The Minority Report | Ashley Kim

Last week, I had something happen to me that’s never happened to me before. My headlight went out. The experience I had was a humbling one.

Ever since I have moved out and been “on my own”—whatever that means in college—I’ve been able to lean on my dad or my brother to help me with anything that had to do with my car or fixing something—an outrightly unfeminist thing to do, if you ask me.

Anyway, the point is I had to change my headlight by myself. I went to a local auto parts store and hoping I could figure it out on my own, I tackled the “LIGHTING” section. A man approached me asking what I was looking for because he assumed I was confused, even though I was certain I didn’t need no man to help me. I told him what car I drive, and after asking me a few questions that he further mansplained to me as I asked him to clarify, he gave me the right bulb. Or, so I thought.

My friend and I spent an hour watching and following YouTube tutorials on how to change my headlight. Upon dismantling the entire headlight from my car (because that’s what YouTube said to do), we discovered I had the wrong bulb. We couldn’t get the headlight back into my car for such a long time that I had lost all hope of it happening at all. I called my dad, which I promised myself I wouldn’t do since he had doomed me to this destiny. Shame on him.

Anyway, I called him. He asked me why my friend—a man—wasn’t able to fix my headlight. “He doesn’t know how to do it and he’s a guy?” were his exact words.

This coupled with the man at the store (who I was supposed to trust because he’s a man working at an auto parts store) greatly irritated me.

I was knocked off my feminist high horse thinking that most people in my life felt the same way as me when it comes to equality and that I would encounter less mansplanations in public because, hey, maybe the world is progressing since nothing has been mansplained to me in at least four days—a new record!

I eventually was able to change my headlight on my own. And I did it in a dress and knee-high boots, which I think means I’m a real woman now, or something.