I realise that this sounds may sound somewhat creepy – at least that’s what my friends thought when I told them – but in this instance it wasn’t really. At no point did I feel intimidated. The conversation went something like this:

– You are a very nice lady.
– Oh thank you.
– Can I come in? I would very much like to make love to a nice lady like you.
– Um er, no thank you.
– You sure? I am alone. You are also alone tonight.
– Yes. Sorry. How much is the fare?
– It’s 12.17. You can give me 10.
– Here you are.
– Good night.
– Good night.

I got out of the car and went inside, said hello to my housemates and the dog, then went to bed. Alone. No problem.
Not everyone will be aware of this, but catching a taxi can be a fraught experience for a woman by herself. There seems to be a real issue in the UK, where young women are cautioned never to catch a minicab by themselves or to be the last passenger in a large group heading home. Apparently, it is too risky.
Luckily, things aren’t quite so bad here although there are enough news stories and anecdotes to make you wonder how safe it really is. My friend had a particularly frightening encounter when a driver actually tried to sexually assault her. Luckily, she managed to push him off and get away, before any real harm was done.
One evening my cabbie frightened me so much that when he pulled up to an intersection I bailed out of the car and did a runner. I did throw some money at him, on the off chance that I was wrong – which I admit is possible.
He hadn’t said or done anything you could put your finger on, but the way he was staring at me in the rear view mirror was incredibly intimidating. I had never seen anyone look at me with so much hatred – and I’m pretty fugging hateable on occasion (Ah, no, not really – I’m a delight to be with. Honestly!).
While most of the time I manage to get home without incident, there have been a few occasions when the driver has suggested he’d be open to having the fare paid in favours instead of euros. Cash ain’t always king apparently as several of my female friends, and a few of the men, have had similar offers.
This is unnerving and more than a little insulting. I’d like to think that if I was selling sex I could charge more than the cost of a 15-minute car ride. Thankfully, the wonderfully generous offer of sex for transport hasn’t been made for a while. What with the recession and the record number of taxis on the road, money is probably preferable to a blowjob these days.
While being asked for sexual favours isn’t exactly delightful, being assaulted is a whole different world. Last month a taxi driver in Limerick was found guilty of assaulting a passenger who had fallen asleep in his car. The girl, a student of nineteen, woke up to find the driver was touching her. She asked him to stop and according to her testimony he did so.
The driver, however, claimed that the girl pulled out a condom and asked him to “make sex” with him. “I think maybe she is not a good girl,” he said, but the jury didn’t buy it.
Obviously I am not commenting on this case. But it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that as woman might make demands.
In a recent story a Romanian cab driver claimed that a passenger pulled a knife on him and forced him to have sex with her. The woman, a sort of bargain basement Angelina Jolie lookalike, was not satisfied and demanded more. When he didn’t comply, she stabbed
him repeatedly.
If the story is true then this, of course, is straightforward assault with sexual intent and should be seen as such. It is no joke. However, because the woman in question was young and attractive, the driver has been turned into a laughing stock. “They don’t understand why I refused her, but they do not know what it is like to have a mad woman yelling at you at knife point,” he said.
Most women do not resort to violence, but that doesn’t mean we never make men uncomfortable. One night as I jumped into a cab, the driver quizzed me on how much I’d had to drink. Not much as it turned out, but he wanted to make sure. He’d just had a run-in with a drunk girl who had tried to seduce him instead of paying and since I was travelling alone, he didn’t fancy
a repeat.
In fairness, the driver was particularly good looking. If you’d had one too many or suffered from night blindness you’d have been forgiven for thinking you were being ferried around by Jake Gyllenhaal, and that could cause even the most well-behaved woman to lose the run of herself.
Unfortunately for Dublin’s lusty ladies, the gorgeous cabbie was spoken for. He was recently married, he explained, and happily so. “Drunk women are the worst,” he complained. “I’d prefer a drunk lad any day.”
Between passing out and peeing on the seats – all-too-regular occurrences, he grumbled – the ladies frequently looked for discounts in exchange for flashing the flesh. One woman, he told me, had recently had her breasts enlarged and pulled off her shirt to give him an eyeful, much to the mortification of her friend.
A woman I used to work with would regularly ask for discounts if she showed a bit of thigh or a boob. According to her, this almost always worked and, since she lived far away from the city centre, had saved her a fortune over the years. I’ve never tried this, but then my boobs are on the small side, and if the discount is proportional to the amount of flesh on display, then I doubt I’d garner much in the way
of savings.
The funny thing is that the idea of having sex with a hot strange cabbie does hold a certain amount of appeal for me. Actually, scratch that, it must have a lot of appeal, since I have dreamt about it more than once.
The reality, however, was curiously passionless and bizarrely polite. Honestly, it was almost as if we were discussing tea.
– Fancy a cuppa?
– Nah, you’re grand
– Sure?
– I am.
– Right so, good night.
In fact, I felt a little sorry for the man, who struck me as someone who was sad and lonely and certainly not a predator. It wasn’t frightening, which is obviously a good thing – but it sure as hell wasn’t sexy either.