muddy madam's moment Hippy Hippy Ache! 🎵Fat bottomed girls
you make the rockin' world go round🎵 At the end of May I had the chance to see Queen and have Adam Lambert sing this to me live in Manchester, and it was brilliant. OK maybe Adam didn't sing it directly to me, but as a fat bottomed girl I claimed the moment, though I am beginning to think that car designers don't believe these lyrics. I think they believe everyone has a narrow, emaciated, waif-style arse, and design accordingly. This is not surprising as statistics gathered in the US showed that only 19.8% of automotive designers are women, proving most car interiors are designed by people who have narrow hips and normally do not have a lot of 'junk in the trunk'. Designers are so used to thinking of men as the default, and women as a sort of niche. It has been proved over and over again that men design for men, and don't seem to, (or don't want to) understand how women's bodies are different, and how those differences need to be addressed in product design. Some of the more famous examples are: police stab vests that
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don't account for breasts, safety goggles that are too large for the female face, work boots that don't fit women's feet and my favourite, that time when NASA had to cancel the first allwomen space walk, to much public outcry, because they only had one properly configured medium spacesuit on the International Space Station, and they needed two. What was more telling is that they actually only have M, L & XL suits on the station, so if you are a smaller woman in space you are stuffed.
So what has this to do with cars? Over the past four weeks we have had four different cars delivered to test for a week at a time, and for three out of the four I couldn't drive them without the seat belts digging in to my hips. Now before you think "fat b*tch, just lose weight", I will tell you that, although I am overweight, I am in proportion, and my backside does not protroud beyond the width of the seat, so why am I having such issues?
