if you're able-bodied enough to ride a bike and otherwise have trouble understanding, from a visceral perspective, the terminology of feminist and antioppression discourse, i have a concrete recommendation: ride a bicycle as your primary means of transportation in a city where this is not the norm.
i don't claim this is a way to automatically transport the experiences of others into your head, and obviously like all analogies it's imperfect, possibly even treading on "oppression tourism" territory, but as a set of concrete experiences to discuss, i think it can help establish some common ground for the sake of getting basic terminology. by way of example, i give the following glossary.
marginalization: when riding a bike you are literally pushed to the margins of the road. if you assert yourself and drive in the middle of the lane, you are constantly put on the defensive and have to ward off motorists challenging your audacity to be there -- even when in fact it's completely legal and the place where you are safest.
victim blaming: people will constantly question your decision to go out, saying "it's too dangerous" and concluding that therefore you just shouldn't do it; anyone who does is taking an unnecessary risk, and if they get hurt, they "should have known better." what you wear (helmet? light/reflective clothing?) will get you further blamed in the case of a traumatizing accident.
[white/male]-as-default, [hetero/cis]normativity: by analogy, car-as-default. if feminism is "the radical idea that women are people," bike advocacy is "the radical idea that bicycles are means of transport." underlying assumptions in personal conversation, marketing, business planning, and urban planning, frequently make the assumption that "transportation = car", and you'll find yourself repeatedly having to think (or say) "hey, what about me?" furthermore, the fact that personal motorized vehicles are the default thing-for-going-on-roads in cities is more historical accident than the "natural" order of things.
microagression: one or two little things that happen (someone honking or yelling at you, someone passing too close or cutting you off) might be shakeable, but if you keep this activity up and endure it constantly, day after day, i guarantee it will wear on you. the person you wind up snapping at might not have even been the most egregious instance, and they may come away with the impression that cyclists are irrationally aggressive people -- because they don't have the context of every other tiny aggression you encountered across the history of your riding, making you constantly defensive and volatile.
intersectionality: it's entirely too easy to think that the issues you have a window onto as a cyclist only pertain to cyclists. and then you start catching yourself doing the same shit to pedestrians (turning in front of them, not stopping at stop signs) that you're upset when drivers do to you, and you start hearing about cyclists being dicks to other cyclists and pedestrians, or you hear a cyclist wonder why everyone doesn't just ride a bike (including the poor, elderly, and disabled?) and you (hopefully!) start to realize that getting around the city sucks for a lot of people and is a way bigger problem than just your subjective view. this is related to the idea that a workable feminism necessarily incorporates all axes of systematic oppression, not just those that incongruently affect women.
on the flip side of all this, for me personally, the bicycle has been a hugely, astoundingly critical component of my own sense of autonomy and independence. i mean, okay, in some ways it still represents a dependence, but it's a dependence on something i own and control, rather than a dependence on male friends to wait with me at bus stops at night or on someone to give me a ride home -- in other words, having my location be subject to the whims of unreliable external factors. i don't have a sense for how this would compare to just owning a car, but honestly i think it would still win, because of the increased flexibility (ability to stop on a whim, don't have to hunt as hard for parking, can go on trails, gives access to open air/adrenaline from exercise, etc).
in that sense, i think it's an incredible instrument of feminism, and certainly of my own happiness.
no subject
Date: 2013-05-24 10:58 pm (UTC)From:There is another side to this that, perhaps, you are not considering.
In the event of a slight bump between two cars, then there might be some minor fender damage, and some yelling, but no real harm. If, on the other hand, a car slightly bumps a person on a bicycle, the potential damage is catastrophic. Take that fact, and now combine it with the fact that bicyles are unquestionably of lower visibility than another car.
Most drivers have years or decades of experience in watching cars with unconscious acuity, and being able to track them without even realizing it via their peripheral vision. All of those skills go out the window when they are confronted with a bicycle on the road, and the need to constantly make conscious checks on the bicyclist generates stressors and tension that otherwise wouldn’t be there.
On top of those factors, there’s the simple reality that being behind a bicyclist is inconventient and makes every trip more time consuming. Both uphill and downhill, a person on a bicycle can’t move with the same surety, confidence, saftey, and speed of an automobile.
All of this means that the person on the bicylce, if we’re taking the same kind of reasoning and analogy that you’re applying, is being the true oppressor… they’re adopting a lifestyle choice that is actively forcing changes in behavior on everyone around them, forcing everyone else to adjust their pattern to accommodate the bike rider.
Now, I don’t ACTUALLY resent the people on the bikes, and I enjoy my bike and like to ride it… but I can’t help but feel that this analogy of yours reflects how I see most arguments of “oppression from the hetero normative white privaledged blah blah blah”. They start with the assumption that non normative behaviors are completely costless to other people, and that any efforts which aren’t made by society at large to accommodate them are a sign of diabolical oppression. Consider, instead, the possibility that the normative might be the actual, real, honest to goodness “best way to do things” for most people, and that while good faith efforts to accommodate people who choose otherwise are right and good and fair, it’s still appropriate for the society as a whole to optimize for the most normative case.
