Athletic Intruders: Ethnographic Research on Women, Culture, and Exercise

7. Women Who Ride: The Bitch in the Back is Dead

“My butt hurts. My butt really hurts. I’m not going to be able to walk or sit down.” Debby shouted this bit of information to me as we stopped for a red light on the way to Apple Jack’s Saloon. “My cunt hurts too.” I shouted back. “My cunt really hurts. I’m not going to be able to walk or sit down either. Hey Deb, how many men do you think ever get to say this while they’re riding?” Stopped in the middle of a feeder highway on the way to Sky Londa, we rocked with laughter. Each time we yelled some female complaint, Ken, our riding companion and my husband, rode a bit faster. He definitely appeared to want to get away from us. When females bond around bodily functions, men quickly disappear. “Well, a guy could say his cunt hurt,” I replied, “if he was packing and treating her like shit.” The light changed and we took off down the highway. Debby and I are riding buddies. While a lot of women have helped me gather the courage to brave the bike, if it weren’t for Debby, I wouldn’t be riding. It’s scary. Women are not raised to ride motorcycles. Riding is so contradictory to the traditional forms of femininity that finding “riding” women on the road is truly astounding. C H A P T E R S E V E N ‫ﱰﱯ‬ Women Who Ride: The Bitch in the Back is Dead BARBARA JOANS 159 Women bikers. Women riding buddies. Women’s passenger clubs. These words bring up mixed images. Women riding motorcycles? In the distant past it was pretty common. In the recent past, it is almost unknown. Today, it raises eyebrows if not hackles. This chapter is about women who find it necessary to change the definitions of femaleness and femininity in order to ride—women riders who push the boundaries of stereotypic femininity and dare to ride the wind. In the 1920s and 1930s women rode. Milwaukee created motorcycles , and women, as well as men, took to them. Women were pictured riding, passengering, and hanging out in the biking world. In the early days men and women both rode; and, while it took daring to do so, women as well as men were daring. By the late 1940s the motorcycle world changed. The men, returning from World War II, wanted a different kind of woman, and most women obliged. The biking woman became the biker’s woman. Known in less polite circles as the “bitch on the back,” she rode only with her man. The biker was male, and the woman’s place was behind him in the bitch seat. That seat, usually small, was extremely uncomfortable, and the woman’s position precariously perched (almost as an afterthought in both actuality and symbolization). The biker’s woman was necessary and peripheral to the biker world. She was a necessity as a subordinate sexual companion . The biker’s woman was often interchangeable with other women, and frequently nameless. The biker’s woman was the groupie who drove to bike rallies in cars, snuck into the festivals carrying food, drink, and drugs, and was often dismissed at dawn. If she loved bikes or bikers and survived the biker’s bitch stage, she could settle down with her biker, who invariably expected her to fulfill her female role within the male biker world. She would be soft and submissive, sexual and subservient. Her weakness made him look strong, his unequal complement. In every era and in each generation there were, however, extraordinary and remarkable women who rode motorcycles. They rode independently , in their own way and in defiance of the stereotypes. Sometimes they rode with men, sometimes with other women. Mostly they rode alone, choosing a solitary and unforgettable path. They became the stuff of legends, but they did not become the leaders, for the remarkable biking women of this generation. Perhaps they were too few in number or too individual in tastes and choices. For whatever reasons and regardless of how exemplary their behaviors, they remain outside the main arena of women on motorcycles. By the close of the 1940s, most women, if they appeared on motorcycles at all, rode the rear. Women who ride today are a relatively new phenomena. There are many groups, clubs, organizations, and chapters of riding women that 160 BARBARA JOANS grow stronger...