Complex Numbers

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.