7
Queen of the Wheel. Studio portrait, 1897.
I want to fuck a bicycle. I want Callisto to take the bicycle apart so I can fuck it. Fuck the frame. Fuck the pedals. Fuck the handlebars. Fuck the front wheel. Fuck the back wheel. Fuck the sprockets. Fuck the spoke. Fuck the saddle. Fuck the seat post. Fuck the hub. Fuck the rim. Fuck the shock absorber. Fuck the front brakes. Fuck the valve. Fuck the cogset. Fuck the head tube…. I want you to get me a bicycle pump that will last. Don’t get it at Walmart. I want to fuck it. Fuck it so that I am pumped and pumping and bloated and floaty, and while I am fucking that bicycle pump, I can feel the gasses in my body compress. Pump and fuck.
—Vi Khi Nao, Fish in Exile (2016)
The heroine of Vi Khi Nao’s novel is a woman with the unlikely name of Catholic whose life is thrown into chaos by the death of her two children and the collapse of her marriage. Her bicycle fantasy, we are meant to understand, is a symptom of the larger crisis—not pure fetishism but perversion born of turmoil, with some perhaps unhealthy masochism in the mix. (“Do you think if I pumped and fucked long enough my uterus would look like a thunderstorm?” she asks.) Nevertheless, the lust Nao depicts is a real thing, a kink that exists in fact as well as in fiction, and it is safe to say that there are people whose desires in this direction are uncomplicated by spiritual malaise. They simply want to fuck a bicycle.
One afternoon in November 2007, custodial workers at a municipal housing facility in the Scottish town of Ayr walked into a room and found a man, wearing a white T-shirt but naked from the waist down, holding his bicycle and “moving his hips back and forth as if to simulate sex.” Robert Stewart, fifty-one, was arrested and brought before the Ayr Sheriff Court, accused of a “sexually aggravated breach of the peace by conducting himself in a disorderly manner and simulating sex with an inanimate object.” The sheriff, or judge, Colin Miller, had heard his share of strange cases; in the early 1990s, he had presided over a special legal proceeding, exhaustively covered in the tabloid press, in which he’d reversed the wrongful conviction of a husband and wife charged with engaging in child sexual abuse and “satanic rituals.” But for Miller, this case was a novelty. “In almost four decades in the law I thought I had come across every perversion known to mankind,” he said while sentencing Stewart to three years’ probation. “But I have never heard of a cycle-sexualist.”
The sheriff apparently hadn’t done much research. If you have an internet connection, you are no more than a few clicks away from vivid evidence of cycle-sexuality. Much of what you’ll find is, well, porn, the garden-variety kind, photographs and videos in which bicycles serve as plot devices and, often enough, as sexual devices—sex toys with wheels. One popular subgenre features couples on mountain bikes, off-roading to secluded spots in the woods where acts are consummated, incorporating the bicycle in more or less predictable ways. Some bike porn videos are amateur endeavors, captured by the participants themselves using mobile phones. Other videos are clearly the work of professionals, well lit and shot from various angles, starring physically dexterous individuals who are capable of performing sex acts while slung across a bicycle, without pulling a hamstring, or worse. There are videos that follow classic porn narratives, in which the bicycle stuff is mere pretext. (“Young Slut Can’t Afford to Have Her Bike Repaired”; “Hottie Rides Bike and Then Rides Cock.”) Many scenarios involve nude women and bicycle seats: women pedaling bikes with dildos mounted on the saddles, women masturbating using seats or seat posts, and so on.
There is a distinction to be made between mainstream bicycle porn and a more underground variety. Bike Smut is a loose-knit movement founded in Portland, Oregon, in 2007 by a cyclist and activist known as Reverend Phil. The group bills itself as “a coalition of the horny”; its signature event, the Bike Smut Film Festival, features “a collection of short erotic films made by inspired cyclists from all over the world” that celebrate “the joy and liberation of sex-positive culture and human-powered transportation.” The vibe of the films is broad-minded and bohemian, embracing sex that is straight and gay and bi and trans and otherwise. Many of the films are feminist, porn made by women, for women.
