Our Bodies, Our Bikes

By Elly Blue and April Streeter

An homage to the classic Our Bodies, Ourselves, this encyclopedic, crowd-sourced compilation of essays, resources, information, and advice about the intersection of gender and bicycling covers a lot of ground—bold meditations on body parts, stories about recovery from illness and injury, biking to the birth center, and loud and proud declarations of physical and emotional freedom.Includes accounts of bicycling while pregnant, tips about how to ride fast or what to wear when you need to look professional, stories of cycling with kids, biking with various experiences of gender, age, ability, sexuality, menstruation, chronic illness, an extensive and illuminating article about the vulva and contact with your bike saddle, thoughts about abortion and reproductive rights, and much more.There's something for everyone in here, and something to expand everyone's idea of what's for them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Microcosm Publishing
• Release date: Nov 10, 2015
• ISBN: 9781621063650

Book preview

Table of Contents

Introduction

Knowledge is Power

The Triple Threat — Samantha Brennan

The Bike Test —Elly Blue

Interlude: I See You, Baby — Cecily Walker

Being in Our Bodies

On Your Left—Adrian M. Lipscombe

My Butt — Nickey Robare

Cycling Up an Appetite — Constance Winters

Obesity is a Bogeyman — Heidi Guenin

Interlude: Biking the Transition — Nathan Ezekiel

Safety

The Aha Moment — Echo Rivera

Everything You Want to Know about Biking Safety — Alex Baca and Bec Rindler

Clothes

Pedaling and Professional Attire — Constance Winters

Dress for Success on the Bike — Janet LaFleur

Every Season — Elly Blue

Vulva

How to Make Your Butt Happy — April Streeter

Your Vulva — Elly Blue and Caroline Paquette, RN retired, BSN

The Cuntraption — Adriane Ackerman

Menstruation

Biking and Bleeding — Elly Blue

Sustainable Cycles — Rachel Horn

Hot Stuff

Sex Goddess on Two Wheels — Jaymi Tharp

Why it’s Great to Date a Cyclist — Anonymous

Divorce by Bike — Josie Smith

When a Sexy M.F. Sneaks up on Your February Morning — Rhienna Renée Guedry

Childbearing

Biking to the Birth Center — Katie Proctor

Biking Towards VBAC — Dena Driscoll

After the Fact — Katura Reynolds

Our Bodies, Our Choice

Cycles of Anxiety — Constance Winters

True Story — C.E. Snow

Interlude: Bike Patch — Katie Monroe

Menopause

Aging by Bicycle — Susanne Wright

Biking up to the Pause — Elly Blue interviews Beth Hamon

Interlude: Joining My Son’s World — Kathleen Youell

Sickness and Health

Wheeling — Parisa Emam

You’re Too Pretty to be Disabled — Halley Weaver

Cars Did This to Me — Lisa Sagrati

Every Breath — Jacqueline A. Gross

My Bicycle is my Second Doctor — Beth Hamon

Bike-Ability — Sarah Rebolloso McCullough

The Physical and Mental Victories of Cycling — Kristin Eagle

A License to Bike — Synthia Nicole

Interlude: Clearing My Mind—Chelle D

Sports

Equal Pay for Equal Work — Julie Gourinchas

Ass Nebula — Kirsten Rudberg

How to be Fast — Lindsay Kandra

Secrets of Cycling Superpowers — Emily June Street

Postlude

Contributors

INTRODUCTION

Elly Blue & April Streeter

Why this book?

Here in the United States, we are in the midst of a massive, ongoing public health crisis, with impacts both personal and political. Increasingly, people are taking to two wheels in response. We are using bicycles, bike infrastructure, and pedal-powered community movements as a sort of thread to stitch up the broken parts of our lives, landscapes, and communities.

Of course, as bicycling grows into a national pastime and an increasingly mainstream mode of transportation, the same debates and narratives are turning up in bike communities as are raging in other places—about race, and class, and, of course, gender.

Meanwhile, we are also in the middle of what often feels like a national family dinner table argument about women’s rights and the role and meaning of gender in our society and economy. Who should do what work, at home and for pay? Who should be responsible for children? How should a person’s decision to have children—or not to do so—affect the other aspects of their lives? The banter often gets silly, but the consequences are very heavy.

On the surface, gender issues have nothing to do with the discourse about cycling (it’s great for your health, the economy, and the planet!) that we are used to hearing. But on a deeper level, every aspect of the battle over gender roles and women’s self-determination is deeply ingrained in how we physically navigate the landscapes around us, and what those landscapes look like. In many places, our choices are constrained—without access to a car, we can become trapped in the home. But by using our limited resources on a car, we become trapped in increasingly deep poverty. Without access to reproductive choices, we are trapped with the de facto consequences of that lack of choice.

Meanwhile, the bicycle offers freedom. Damaged as our communities and bodies may be by the world that has been built around us, on a bicycle we can bridge the distances between physical places and break the limits we have set on ourselves. The bicycle is not for everyone, and it is not a solution in itself; but it is undeniably one of the most powerful tools we have available for our liberation.

Who is this book for? Everyone. Most books about bicycling happen to be written by, for, and about men, even if that isn’t explicitly spelled out in the marketing materials, but that does not stop many women from reading them, and we aim to be no less inclusive. Most of our contributors identify as women, and the writing and art here describes our lives, our expertise, and the many things you too might experience or want to know about that you simply won’t find in other books or articles or even casual conversations about cycling. We aim to shift the tacit assumption that men are the experts, the audience, and the standard when it comes to cycling or anything else. And with that, we hope to help budge the idea that we must be defined by anyone else’s ideas about what anybody’s gender or our anatomy and reproductive capabilities mean.

