It’s been a while since I’ve checked out secondhand car adverts (Mototrader was the shit whenever I was bored while visiting my cousin’s home) but there was one thing which has bugged me till today. While browsing through the adverts for nice cars (a kid could always dream, right?) I noticed that there were quite a number of ads with the text ‘lady owner’ in the description. However, it seemed to have no correlation with the price of the car and it was found on all sorts of cars.
There was no explanation to what ‘lady owner’ meant, and depending on who was reading it, the vague description would have different meanings. Think about it for a moment.
‘Lady owner’ can be a positive, negative or neutral statement. If it was neutral, it was a waste of space – since those ads were charged by words/letters. If it was negative, why bother putting it? I mean, there are negative descriptions like ‘minor accident’ which affect the price of the car or insurance cost but ‘lady owner’ seemed to have no effect on the car’s value.
So it has to be a positive statement. Right? But if it was positive, what is a prospective buyer supposed to infer from that description?
Because it is owned by a lady, the car is kept in good condition? Or it doesn’t have many miles because ladies don’t drive as much as men? Or that it comes with pink fluffy dice hanging from the rear view mirror?
No. Because men do those things too.
And while I know more men than women who care about their cars, I feel that it has nothing to do with their gender. I’m a guy who doesn’t care that much about cars. I just keep mine in running condition through regular servicing and as long as it gets me from point A to B, that’s good enough for me. Oh, and I have a bunch of soft toys hanging from my rear view mirror.
There are men and women who are interested/disinterested in cars out there – it’s a person, not a gender thing.
So what does ‘lady owner’ imply? Beats me. I think ‘expert/careful driver/owner’ would probably be a better description.