It’s unfortunate that people are fundamentally fallible, and reality forces everyone, now and then, to accept that any time the deviate from normative expectations, some people are going to get irked when pushed out of their comfort zone. Where that deviation is an elective choice, I gotta say, it’s hard to find any virtue in any attitude OTHER than accepting accepting it as just an added cost of doing it your way (or, in the terminalogy of Europe, a Value Added Tax).
ON THE OTHER HAND, when deviation isn’t a matter of choice, (‘I can’t afford a car’ doesn’t count, since that’s the end result of previous choices; ‘I was born this way’ does count, since no choices were made), a just and generous society should try to find ways to accommodate as many of its citizens as reasonably possible.
Retort! Go.
no subject
Date: 2013-05-24 11:23 pm (UTC)From:there’s the simple reality that being behind a bicyclist is inconventient and makes every trip more time consuming
ORIGINAL PARAGRAPH BASED ON MISREADING: This is one of a couple of places where you make a lot of assumptions - about the geography of a city, about infrastructure, about where people live and work. I'm getting a bike soon because of the simple observed reality that it's faster and simper for Chris to get between campus, home, and the places where we both live and eat and shop and play because she consistently bikes and I walk or drive. Also it's easier and cheaper for her to park when she gets there. That's because we both live in a geographically dense area and tend to stay within about a two-square mile radius.
ADDED PARAGRAPH THAT MAKES SENSE: While I misread your sentence (I just totally dropped the "behind" from the sentence), the point about assumptions actually still works. While I could make your inconvenience complaint about buses, it's actually the case (I've watched) that within even the hilly parts of the city, just staying behind a biker usually has the same effect, time wise, as trying to maximise fuel efficiency by avoiding acceleration. Which is to say you that, in an area like Oakland/Shadyside/Friendship in Pittsburgh where there are lots of stop signs, it doesn't actually slow you down appreciably.
That geographical density has other consequences as well - such as the fact that it would completely overwhelm our infrastructure if everyone that had the means to drive drove everywhere. You just could never create a city like Pittsburgh (forget new york) that operated on the basis of that being "normative." So what you're describing as normative can't possibly be so...
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Date: 2013-05-25 11:23 am (UTC)From:Yes. The biggest inconvenience to drivers is other cars. Sure, I slow down traffic when I bike on Trippstadter Straße under the viaduct (there's no room to pass me)—but I just slow it down by a few seconds, I don't turn the road into a parking lot, the way cars do. And even a single car parallel-parking can back up traffic (e.g. Murray Avenue in Pittsburgh, or Park Avenue in Montreal), which is a genuine inconvenience. But I suppose that's okay since it's being perpetrated by people who are ~normal~ (since they drive cars) and are thus entitled to impose the costs of their choices on everyone else.
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Date: 2013-05-24 11:36 pm (UTC)From:That's a natural first reaction, but it absolves you of having to think about how an even slightly different world would work by focusing on the individual's behavior and their consequences exclusively. (If there are lots of bikers, the marginal inconvenience of a biker goes down, if there have been bikers for a long time, the marginal inconvenience of a biker goes down, and there's no reason to believe that historical path dependence leaves society at a global or even local maximum). It also takes focus away from any other costs that car drivers are imposing - on people's abilities to sleep, to breathe (During the 1996 Summer Olympics Games in Atlanta, when peak morning traffic decreased 23% and peak ozone levels decreased 28%, emergency visits for asthma events in children decreased 42%.). Normative behaviors can be highly costly to other people, and they're protected by the very perception that they're normative.
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Date: 2013-05-24 11:48 pm (UTC)From:i've had cars pass me *when i'm going the speed limit.*
the point being... when there's resource contention, the automatic default assumption seems to be that the convenience of drivers matters more than the convenience of cyclists. there's resource contention between everyone on the road, but there's a marked asymmetry in the expectations about how that contention ought to be resolved.
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Date: 2013-05-25 12:47 am (UTC)From:So, let's turn it around: what argument do you have that the strict minority has a right to demand non-proportional parity of resources? And when we're talking about a "resource" that isn't centrally managed, but is as impossible to quantify as the moment to moment decisions of every individual motorist and cyclist, what does that even mean?
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Date: 2013-05-25 04:42 am (UTC)From:For a motorist, as you point out upthread, trying to drive when cyclists are around can be stressful and inconvenient. But for a cyclist, trying to bike when motorists are around can get you killed. Statistically speaking, several cyclists will die today in car accidents.
Another way of saying this is: we will have to inconvenience someone, so who is it more fair to inconvenience: people who are currently in harm's way, or people who aren't as much?
