bikes and feminism

[chrisamaphone]

on the bicycle as a vehicle to understand marginalizaton

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 bicycle as a tool of autonomy

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.

Comments

[chrisamaphone]

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.

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?

[balseraph.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid I don't see the conflict here. Because bikes aren't common in some places, people aren't comfortable riding around them. At places or events where bikes are common, they are.

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?

[simrob.livejournal.com]

At issue here is that there are always bunches of things that people do that are illegal (jaywalking, driving 10 miles above the speed limit) but that are nevertheless considered reasonable and acceptable behavior. (Conversely there are things that people usually don't do - and that are considered unreasonable - that are technically legal, like marking off one's lawn with spray-painted "do not trespass" signs, but I'm not sure that's relevant to the point at hand.)

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.

[quartzpebble.livejournal.com]

Seattleite here. I still pass a white-bike memorial on the way into campus--a driver hit and killed a Jimmy John's delivery driver several months ago. Sure, better than LA or San Diego, sure. But deal with them just fine? Not entirely.

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).

[toorsdenote.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure what you mean by "making the roads safer".

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.