Is car-jacking a gender issue?

In the Grand Theft Auto video game, one of the many modes of transport is freely available in most parts of the game space - cars (obviously, if you are swimming around in the water then there are fewer cars, but...). Getting a car is very straight forward - you stand in front of a car, or approach one stopped at traffic lights, open the door and pull the driver out, then take their place and drive off. And so car-jacking just gets added to the list of crimes that you can carry out in this game ...

What's curious is that the ease of car-jacking in GTA seems to be spreading into the real world -well, at least, the unreal world of music videos. In the recent Robbie Williams 'Bodies' single release that starts off with a brilliant dance bass-line (via Trevor Horn, no less) and then goes in a different direction (balladic, no less), there's a scene where a woman with sunglasses turns up in a beach buggy (aka a dune buggy) and slows down to a stop, seemingly to offer the strolling Robbie a lift. In a striking piece of editing, one minute the woman is smiling at Robbie from the driver's seat, the next moment Robbie has vaulted in and is driving the beach buggy with the woman with sunglasses magically transported to the passenger seat. It happens so fast and so smoothly that I had to watch it again to make sure I was seeing things correctly. Magic!

(check your eyes here)

Now, I'm rather unfamiliar with the type of lift offering where the person you offer the lift to then drives the car, but it seems rather peculiar to me, especially when the woman continues to smile throughout as if giving your car to a perfect stranger was the most natural thing in the world. Of course, I'm sure that Robbie's PR people have a perfectly reasonable back-story that explains why this is totally explainable and not how it might appear, but then I'm sure that the Rockstar Games PR people have equally good explanations for the 'car-loan' scheme alternative that occurs in GTA as well.

It's a good thing that video games and music videos are not meant to accurately represent the real world, where people of both genders can drive cars without their major concern being the fear of someone arbitrarily taking over the task without warning. The truly remarkable thing is the title of the album from which the music video track is taken: Reality Killed the Video Star. In this case, the reality seems curiously lacking for one video star...

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