Joy of the road is gender-neutral
One of the beautiful aspects of riding a motorcycle is that, for those few precious moments when you watch your speedometer leap into life and feel the wind rush past your face, when you feel the pull of gravity drawing you closer towards the blur of a corner, things like your gender cease to matter. It’s just the machine and you. That is the joy of the road. That is freedom.
Freedom that lasts just up until you stop, step off the bike, take off your helmet — and are promptly greeted with offers to help park the machine you just rode in on.
The pleasures of taking to the open road on a motorcycle are gender-neutral: There’s the rumble that growls from deep within your machine when you twist the throttle; the sheer distortion of sound and vision at 70 miles (113km) per hour; the sudden lurch as you and your bike pull away, leaving traffic behind you.
And yet all my years of riding — and I have been riding for about half of my life now, on different machines, in all manner of places — have taught me that while the pleasures themselves may be gender-neutral, people consistently assume that the people experiencing them are male.
In some ways, they’re not wrong to do so. I have always been a bit of a thrillseeker, and since I was little, I have been fascinated by machines. Motorcycles found their way into my life before I even knew what “feminism” or “gender bias” meant. But statistically speaking, I’m a minority. In Britain, where I live, men are three times as likely to own a motorcycle, moped or scooter than women. It’s a rare occasion that I encounter fellow women on two wheels on the road, especially riding solo. The message from popular culture is certainly that bikes are for men (see Steve McQueen, Marlon Brando and, more recently, Ewan McGregor). When women do appear on them, it is while a) wearing a skintight cat suit, b) clinging onto a man from behind as a passenger or c) looking reassuringly butch and thus, vehicularly appropriate.
Why are there so few of us women experiencing one of the great joys of summer: Riding into the sunset on two wheels?
Part of it has to do with the relationship between men and machines. Historically, machines have belonged to domains typically considered masculine — labour and industry, war and militarism. Women’s relationship with machinery, by contrast, has been restricted to the domestic sphere. Today, thankfully, we’ve progressed to the point where women are allowed out in cars. But in the popular imagination, for women, cars remain extensions of the home, tools to shop for groceries or collect the children.
Another part has to do with the association in the public imagination between motorcycles and crime, deviance and aggression. Real-life infamous incidents centred around motorcycles, like the Hollister riots in California in 1947 and the Mods and Rockers clashes across British seaside resorts in 1964, along with notorious motorcycle clubs like the Hells Angels, have over the years fed widespread perceptions of bikes as vehicles for gangs.
And part of it has to do with the limited number of ways that pop culture has allowed women and bikes to come together. Men who want to ride have a spectrum of different motorcycle-based masculinities to choose from: There are the metrosexual Belstaff-jacket-wearing David Beckhams; the “Mad Max” style crazy adrenalin junkies; leather-clad Angels types; even existentialist motorcycle maintenance gurus.
By contrast, when women associate with bikes, in pop culture at least, it’s to indicate that they are strong biker chicks. Unfortunately, until we see more images of women wearing boring outfits, until we have more motorcycle advertisements and products aimed at women not as passengers but as riders, until we get more models of female motorcyclists. The good news is, it’s not bikes that engender you; it’s people who do all that. So whether you’re a catsuitclad lady who doesn’t touch dirt, but loves the smell of burning tyres, a grease monkey who tinkers with her own gaskets or simply a commuter looking for a more exciting way to get to work, don’t let people get in the way of you feeling the elements charging at you, refreshing your soul with the thrill of liberation, the sensation of flying. ■ Esperanza Miyake is a cultural studies researcher who examines technology and gender identities.