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Date: 2013-05-24 11:38 pm (UTC)From:Okay this is maybe off topic because I just can't let it slide. I'm glad that the person who went into medical bankruptcy because of all those ER visits for severe asthma attacks can't afford a car as an end result of previous choices.
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Date: 2013-05-25 12:35 am (UTC)From:no subject
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Date: 2013-05-27 02:13 pm (UTC)From:no subject
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Date: 2013-05-30 04:05 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2013-05-24 11:54 pm (UTC)From:i believe the Critical Mass event was organized precisely for the purpose of challenging this idea -- suggesting that with a critical mass of cyclists on the road, drivers can't help but learn to notice and watch for them. this seems to work on a day-to-day basis in places like Amsterdam and Copenhagen. if the roads aren't safe because cyclists are rare, but cyclists are rare because the roads aren't safe... maybe let's work on making the roads safer?
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Date: 2013-05-25 12:40 am (UTC)From:I'm not sure what you mean by "making the roads safer". It's already illegal to do bad stuff to cyclists, and a legal requirement to grant them appropriate rights of way, etc. Are you suggesting more stringent enforcement of those laws? Or campaigns to increase awareness of them? Those are all well and good. Bikes are super common here in Seattle, and people seem to deal with them just fine. Carrying your examples forward, non heterosexuals are treated way better and more comfortably in San Francisco than in, say, Detroit.
But, your statement was specifically about not already bike friendly cities. Short of mandating people ride bikes (or whatever the gender equivalent would be), what are you suggesting?
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Date: 2013-05-25 03:05 am (UTC)From:Whose job is it to decide which if these "grey area" things are reasonable or not? The driver who passed Chris going the speed limit probably felt like they were justified in their feelings of being inconvenienced even though they were legally completely in the wrong.
Put differently: placing the onus of education on the minority bikers to explain to everyone that, no, they're legally allowed in the road and not allowed on the sidewalk etc etc etc. sets the stage for exactly the micro-aggression scenario Chris described, and certainly I think that's a place where the feminism analogy holds.
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Date: 2013-05-25 09:26 am (UTC)From:ETA: my partner bikes downtown, tells me stories about the left-side bike lane on his route, and then I try not to think too hard about the risks he takes. That is an example where busy and thoughtless drivers, rush hour and over-congested streets, and street design that puts cyclists in an unexpected location put any cyclist in danger.
There's a difference between knowing that there are laws against crowding cyclists and internalizing skills that let you do that. I would say training campaigns or mandate that everyone rides a bike on the street so they get the experience from the other side, but that's impractical (and we already don't have effectively distributed transportation funding).
no subject
Date: 2013-05-25 04:56 pm (UTC)From:Some of this is surely infrastructure, right? Protected bike lanes are much safer than unprotected ones, for example. I've been to Amsterdam, though not Copenhagen, and the intersections are engineered with bicyclists in mind, not just cars and pedestrians.
no subject
Date: 2013-05-28 12:58 am (UTC)From:Reduction in privilege is not the same as oppression.
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Date: 2013-05-24 11:06 pm (UTC)From:I was thinking about the post about "not-cyclists" you linked to in the context of this analogy, and this is a big can of worms, but I was wondering if you think there's a meaningful analogue here of "not-cyclists"-who-are-cyclists. Say, someone who's a woman, but for whom that fact is not necessarily a huge part of her identity, or not necessarily obvious, perhaps. And the next step, of course, is to ask if there are people thinking, "See, none of my customers are women!", when, in fact, some of them are, or would be...
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Date: 2013-05-25 12:03 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2013-05-25 02:26 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2013-05-25 03:04 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2013-05-25 03:07 am (UTC)From:Or, I feel about as liberated now by a car as I did by a bike when in college, and they're probably an equivalent amount of my disposable income at either time. I tried buying a car in college, and it was a rolling disaster; I could have used less money to travel *much* more, but I screwed up and tried to go the car route for a year.
no subject
Date: 2013-05-25 09:10 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2013-05-25 12:51 pm (UTC)From:Or, unless you're walking barefoot, how much did those shoes cost? ;-)
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Date: 2013-05-25 08:31 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2013-05-27 02:23 am (UTC)From:Lessons were learned. :-)
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Date: 2013-05-27 01:10 am (UTC)From:and i guess this ties into my other problem with basically any discussion about oppression, in that it contributes to a conflation between being oppressed for one's identity and being oppressed for one's choices, and i feel that those are different problems that shouldn't be addressed with the same approach.
no subject
Date: 2013-05-27 01:58 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2013-05-27 03:16 pm (UTC)From:bigotry isn't okay in either case (whether or not something is a choice), but bigotry over choices is different from bigotry over non-choices. it's a whole separate, and perhaps irrelevant, discussion as to what is or isn't a choice, but i am willing to stand by the statement that riding a bicycle is much more obviously a choice than being a female, and thus the sort of oppression experienced as a cyclist is very different from that as a female. specifically for me, because i deliberately choose to ride a bicycle as my primary mode of transportation, i feel much more capable of taking ownership of that decision and everything that comes with it, whereas i don't feel that way about gender.
no subject
Date: 2013-05-27 10:55 pm (UTC)From:and on the gender side of things, zinnia jones says that being female (in outward presentation, hormones) is on some level a choice, albeit the best choice for her. what would it mean for her to "take ownership" of that decision?
