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Complex Numbers #1045037 added February 18, 2023 at 11:38am
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What the Bike?
Entry #5 into "Journalistic Intentions"  [18+] this month: Happy Ride
You know what always struck me as idiotic? And I do mean "always," as in "from the moment I first found out about it as a kid."
Gendered bikes.
It took me a while to figure out the reason for it, and to this day I'm not sure if I came up with the right idea or not: girls' bikes have the lowered crossbar to accommodate a skirt. I mean, that was the only thing I could figure out, as all genders have legs (barring accidents, disease, or thalidomide), and you don't ride a bike with your genitals, so what else could possibly be the difference?
I keep calling it a crossbar. It probably has a more proper name. But you know what I'm talking about: that upper rod between the saddle thingy and the handlebar whatchamacallit.
I may not be an expert on bicycles, okay? The ones in the linked prompt picture both have the lowered crossbar doohickey.
Anyway, it didn't help my bewilderment that where I spent my childhood, I didn't see a lot of girls wearing skirts or dresses. It was a rural area, and everyone wore pants or shorts, including my mom.
But enforcement of strict gender divides was even more of a thing back then (though I thought it was silly), so you'd see these girls riding around with their girly bikes (rarely pink) with the lowered crossbar. "They're just doing it because their parents thought: 'have girl. girl want bike. girl need girl bike. girl on boy bike may grow up to like girls.'" Or something like that; I don't know.
Worse, the "boy" bikes were considered standard, and the "girl" bikes, the aberration.
Seriously. No one rides a bike wearing a skirt, dress, or kilt, do they? I don't think I've ever seen it. Nor have I seen a woman riding a horse side-saddle except in, like, picture books or period (not that kind of period) movies. ("What has two legs on one side and four on the other?" was an actual riddle I saw in a kids' book at one point. "A horse with a lady riding." "What?")
And then I reached puberty. Most kids "hit" puberty; for me, it was more of a gradual thing. And that's when I realized the terrible, awful, what-the-fuck truth about life: in a sane world, in a world that makes sense, it should be the other way around, with the bikes for guys having the lowered crossbar. And yes, I learned that the hard way. That is a pain I will never, ever forget. I'll be lying on my deathbed, racked with cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, and a toothache, and I'll be like "Remember that time you racked your brand-new balls on a bike when you were 12?"
Didn't stop me from riding a bike (well... for more than a day or so, anyway). But I never did make sense out of gendered bikes. |
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