this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2025
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You clearly don't know many fairly well-off (or aspirationally well-off) women / mothers, if this is surprising to you.
Its not a theory. Its... many of them will just tell you that, verbatim, if you ask them.
"I just don't feel safe in a smaller car."
Its a primary component of the marketing angle the US entire auto industry has been using to market to 'the affluent careerist modern woman' / 'responsible and practical mom' for ... two decades now?
Big car = You are safe.
(and stylish or powerful or practical or eco-conscious or rugged or w/e other adjective)
For moms, an SUV is a minivan from the 90s, but with more style and performance.
For yuppie women, an SUV is a luxury sedan or coupe, but tank-sized, more authority commanding, more intimidating.
(Modern US SUVs are routinely as large or larger than actual M4 Sherman tanks from WW2, sans cannon barrel, if you go by volume, 'bounding box')
... I'm surprised that you're surprised by this.
With women truck drivers, I can understand that somewhat more, as you apparently just don't know too many white trash women, who are disproportionately Republican.
Makes sense here on lemmy.
For the entire MAGA type of people, well, trucks are real cars, everything else is "gay" or at least not as strong, or capable.
... even though that hardly ever actually is the case in any kind of practical or realistic terms.
Its all marketing, all appealing to the consumer, in ways said consumer both does and does not realize they are being appealed to.
It's all about how buying, "owning", and operating some kind of vehicle makes you feel, and what your exact choice, what message you think that sends to other people.
Here, I found this after writing my first section, and its almost verbatim what I said:
https://agirlsguidetocars.com/women-driving-suv-sales
Yeah that's from 2016.
This has just been how SUV marketing in particular has worked basically since I got out of high school. almost 20 years ago now.
kinda wild how weaponized psychology is, and everyone kind of thinks they're immune to it themselves till one day it smacks em in the face
What do you think psych majors do when they want to make a lot of money?
They go into marketing.
Marketing is literally just the corporate wing of "you are not immune to propoganda."
Modern, psychology based propoganda techniques were originally pioneered for marketing purposes, then later adapted to politics.
Look up Freud's nephew, Eddie Bernays (sp?), and how he basically co-opted the Suffragette movement in the US to establish cigarettes as 'Torches of Freedom', thus making it hip, rebellious, and progressive for women to smoke, where previously this was largely seen as unwomanly behavior.
Net result?
Tobacco companies now have a whole new market demo to play with, sell to.
... Corporations have had over 100 years of practice at this, and now, they have an actually unimaginable amount of data, from our social media-ized digital age to become exceedingly efficient at pushing what they want.
You think its an accident that various content 'pipelines' exist on video platforms?
That corpo social media in general promotes anger and division in the general populace?
That shortform video social media actually does rot your brain, cause an actual biological addiction, destroy your attention span and ability to focus?
No. They know it does all these things, in astounding detail, with incredible levels of statistical certainty. Tiktok and Facebook definitely have been sued for knowing that they are doing this, ... their whole marketing business model based on statistical profiling models requires them to know this, theres no way they could have the data and algos they do and not know this.
They're engineering consumers' brains into what they want, what they can make money selling to.
We basically already live in the Matrix: It's called omnipresent advertising.
oh trust me, i know it. adhd/autism combo...ads crafted over centuries to grab your attention are pretty much impossible for me to ignore and i hate it
Well then, I guess you would agree with me that We Are Not Their Kind Of People.