A Saudi Prince Says Women Should Finally Be Allowed To Drive

Dillon Cheverere8 years ago

Buckle up, Saudis. If this prince gets his way, and I think princes usually do in countries like Saudi Arabia, women could be behind the wheel soon for the first time in the country’s history. A really small publication called TIME Magazine that I once wrote for has the story.

A member of the Saudi royal family has broken with long-established tradition and called for the country to allow women to drive.

Prince Alwaleed bin Talal posted a letter Tuesday titled “It is High Time that Saudi Women Started Driving their Cars,” to his Twitter account. Saudi Arabia is the only country where women are not permitted to drive.

“Preventing a woman from driving a car today is an issue of rights similar to the one that forbade her from receiving an education or having an independent identity,” he wrote.

Prince Alwaleed bin Talal’s tweet is below. First of all, the format of this tweet has my mind in a billion pieces but we’ll talk about that later.

I didn’t realize this was the only country left on the planet that didn’t allow women behind the wheel. Granted, I don’t know the ins and outs of every middle eastern nation, but I assumed women couldn’t do all kinds of stuff over there, driving definitely included. Imagine a country with only male drivers on the road. Just weird.

Okay so there are over 32 milly people in Saudi Arabia. That’s roughly 16 million females. The legal driving age there is 18 for cars (only 16 for motorcycles for some reason). Let’s ballpark it and say 12 million Saudi women will suddenly become eligible to drive cars. Yikes. We make jokes but real talk I’m staying off the roads for a solid decade until they’re up to speed. It’s not because they’re women; it’s because they’re women who have literally never operated a motor vehicle before. The learning curve, man. Think about it.

Okay, back to the tweet that’s freaking me out. The right alignment. What. I guess you read Arabic from right to left and that’s cool or whatever, but Twitter has a right-align option? Uh, where? Who knew? I want to right align my tweets so bad starting right now. Will tells me that it’s because everything is backwards on the other side of the world, just like how toilets flush the opposite way in Australia and shit. I don’t know how but he’s exactly right.

But then also he has a mix of Arabic and English in the same tweet, and the first link is in English but it takes you to a webpage written in Arabic? Ugh I’ll be thinking about this tweet all day..

[via TIME]