"Truth is, on long trip dates, women never help when driving (some even claim they cannot read maps, empowered in passive aggressivness but have a right to be blind and stupid)"
Not always true. My wife does a lot of the driving, most of the daylight driving in fact. Doesn't see to well at night so I do that. She can also read a map fairly well.
The problem with her navigation is that she has absolutely no concept of compass directions. If you told her the Sun rose in the East, there's no way she could locate a rising Sun. Every thing is right or left, no East or West.
Some studies have indicated that women and men perceive directions differently. Between 2/3 or 3/4 of women always give directions using left/right terminology. Men are about a mirror image with similar ratios always giving directions using North/East/South/West terminology. I don't know if this is hard wired since there was a correlation between city and country dwellers with city dwellers tending more, regardless of sex, to use the right/left terminology and country dwellers, also regardless of sex, tending to use the compass direction terminology.
I suspect this may also have something to do with women stopping more frequently to ask directions too.
I generally give directions using compass points. Right and left are fine sometimes, but you can't assume that the person you're giving directions to are coming from the same perceptual place as you are.
I think you've got to figure in topography as well. In a flat area of the country, it's easy to locate east or west because roads are generally laid out that way, on a square.
Come to a hilly area where roads wind around hills and valleys and what exactly is north or east at a given intersection is not always as easy to figure out.
There is a section of Interstate in rural Virginia that is I-77 south and I-81 north simultaneously.
Try to figure that one out with your cave man reckoning!
SD
Somehow I always seem to be the "magnet" for strangers asking the "locals" for directions. Seems to happen to me at least once a month. Maybe I give off some sort of "compass" magnetism? :-)
In regards to the directions syntax thing-ie ;-), I give directions like so:
Take a right at such-and-such street, going south. Take a left going east at blankety-blank corner. Usually I throw in a couple of landmark building or business names along the way too :-).
Incidedntally, the bromide about some men not wanting to ask for directions is not about orientations. It is the man's reluctance to involve himself in relations of potential dependence. This relates back to the male predilection for the objective rather than the subjective and immediate [if you are dependent on someone else "saying" or providpng orientation, you are still dependent and hence just as lost or immediate as before.]
But this is a trait that varies and some men have no problem asking the "opinions" of others as to orientation, because the man himself remains the judge as to who can be trusted, among other evidences, and so this still amounts to a preference for the objective.