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The ethos of our car culture has always centered around that most American of obsessions; Freedom. For the longest time, I thought car=freedom, even when my own eyes told me the exact opposite.

Think ‘50s greaser teen with the wind in his (and it’s always a him) hair on a once-in-a-lifetime road trip, or parked on a Lover’s Lane making memories with his best gal. But friends, I’m about to blow your minds: The car has actually made us all less free, including the men, but especially women, minorities and the disabled.

I want to take you all the way back to the 1920s when mass automotive adoption was just starting to pick up. More cars on the road began to equal more and more cops. Even today, the majority of police interactions most people will experience involve some sort of traffic stop. The rise of the car can be directly linked with the rise of the police state in general and the curtailing of our freedoms, as Sarah Seo argues in her book Policing The Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom. As public roads became the playground of more powerful and dangerous vehicles America needed more laws and more police to handle these new motorists. Even being outside of a car on the road became a crime as car ownership exploded. The term Jay-Walking was coined to describe humans just trying to navigate busy roads.

But even culturally, the car only ever meant freedom for men. For young women, their place was perpetually in the driver’s seat. Young men were always assumed to be the driver and that meant these boys had full control of interactions with the opposite gender. From staying out past curfew to “parking” for trysts to full-on sexual assault, the car was a dangerous place for a young woman and could lead to her “goodness” being questioned by the community.

For married women, the car was always just a tool to fit in more chores, especially when families began moving to the suburbs en masse. A car was needed to do the grocery shopping, fetch children from school, go to the dry cleaners, etc. It was such a tedious tool that Betty Friedan, the ground-breaking feminist and author of the Feminine Mystique, sent her children to school in a taxi in order to find more time to work.

And while owning a car could mean freedom for a Black person to find more equitable work or housing, the car also became the focus of intense police interactions with Black people—a situation that continues to this day with tragic consequences.

Nowadays we’re all in the driver’s seat, because we’ve built our culture and communities around the car. There’s no freedom not to own a car if you want to engage in any aspect of public life in many communities. Public transit has degraded in American cities and suburbs to almost non-existent in some places, stifling options for elderly, disabled and people too poor to afford all the taxes, fees, occasional parking or speeding tickets, payments and insurance it takes to keep a car on the road.

That’s another way cars make us less free: tickets from traffic stops or moving violations can drain a person’s bank account with fines and fees for years. Hell, when I applied for a mortgage seven years ago the lender brought up a speeding ticket I’d gotten three years previously. I got a worse rate on my homeowners insurance because of that, even though I average a speeding ticket maybe every five years or so.

None of these factors are the fault of cars, but rather the toxic culture around cars. I love cars. I really do. I just resent being forced to own one for most everyday functions.