Toban Black

    
Automobile branding

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Little drivers

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“These streets are mine too!”

Those words are part of a Take Back the Night march sign
(which Anna Overseas posted on Flickr)

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April Streeter (in this blog post) -
“Even in bike-crazy Portland, the stats have showed an approximate split of 70% male riders versus 30% female riders. In Paris, there’s a similar split, says mobility consultant Eric Britton. The numbers are even more skewed in other places.”

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Anna Letitia Mumford on her fifty car pile-up blog -
“A rant from the second wave (but seriously folks, we have a gender problem)”

(I agree that we should find ways to make bicycling attractive, but I also think that we should challenge mainstream standards of sexiness and beauty (like waifish models of femininity); I’ll elaborate on that point below.)

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Dominick Tao (in this journalistic blog post) -
“As a whole, men in the U.S. make three times as many trips by bicycle than women, according to research [pdf] by John Pucher, a professor of urban planning.”

“The numbers are actually worse in New York, where only 21 percent of trips by bicycle are made by women. According to a voluntary survey by members of the New York Cycle Club, the largest organization of its kind in the city, only about a third of the club’s members said they are female.”

“With the exception of areas [of New York] like Central Park and designated bike trails — which female cyclists populate almost as zealously as their male counterparts) — bike riding in most parts of the city is hardly leisurely. ‘It’s like going into battle,’ Mr. Pucher said. ‘You need a helmet and gloves.’”

“Indeed, a ride through Midtown during the rush often means dodging trucks and speeding taxis, weaving through flocks of ear-budded pedestrians, swerving around gouged asphalt, and rocketing across intersections when the traffic signal does not say go.’

Mr. Pucher said to make cycling more appealing to women, and children and the elderly, for that matter, cycling in the city needs to be safer.”

In other words, our streets needn’t be macho battlegrounds.

(Mr. Tao also stresses fashion issues in his post.)

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“You can’t be sexy without consuming.”
- Julie (in this Feministe blog post)

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In London, England

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Three posts from Lisa on the Sociological Images blog -
- “The Economics of Beauty”
- “Sexualization and Adultification of Young Children of Color”
- “The Beauty Industry: Spending And Routines”

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(Photo by Orin Optiglot)

In Melbourne, Australia

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