Automobiles

The introduction of the gasoline-powered automobile at the end of the nineteenth century provided a mobile platform for sexual adventure and a focal point for the development of a new kind of sex culture. Although courtship already involved forms of transportation—romantic walks, buggy rides, bicycles built for two, and train trips—the automobile offered a new kind of mobility, separation, and privacy to couples who wanted to take romance beyond hand holding, dancing, and perhaps the chaste kiss that once constituted publicly acceptable courtship behaviors. In addition, automobiles are both sexy and symbols of sexuality in the increasingly technological culture of the last hundred years.

EARLY AUTOMOBILES

It took a few years for the automobile to evolve from a barely motorized buggy owned by a wealthy few to a widely affordable mode of transportation. Although versions of the automobile were introduced in Europe and the United States in the 1890s, it was only through Henry Ford's innovations in mass production that the automobile became widely available to working-class families. The first "surrey" cars in the 1890s lacked tops and had high benchlike seats that were hard and uncomfortable. By adding tops and then windows and heaters, car manufacturers moved toward a more comfortable and impervious interior space with bigger, longer, and more padded seats and upholstered doors. By the 1920s enclosed cars whose interiors could be used as mobile beds were being fitted with running boards and fenders that also served as sites for sexual encounters. Some cars came with matching tents or removable seats that made them ideal for camping, transport of goods and people, or sexual activity. By 1927 more than 15 million Model T Fords had been sold.

AUTOMOBILES AS SITES FOR SEXUAL ENCOUNTERS

As automobiles became more enclosed, blocking passengers from prying eyes and weather, they also become increasingly convenient sites for sexual behavior. As more people could afford to purchase automobiles, cars become increasingly available to younger people as vehicles for dating. Because most young people lived with their parents until marriage, romance was limited to what was publicly permissible. The mobility of the automobile, however, enabled new possibilities for sexual encounters, permitting couples to go where they wanted, providing a new site for sexual encounters away from public places such as the parks, church socials, porches, and living rooms that had previously given courting couples opportunities to get to know one another. Couples could move around together, going from social venues, such as a drive-in restaurant, where they could eat alone together with other automotive couples, to lovers' lanes and other parking spots, where the privacy of darkness and the solitude of the closed car permitted explorations away from the eyes of family members and neighbors.

During the first thirty years of the automobile, roadside culture also evolved to accommodate the automobile and its touring passengers. As automobiles became more numerous and reliable, more people began taking road trips and needed places to stay along the road because a tent was not everyone's idea of desirable accommodations. Roads, which had been poorly built, began to improve to accommodate automobile traffic. Food and lodging industries developed specifically for the needs of the automobile tourist, who often found it inconvenient to park in the environs of midcity hotels. Motor courts and motels emerged along popular automobiling routes and provided another trysting place designed specifically for vehicular access. Although most motor courts provided lodging for travelers, some quickly saw the benefits of hosting the sexually adventurous, renting rooms by the hour and asking few questions.

LEGAL REACTIONS

The increased opportunity for sexual behavior was not without detractors. Lawmakers began defining the kinds of activities permissible in automobiles. Although most lovers' lane activities were tolerated or, at worst, lovers were shooed away by the police, some municipalities passed laws against various degrees of sexual activity in cars, including kissing and masturbating while watching other people have sex in cars. In Clinton, Oklahoma, such self-servicing activities were banned in drive-in movie theaters. Chicago enacted a series of statutes, including one that made the car a "public place," which, taken together, essentially outlawed making love in cars. In Carlsbad, New Mexico, couples having sex in a parked vehicle during lunch hour had to have the curtains drawn. If couples having sex in parked cars in Liberty Corner, New Jersey, accidentally blew the horn, they could be put in jail. In Detroit car sex was banned unless the car was parked on the participants' own property. In Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, police officers who suspected that a car's occupants were engaged in sexual activity had to honk their horns three times and wait for two minutes before investigating. What the presence of such laws indicates is the pervasiveness of sex in cars. Those laws testify to the range of social situations sex in cars has produced.

