Reading 19
“Sex in cars comes in two forms: while moving and one of the participants is driving or while parked. Both are frowned upon by the authorities but the former especially so. Nevertheless, both forms seem to happen a lot. Cindy Struckman-Johnson, a University of South Dakota psychologist, found that 33 per cent of men and 9 per cent of women had engaged in some kind of sex while driving. While not driving, the figure rises to 60 per cent of all people and over 8 per cent had lost their virginity in a car.
“The figures are not that surprising. If home is impossible and a hotel too expensive, where better to indulge than in these rooms on wheels? Indeed, in 2019 Cosmopolitan ran an article entitled ‘20 Ways to Have the Best Car Sex of Your Life’. Joylessly, the first way is not to do it while the car is moving. There are also a number of lists of the best cars to have sex in – disappointingly the UK winner on the Askmen website was the Mitsubishi L200 Long Bed (Animal), a truck.”
- Bryan Appleyard, The Car: The Rise and Fall of the Machine that Made the Modern World (2022)
“A car manual solemnly pointed out that sex in a Beetle did not qualify as indecency in the eyes of the law so long as the car was not parked in a prominent location. Thirty years after having sex with his girlfriend in the back of a Beetle, a journalist from Bremen confessed that he was still overcome by a ‘strangely fascinating weakness in the groin’ whenever he saw one of the cars in the street. It was left to the Mexicans, however, to discover the full erotic potential of the Volkswagen Beetle (known there as a vochito). ‘It is not just that many vochitos were made in Mexico,’ one owner said later: ‘many Mexicans were also made in vochitos.’ It’s hard to imagine: they must all have been contortionists.”
- Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in History and Memory (2015)
“The award for most comically exact alignment of car and star must go to Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Hummer. AM General, a somewhat specialist automotive firm in South Bend, Indiana, had been making the High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle – HMMWV or ‘Humvee’ – for the army from 1984. People began to notice its implausibly wide stance on TV reportage of assorted US overseas adventures in the nineties and early 2000s. Schwarzenegger noticed one when he was shooting Kindergarten Cop in Oregon in 1990. ‘He just went ape for that machine,’ said his agent. He contacted the company, suggested they sell it to civilians and from 1992 that’s what they did.
“Now called the Hummer, it was either – take your pick – a steel vision of toxic masculinity, a brutal assault on the environment or a rather cool street cruiser. It had a 6.2-litre diesel engine and a kerb weight of 2,800 kilograms. It took 21.8 seconds to get to 60 and its top speed was just 68 mph. In the H1 versions it looked pretty much like its military predecessor, H2 looked slightly more like a conventional SUV and the much smaller H3 just looked awful, possibly a prisoner transport vehicle. As a domestic car sale it made no sense whatsoever. As a political gesture it was downright offensive. ‘Hummer’s H3 is mightily effective off the road,’ said Autocar magazine when it was introduced into the UK, ‘but not good enough on it to risk taking a smack in the mouth for.’”
- Bryan Appleyard, The Car: The Rise and Fall of the Machine that Made the Modern World (2022)