The common denominator in Bike Smut films is, indeed, bike smut: the leering camera lenses are directed at chainrings and diamond frames as much as at human limbs and loins. There are video clips in which naked men and women lick and stroke handlebars and top tubes. In other videos, the basics of bicycle maintenance are demonstrated by women in skimpy outfits, armed with Allen wrenches and lubricant. In the film Fuck Bike #001, a long-haired, tattooed man is shown pedaling a stationary bike, of a sort: a fourteen-foot-long Rube Goldberg assemblage, composed of bicycle frames and wheels and sundry other bits, whose drivetrain powers a dildo attached to a long metal dowel. At the business end of the contraption, a woman lies on an elevated mattress with her legs spread, writhing and moaning. Fuck Bike #001 devotes a few seconds of screen time to images of the “couple,” the nude cyclist and the nude woman; but the film makes clear that the sexy stuff, the real hot action, is in the kinetic workings of the components, the whirring of cranks and chains and wheels, the play of light on the metal and chrome. Truly, it is bicycle pornography.
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There are others who look at the bicycle’s bits and pieces and see kinky possibilities. Rheta Frustra is a Vienna-based artist and activist whose project Bikesexual aims to “challenge body norms and sexual norms” by creating “upcycled” sex toys using old bicycle parts. On the Bikesexual website, and at workshops conducted across Europe, Frustra offers instruction in the making of butt plugs and bondage gear—handcuffs, whips, cat-o’-nine-tails—from scraps of rubber and metal salvaged from disused bikes. Those who have “always wanted a harness, but…were too embarrassed to go into a shop in daylight downtown” can fashion one quickly using a broken bicycle inner tube, bicycle chains, a couple of buckles, and “a used bicycle cog for the dildo.”
Like Bike Smut, Bikesexual is subcultural and countercultural, part of the activist underground that regards bicycling as a form of antiestablishment resistance. (Bikesexual, Frustra says, “combines principles of DIY, vegan, ecological, and bicycle culture and queer politics.”) But the sexualization of bikes is neither a fringe phenomenon nor a new one. The bawdy caricatures that filled London print shops during the dandy charger’s brief heyday—those images of priapic fops and busty ladies groping and humping astride the velocipede—envisaged the bicycle as an erotic machine, or at least an instrument of erotic farce, a sex toy for the Regency’s coalition of the horny. During the 1890s boom, while guardians of morality were fretting (and fantasizing) about bicycle seats that “bring about constant friction over the clitoris and labia,” studio photographers were capturing images of nude women straddling bikes. (These photos, preserved on cabinet cards, fetch high prices on eBay.)
In this same period, bike smut snuck into mass entertainment under the cover of double entendres. The famous 1892 English music hall hit “Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two)” was said to have been inspired by a royal sex scandal, the affair of Daisy Greville, Countess of Warwick, and Edward, Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII. The song’s lyrics featured suggestive puns about bicycle components (“You’ll be the belle / Which I’ll ring”) and made winking analogies between the titular bicycle built for two and another kind of tandem ride: “You’ll take the lead / In each trip we take / Then if I don’t do well / I will permit you to / Use the brake.”
The bicycle activated the dirty minds of more highbrow artists, including prominent modernist writers. In Finnegans Wake, James Joyce writes of a young “prostituta in herba” who pedals a “bisexycle.” A baldly pornographic scene is found in Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye (1928). The novel’s unnamed narrator and his lover, Simone, strip nude and go cycling through the countryside. The ride climaxes, literally, with Simone’s orgasm, which sends her sprawling off her bike, onto the roadside:
We had abandoned the real world, the one made up solely of dressed people, and the time elapsed since then was already so remote as to seem almost beyond reach…. A leather seat clung to Simone’s bare cunt, which was inevitably jerked by the legs pumping up and down on the spinning pedals. Furthermore, the rear wheel vanished indefinitely to my eyes, not only in the bicycle fork but virtually in the crevice of the cyclist’s naked bottom: the rapid whirling of the dusty tire was also directly comparable to both the thirst in my throat and the erection of my penis, destined to plunge into the depths of the cunt sticking to the bicycle seat…. I realized she was tossing off more and more violently on the seat, which was pincered between her buttocks. Like myself, she had not yet drained the tempest evoked by the shamelessness of her cunt, and at times she let out husky moans; she was literally torn away by joy, and her nude body was hurled upon an embankment with an awful scraping of steel on the pebbles and a piercing shriek.
It is instructive to compare Bataille’s wanton bike ride to the scenarios imagined by the bicycle’s turn-of-the-century opponents, who warned that “a long ‘spin’ in the country” will often result “in sexual embraces.” This was classic moral panic, but it may not have been wrong on the facts. For well over a century, the bicycle trip from the city to the country has been viewed as a journey ripe with erotic possibility. (The porn trope of cyclists trysting in the backwoods is merely the latest iteration.) Out on those rustic roads, in those open spaces, the constraints of society no longer pertain; cyclists can taste true freedom and surrender to their wildest desires.
