Quote:
Originally Posted by Vindicator3
I'm not sure where some of these stereotypes came from. I do associate Subarus with lesbians, kayak owners, and people who live in the mountains/snow. I don't associate Subarus with ugly people, bad or aggressive drivers, or any of the other stuff mentioned. And of course there are millions of other people who own them who don't fit any of these (I have a good-looking straight male non-kayak owning colleague who hauls his kids around in one, my step-mother drove one for a decade or so, etc). My daughter drives one, too, but lives in the mountains and will probably own a kayak soon enough.
All of that is for non-WRX Subis. The WRX stereotype to me is a young male who likes to mod his car and drive too fast, similar to Civic type S and other performance versions of small Japanese cars.
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People are weird and have an innate need to categorize and compartmentalize everything. Thus it's easier to say that Italians are loud, Jews are cheap, Mexicans are lazy, etc. than to acknowledge the nuance that while some people in those groups might exhibit those characteristics, it's not all people. Or even most or many. The truth, of course, is that people are more-or-less the same regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality, etc. While there may be certain mores that are prevalent in different cultures, at the end of the day we're all pretty much motivated and subject to the same base human emotions and tendencies. Stereotypes are just a lazy way of ignoring all that nuance and are fed by confirmation bias – when someone meets a loud Italian, regardless of how many not-so-loud Italians they've met, it just reinforces the stereotype. It's human nature, always has been, and probably won't ever change. This stuff just gets injected into the zeitgeist and is hard to ever get back out.
But yeah, for every Subaru with a kayak on top of it there's a dozen without one, for every inexpensive Japanese car with a huge wing on it there's a dozen without one, etc. But for whatever reason we tend to notice the ones that reinforce our preconceived notions. Not to mention how popular culture reinforces them as well. Like I said, people are weird.