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

[balseraph.livejournal.com]

Devils advocate, for the sake of discussion (because discussion is fun!)

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.

[lindseykuper]

Nice post, Chris.

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...

[talldean.livejournal.com]

Tangentially: the amount of freedom granted by ownership of the means of transport is directly related to the proportion of your disposable income it consumes.

[hvincent.livejournal.com]

one of my problems with this analogy is that one has to choose to be a cyclist, which includes considering whether or not the benefits are worth the trade-off of having to deal with the problems. for example, one can make the decision of 'well, today i just don't really feel like being marginalized by douchebags in cars who are grumpy that i'm on the roads' and just not be a cyclist that day, but not really 'well, today i just don't really feel like being catcalled because i have tits so i guess i'll leave them at home'. and since the cyclist lifestyle can be arbitrarily shed if it becomes too taxing, a lot of the problems that come up as a result of intrinsic or long-term factors don't carry over.

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.

[neelk]

in that sense, i think it's an incredible instrument of feminism, and certainly of my own happiness.

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.)

[notyourbroom.livejournal.com]

<3

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/)