In Voici des ailes! (Here Are Wings!) (1898), the novelist Maurice Leblanc tells the story of two Parisian couples, Pascal and Régine Fauvières and Guillaume and Madeleine d’Arjols, who undertake a bicycle tour through bucolic Normandy and Brittany. As their journey unfolds, morals loosen, along with corsets, which the women abandon in favor of less constricting clothing. Eventually, Régine and Madeleine discard their blouses altogether, and go wheeling through an Edenic landscape with their breasts bared. For Leblanc, biking itself is a kind of sex. The cyclists, the bikes, the landscape, the elements—all are sexual entities, participants in an ecstatic orgy.
The road rose and fell over gentle slopes, and in the delirium into which their speed had hurled them, it seemed that the earth was swelling and sagging, like a chest throbbing with the rhythm of breathing…. [The cyclists’] arms opened as if for an embrace. The resistance of the air gave the illusion of something moving toward them and nuzzling tenderly against their breasts. The breath of the breeze on their lips was like an ineffable kiss of love. The soft scents of honeysuckle stirred them like secret caresses…. Their consciousness vanished, dissolved in things. They became parts of nature, instinctive forces, like the gliding clouds, like the rolling waves, like the floating fragrances, like the echoing sounds.
By the end of the novel, the Fauvièreses and d’Arjolses have swapped spouses, and two new couples pedal off into a future that holds the promise of lots of spicy conjugal activity, and lots of bicycling. The message of Voici des ailes! is that cycling represents liberation, and that liberation is by definition libertine.
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It’s an idea that seems like it would be time-stamped, a remnant of the easily scandalized Victorian age. But it has currency in today’s bicycle culture. The World Naked Bike Ride (WNBR) is an annual event in which thousands of cyclists in dozens of cities around the world pedal through the streets in “bare as you dare” states of undress. Conrad Schmidt, the Canadian credited with founding the WNBR in 2004, has characterized it as a return to cycling’s roots and a celebration of cycling’s essence. “The concept of riding a bike naked goes back to the early days when bikes were first invented,” Schmidt has said. “There is just something about bikes and being naked that are meant to go together.” Some WNBR cyclists wear body paint or strategically placed socks; others ride fully nude. In spring of 2020, during the first months of the Covid crisis, many WNBR participants wore only surgical masks. A few riders also placed masks over their genitals.
The event has the atmosphere of a countercultural carnival—a boisterous swarm of humanity wending through city streets, letting it all hang out. But the goal, WNBR organizers insist, is not simply to épater la bourgeoisie. Philip Carr-Gomm has written that people who protest in the nude “convey a complex message: they challenge the status quo by acting provocatively, and they empower themselves and their cause by showing that they are fearless and have nothing to hide. But at the same time they reveal the vulnerability and frailty of the human being.” The WNBR embraces the direct-action tactics of Critical Mass; its rhetoric links nudity and sexuality to environmentalism, safe streets, and anti-automobilism. “By cycling naked we declare our confidence in the beauty and individuality of our bodies,” reads the WNBR mission statement. “We face automobile traffic with our naked bodies as the best way of defending our dignity and exposing the vulnerability faced by cyclists and pedestrians on our streets as well as the negative consequences we all face due to dependence on oil, and other forms of non-renewable energy.”
The conflict between motorists and cyclists has often been cast in terms of sex and gender. In a world dominated by cars—those turbocharged totems of masculine virility—bicycle riding is regarded by many as emasculating and infantilizing. “It’s impossible to feel like a grown-up when you’re on a bicycle,” wrote dedicated bike-hater P. J. O’Rourke in a 2011 Wall Street Journal op-ed. “Search plazas, parks and city squares the world over and you won’t find a single statue of a national hero riding a bike. This promotion of childishness in the electorate means that bike lanes are just the beginning. Soon we’ll be making room on our city streets for scooter and skateboard lanes, Soapbox Derby lanes, pogo-stick lanes, lanes for Radio Flyer wagons.” Hollywood has harped on this theme, portraying male cyclists as sexually stunted man-children: think of Pee-wee Herman pedaling his fire-engine-red Schwinn or Steve Carell’s forty-year-old virgin, who doesn’t have a driver’s license and commutes on a bike to his dead-end job at a strip mall electronics store. These attitudes surface in real-world battles over the right to the road. In traffic altercations, motorists frequently disparage cyclists using homophobic and misogynist language. Social scientists have reported the widespread use of such epithets as “pussy,” “cunt,” “fag,” and the more pointed “bicycle fag.” My own field research confirms these findings.
