Curate, connect, and discover
At the beginning of the first cars movie, a pair of lightning mcqueen superfan miatas flash their headlights at lightning. When they do this, the implication is that they are flashing their tits at mcqueen, a joke aimed at the adults watching the movie with their children. While the moment is brief and no more than a throwaway gag, it provokes many questions for me inregaurds to gender and sexuality in the cars universe. It is scandalous for these cars to show their headlights, to choose immodesty blatantly. For many of the other cars, however, their headlights are always out, and their blatant immodesty is normal and expected. These cars with no covering for their headlights are allowed to be immodest in a way a car through no fault of their own cannot. By the nature of their birth, blinky light cars are forced to conform to a set of morals and modesty that those around them do not. This makes me think of the difference in treatment of men’s tits versus women’s tits. Men can walk around shirtless all they want with no repercussions. It is normal and expected for men to go full frontal at the beach or pool in a way that would be shocking and illegal for women. If anything, efforts to cover men’s tits will be seen as more immodest and more taboo than it is not to cover them. This matches the cars that do not have blinky headlights in the world of cars. In this logic, cars without winky headlights are men, and those with them are women. Women are expected and forced to coverup their boobs because of their average relative size compared to men and social conditioning that sexualizes women’s tits over men’s. Like the cars with headlights that can be hidden, the fat deposits granted to cis women at birth cause them to be othered by the other halfish of society. Women have more there than men most of the time and are motivated to cover up. If you got DDD boobs you’re gonna to want to support them, and consequently cover them. This natural feature of a person leads to them being naturally drawn to a place of modesty. On the winky eye cars, their natural state draws them towards modesty as, at rest, their headlights are closed. While they might not always want their headlights out, likely women don’t always want their tits out, headlights are still an important bodily function for these cars. Do these cars face oppression for their natural traits like women do in our society? If these cars are driving at night, is there the risk that those around them will be distracted by the usage of a stigmatized and sexualized part the same way we stigmatize breastfeeding mothers?