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Date: 2013-05-29 10:51 pm (UTC)From:also, i'm really bad at sitting through videos on the internet, so i will admit to not watching through that link. but i have no idea what it means for other people to take ownership of their own decisions; i only know what it means when i do it myself.
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Date: 2013-05-30 03:51 pm (UTC)From:oof okay yeah that comment was very unclear - that's not what i meant at all. let me try again.
i'm trying to say that i assume good faith of any given person on the road in their given mode of transportation. i don't assume that they're doing it just to piss me off, or just to be an asshole - i assume that with they made a decision based on the information and finances available to them, plus possibly some whims of the day according to factors like weather and time.
the supposition of drivers who are angry at me on the road seems to be the opposite - that, in fact, i'm doing it just out of a lack of regard for people on the road, or that i don't realize how dangerous it is - that i am either hostile or stupid for doing this thing.
what i thought you were saying (and maybe i've understood incorrectly) was that you personally feel responsible for dealing with consequences, such as that anger and whatever actions is leads to, because you see what you're doing as a choice.
so my reaction is basically: but it's no more of a choice than the choice to drive, is it? or, are there specific aspects of that choice that you see as different?
no subject
Date: 2013-05-27 10:48 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2013-05-27 10:45 pm (UTC)From:you're absolutely right that the ability to switch back to comfort at any time fails to get something important across. that was what i meant by the "oppression tourism" comment, which was basically attempting to disclaim this as a "just try this and then you'll know how it really feeeeels" and call more attention to some artificial similarities that could aid understanding of terms for someone with otherwise *no* points of reference.
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Date: 2013-05-29 10:39 pm (UTC)From:i can also raise the level of pedanticism i'm indulging in here by saying that sure, there's a choice involved in displaying parts of your identity in certain ways and contexts, but that still makes the bikes vs feminism thing separate issues to me. then i can ask things like 'am i being oppressed because this is part of who i am, or am i being oppressed because i've chosen to display part of who i am?' most of the problems i encounter as a cyclist do not affect me when i'm not sitting on my bike (which would be choosing to open display the cyclist identity). while that doesn't make the actual problems themselves go away in a global sense, it changes how i'm able to think about them.
2.) i don't think that there exist people who have absolutely no personal points of reference to understand terms describing oppression. there might be people who are unaware of certain kinds of oppression, but i think that if there exists someone who can't understand terms when explained to them, that someone is unlikely to understand by trying to do something else that is kind of similar.
now, whether or not a person is willing to express sympathy in a productive manner is a different story.
no subject
Date: 2013-05-29 10:51 pm (UTC)From:the reason i decided to actually write up and post this analogy was because someone specifically told me it helped: a friend of mine said that the process of learning to ride a bike as his primary means of transportation gave him a lot more points of reference to reach to. when they're imperfect, you can clarify - but it's a starting point; i've been able to make headway in conversations where otherwise it was just stymied by "but i have no idea what that feels like."
no subject
Date: 2013-05-29 11:00 pm (UTC)From:(which, now that i'm skimming over your original post again, i guess that's what you clarified in the second paragraph anyway, so now i feel kind of silly)
and also, i'm just offering my thoughts as a counterpoint for why this analogy doesn't work for me, since i also happen to fall into both categories that are being analogized.
no subject
Date: 2013-05-27 09:36 am (UTC)From:You're in good company! Susan B. Anthony famously wrote: "Bicycling has done more to emancipate women than any one thing in the world. It gives her a feeling of self-reliance and independence the moment she takes her seat; and away she goes, the picture of untrammelled womanhood."
(Google supplies a number of variants of this quote -- I don't know which one is the correct one, though the Goog does assert that it was originally made in Champion of Her Sex, New York Sunday World, 2 February 1896, p. 10.)
no subject
Date: 2013-05-27 01:35 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2013-05-27 09:41 pm (UTC)From:I've posted this to /r/srsmen (http://www.reddit.com/r/SRSMen/comments/1f5rfp/bikes_and_feminism_on_the_bicycle_as_a_vehicle_to/) and /r/srsfeminism (http://www.reddit.com/r/SRSFeminism/comments/1f5s70/bikes_and_feminism_on_the_bicycle_as_a_vehicle_to/)