In the face of this hostility, bicycle activists champion a politics of jaunty hedonism. The slogans painted on the banners, as well as the bared torsos, of WNBR riders—put some fun between your legs; i’m bikesexual: i’ll ride anything; cyclists pump harder; i came on my bike today; powered by ass, not gas—picture bicycling as exuberant and debauched. (Driving a car, by contrast, is understood to be unsexy, uptight, normie.) Some cyclists embrace the idea that bike riding is feminine—or, rather, feminist. Adriane Ackerman, a member of Portland’s freak bike community, created a head-turning custom two-wheeler: a “double-tall bike adorned with a giant papier-mâché vulva.” The bicycle displays what Ackerman calls “the Shock Twat” or “the Cuntraption” in its frame near the front wheel; Ackerman has rigged up a length of plastic tubing, running from a jug filled with red wine mounted on the rear rack, to a spigot in the center of the sculpture. This arrangement allows volunteers, of which there are apparently many, to perform figurative cunnilingus, kneeling before the bike to quaff the Cuntraption’s flowing “menstrual blood.” As a piece of feminist street theater, it is impressive. (“In my experience,” Ackerman says, “there are few testaments to power more striking than hundreds of grown-ass adults waiting in line to get on their knees for a giant hand-made vagina, just to get boxed wine squirted at them from it.”) It is also a witty response to a culture that venerates cars for, as one scholar has put it, their “phallic powers of penetration and thrust.”
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Some may be hesitant to view the culture clash between the car and the bicycle as a proxy battle of the sexes. Still, it’s fair to say that automobiles and bikes have contrasting erotic personalities—different kinds of sex appeal. For the writer Jet McDonald, the distinction lies in the way bikes expose riders’ bodies to the open air and to the eyes of others: “In northern Europe we save our private bodies for the indoors, the fickle winter polices our flesh. But when the sun finally arrives, the hop from indoors to the bike is small, and we allow a more intimate self out in the open. The car does not do this; the car is a room on wheels. The bodiless driver speeds about in four walls and sexual signals are saved for winks in traffic jams.”
We might add that the actions necessary to drive a car demand far less muscle power, and generate far less body heat, than those required to get a bike moving. The analogies to sex are corny but apt. To ride a bike is to enter into an intimate relationship. You swing your thighs across the bicycle, you mount it, you pump the pedals. Your body merges with the body of the bike. Together, you build up a steady rhythm. The bike gains speed in response to your exertions; you push, the bike pulls. And away you go. It hardly seems necessary to note that cycling has so often been described in language suggestive of orgasm—as thrilling, euphoric, ecstatic.
Perhaps these metaphors go too far. Or maybe they don’t go far enough. The pangs of gratitude and affection I feel for my bike, and for bikes in general, are deeper than those I harbor for any other inanimate thing and, if I’m being honest, for all but a few animate ones. Henry Miller, one of history’s keenest perverts, never recorded any salacious thoughts about bicycles. But in the memoir My Bike and Other Friends (1978), he wrote with earnest ardor about the “best friend” of his teenage years in New York City during the first decade of the twentieth century: a two-wheeler manufactured in Chemnitz, Saxony, which he bought after attending a bike race at the old Madison Square Garden. Miller recalls the bike shop mechanic not far from his family home in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, who did his repair jobs for free “because, as he put it, he never saw a man so in love with his bike as I was.”
Miller “carried on silent conversations” with his bike. He doted on it, with the tenderness of a young lover in the throes of a first romance. There is a faint hint, perhaps, of the future erotic gourmand, the connoisseur of assignations and caresses and excretions, in Miller’s description of his nightly regime of bicycle upkeep. “Every time I returned home,” Miller writes, “I stood the bike upside down, searched for a clean rag and polished the hubs and the spokes. Then I cleaned the chain and greased it afresh. That operation left ugly stains on the stone in the walkway. My mother…would get so incensed that she would say to me in full sarcasm, ‘I’m surprised you don’t take that thing to bed with you!’ ” With bikes, as with humans, the hottest sex acts are often acts of love.