding on make-believe.
The inverse of the capitalism model in which preferential parking would be for those who contribute most to the economy.
what’s next, “refugee parking”? what color will those signs be?
This post is linked at Instapundit. Warn your servers.
Somehow, Insty knows when I’m at Day Job or on the road, and links on those days. It’s uncanny!
Hey, if I choose to identify as a woman, can I park in one of these reserved spaces? If not, then, I’m calling cis-gendered discriminatory bullshit on all of it.