Joe Schmo
Tracy Mendham
English 101
9 September 2006
Driving a Point Home: Meadow Soprano Vs. the Snow Queen
Growing up, I often heard jokes about lady drivers; probably everybody in our culture
does. Although I have two sisters (now eight years old and sixteen). I never thought much about
them until I heard someone making fun of a woman driver in front of my little sister when she
was fourteen. I knew she was just a year away from driver’s ed classes and two years away from
legal driving age. I wondered if these kinds of jokes would affect her self-image and maybe
make her less confident in her own abilities.
Could these kinds of jokes even cause accidents? I wondered. Wouldn’t a nervous driver
be more likely to be distracted and maybe not respond as well to challenging conditions? And
how could you not be nervous if you’d heard time and time again that your whole gender had a
reputation as less-than-competent operators of motor vehicles? Maybe none of these things
would hurt my sister’s feelings or future abilities; still, I just wished she didn’t have to hear these
jokes, just in case. It became a bit of an issue for me. I bugged my family and friends not to
make these jokes. People thought I was a bit of a wet blanket, but they did tone it down around
me and I hope that thought twice before making those jokes in front of Donna even if I wasn’t
there.
I couldn’t do anything about what Donna heard on television, though. The more I started
listening for these kinds of messages, the more I seemed to hear on the shows we watched at
night. It’s no surprise to see this on sit-coms, but even shows that seem to be a bit more
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sophisticated often convey the same damaging image, if more subtly. I was recently watching an
old episode of The Sopranos, the men all seemed to be competent drivers, even under duress, but
the one time we see a woman drive, it is young Meadow Soprano, stealing her boyfriend’s car
keys on a tipsy whim and then driving it right into a ditch. (“Save Us All.”) She then throws
herself sobbing into Jackie Junior’s arms. Jackie and his friends, however, seem to arrive at and
escape even their most ill-conceived, crank-induced heists without accident. I came to believe
then—and still hold—that television exerted a negative force on the self-esteem of girls.
Since I couldn’t prevent woman driver jokes, I had to think about how I could counteract
them. One weekend I was had to baby sit and I was reading to my littlest sister, Donna, the fairy
tales she liked so much. I was reading her “The Snow Queen” (Anderson 46-50). In the story, a