OTHER ASSOCIATIONS WITH SEXUALITY

Automobiles and the culture of the road are associated with sexual behaviors in other ways as well. Prostitution has become associated with automobiles as one of the prime sites for business. Prospective clients cruise for prostitutes, and prostitutes use particular roads, intersections, truck stops, and rest areas as places to attract customers. As a strategy for curtailing prostitution, municipalities such as Los Angeles began seizing the automobiles of citizens suspected of soliciting prostitutes.

Hitchhiking also has become associated with sexuality as sexual appeal has become a pretext for hitching a ride—a tendency exploited in films such as It Happened One Night (1934)—and especially as it relates to the opportunity for and risk of potentially dangerous sexual encounters. The phrase "hitchhiking to heaven" refers to male masturbation.

Automobiles not only are sites for sexual activity; they also may produce sexual stimulation. In Three Essays on Sexuality (1905), written during the era of trains, the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud noted the way "the shaking produced by driving in carriages and later by railway travel" results in a link "between railway travel and sexuality" produced by the "pleasurable character of the sensations of movement." The same sensation of movement has a sexual connection to the automobile, whose movement and shape, character, and symbolism bespeak sexuality, potency, and allure.

In western culture automobiles long have been thought of as sex symbols both as markers of masculinity and as a marketing strategy. Long, lean, powerful speedy machines became phallic symbols as well as indicators of wealth, style, and sexual prowess. Automobile enthusiasts annually list cars with the greatest sex appeal: Corvettes, Ferraris, Lamborginis, Mustangs, Porsches, and Mazda RX-8's, among others. These cars join more classic expressions of powerful sexiness that often are associated with specifically masculine characters in films, such as James Bond with his Aston Martin DB5 in Goldfinger (1964). Sports cars in particular, with their streamlined speed, have been associated with virility, as have jalopies, racing cars, and other custom vehicles whose power relates to the mechanical aptitude and bravado of their drivers. Films featuring drag races, such as Rebel without a Cause (1954), Le Mans (1971), and Days of Thunder (1990), show the ways in which cars, speed, and machismo have become linked in western culture.

In addition to the sexiness of automobile design, sex is used as a way to market automobiles. The association of sexy cars with sexually alluring women is presumed to attract male customers. Phallic automobiles are caressed by ultra sexy female car show models, and although they may have all but disappeared from television advertisements, women still figure prominently on automobile-theme calendars. Advertising tactics that emphasize sleek auto body lines, class status, power, and performance produce an association between the phallic, masculine characteristics of the automobile and its prospective owner, as does nomenclature such as the "muscle" car. Muscle cars such as Pontiac GTOs, Mustangs, and Camaros are automobiles that have been modified to gain maximum horsepower from the engine. They appear bulky and rumbling and outperform normal cars. The status of the car becomes that of the owner. Males are assumed to have driving skills that match the capabilities of their vehicles, and expert speedy driving is associated with masculinity.

At the same time, women are assumed to be poor drivers. Whereas in many advertisements the automobile is an outward sign of the owner's masculinity, few cars are marketed to women on the basis of intrinsic sex appeal. Instead, cars are advertised to women on the basis of practicality, ease of use, and safety.

Cars have also become symbols of courtship and romance, especially in popular culture. Car radios were invented in 1929 and were sold separately (the resulting combination of movement and sound produced the brand name Motorola). Even before the combination of the car and the radio, pop music about sex and romance was circulating, from early favorites such as Irving Berlin's "Keep Away from the Fellow Who Owns an Automobile" to the Nylons' "Little Red Corvette" and Queen's "I'm in Love with my Car." Sex has been associated with automobiles in films that include It Happened One Night, the jalopy culture of Rebel without a Cause and American Graffiti (1973), and more recently Crash (2004).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Flink, James J. 1988. The Automobile Age. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press.

Freud, Sigmund. 1953–1974. "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality." In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, ed. and trans. James Strachchey. London: Hogarth. (Orig. pub. 1905.)

Michael, Robert T.; John H. Gagnon; Edward O. Laumann; and Gina Kolata. 1994. Sex in America: A Definitive Survey. New York: Warner Books.

Wolf, Winifred. 1996. Car Mania: A Critical History of Transport. trans. Gus Fagan. London: Pluto Press.

                                                       Judith Roof