We put together this book as a guide to some of the ways people use and think about bicycles as they relate to gender. We invited diverse perspectives and aimed to cover a lot of ground. Such a book could never be complete, and there are many gaps here that we hope you will be inspired to fill in with your own words and ideas. We hope that we have provided enough of an array that every reader will find something of practical use, something thought provoking and perhaps disturbing, and something to make you cheer.

We hope that you enjoy the ride.

A well-known riding teacher says that most of his women pupils take their first lessons in skirts on a woman’s wheel. They go out on the road this way from three to ten times. They then come back to him in bloomers, learn to mount and dismount from a man’s wheel, which is a great deal harder than the other way, and never again can be induced to ride a woman’s wheel.

Girls who ride for pleasure like to ride with men, of course, and the only way to do it is to keep the pace they set. It cannot be done in skirts on a woman’s wheel, and a man, even a polite escort, cannot be expected to ride slow forever, and so it happens that men’s wheels grow more popular with women every day, and after awhile when people stop talking about it and the small boys stop hooting it will all be very charming and agreeable.

-San Francisco Chronicle, May 19, 1895

It’s easy in any kind of conversation about gender—or any other sort of identity—to become overwhelmed by everything that is wrong: the microaggressions, the biases, the iniquities, the violence. As our eyes open and our brains wrap themselves around a new way of seeing that means judging things we used to take for granted. For a time, it’s all we can see. Yet it’s just as important to be able to see the other side of the coin: The forward thinking, the brilliantly disruptive, the visionary… and the opportunities around us to create something new, and to use what we know to make that new world better.

Critique is vital. And knowledge is power. But power also means being able to imagine a different world and to share that vision with others. If all we can see and share are the wrongs we’re subject to, that can become as ultimately disempowering as not acknowledging them at all.

By all means, see what’s wrong and say it loud. But don’t forget to use that knowledge, however terrible, to give yourself a chance of something better, and to lead your community that way, too.

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THE TRIPLE THREAT: SEXUAL PLEASURE, WOMEN, AND BIKE SEATS, FROM THE 1890S TO TODAY

Samantha Brennan

What do cycling and philosophy have in common?

It’s a rather sad fact that two activities that make up a big part of my identity are heavily male dominated. It’s not just a numbers thing. It’s also that normative ideals of the cyclist and the philosopher are both gendered male in ways that make it hard for women to fit in and to count as philosophers and as cyclists. I’m interested in the historical connection between women, bicycles, and feminism—but my focus is really on the worry that women’s bodies are unsuitable for riding, an attitude that formed part of the backlash to early feminism and one that I think carries forward today.

As the women’s movement and the women’s cycling movement gained traction, setting the New Woman on her course, there was considerable opposition to women’s riding. Clearly, cycling was unladylike. There are many published speeches by clergy against the spectacle posed by women on bikes. Other clergy worried that access to transportation would make it easier for women to give into our baser natures and undertake morally loathsome activities, including prostitution and infidelity. I love the idea that women’s sexuality is so wild and so corrupt that only lack of reliable transportation keeps us chaste and faithful. My favorite clergy quote, however, admits that cycling isn’t always a bad thing: The mere act of riding a bicycle is not in itself sinful and if it is the only means of reaching the church on a Sunday, it may be excusable. (1885)

Much more interesting from a philosophical point of view is the medical condemnation of women’s cycling. Many physicians held that women’s bodies simply weren’t suited to cycling. The bicycle was a sure path to sexual depravity (given the motion of the bike and the proximity of the seat to women’s genitals) and infertility (given the shaking the womb obviously endures while riding a bike). Also, our weaker natures made us prone to exhaustion. In The hidden dangers of cycling, A. Shadwell, M.D, (1897) advised women against attempting a novel and peculiar experiment with their precious persons. He wrote that the risks of cycling include internal inflammation, exhaustion, bicycle face, appendicitis, dysentery, and nervous attacks.

One of the most striking things in the history of women’s cycling is the terror of female masturbation associated with the shape and position of the bicycle seat. It’s worse than the dreaded bicycle face, and worse than the fear that bicycling would make women prone to infidelity and prostitution.

Here’s a passage from Peter Zheutlin’s article,Women on Wheels: The Bicycle and the Women’s Movement of the 1890s, that presents the general problem quite clearly:

That bike riding might be sexually stimulating for women was also a real concern to many in the 1890s. It was thought that straddling a saddle combined with the motion required to propel a bicycle would lead to arousal. So-called ‘hygienic’ saddles began to appear, saddles with little or no padding where a woman’s genitalia would ordinarily make contact with the seat. High stems and upright handlebars, as opposed to the more aggressively positioned ‘drop’ handlebars, also were thought to reduce the risk of female sexual stimulation by reducing the angle at which a woman would be forced to ride.

In Reframing the Bicycle: Advertising-Supported Magazines and Scorching Women, Ellen Gruber Garvey (American Quarterly) writes that both critics and advocates of women’s cycling used medical arguments related to women’s sexuality and reproduction. Anti-bicyclists claimed that riding would ruin women’s sexual health by promoting masturbation, while pro-bicyclers asserted that bicycling would strengthen women’s bodies and make them more fit for motherhood.

Garvey is struck, like me, with the amount of ink that was spilt on this particular problem and the amount of detail regarding masturbation and evidence of masturbation that the doctors describe. It’s not just the seat itself that’s at issue. Doctors were also obsessively concerned with rider position. The same position