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I just watched the Social Dilemma.... oof, okay.
All other issues aside, I cannot stop thinking about this throwaway comment about bicycles by Tristan Harris:
All other issues aside, I cannot stop thinking about this throwaway comment about bicycles by Tristan Harris:
TRISTAN WHAT. The moral panic that ensued when bicycles gained popularity is one of my favorite things. it helps contextualize how willing we are to get in a complete frothing panic over things that are not a threat (cough campus free speech cough)
Totally exaggerated and completely breathless depictions of bicycle accidents were common around the time people started buying bicycles like the ones we use today:
It was apparently thought that too much bicycle riding could give you a heart attack:
We thought it was a credible threat that people might regularly garrotte themselves somehow:
Among other things, we invented maladies like bicycle foot and hand, based on our fears that habitual bicycling would affect our skeletal structure.
And of course, OF COURSE, we found a way to get upset about a device that allowed women more autonomy and literal mobility, adding fuel to the belief that a "new woman" was a bad and dangerous thing to be.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338142351_Female_Cycling_and_the_Discourse_of_Moral_Panic_in_Late_Victorian_Britain
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338142351_Female_Cycling_and_the_Discourse_of_Moral_Panic_in_Late_Victorian_Britain
Look at this bad girl, smoking her cigarette and mowing down unsuspecting gentlemen in her single-minded quest for liberation! Surely the bicycle is making a monster of our women!
Doctors speculated that women could damage their nether regions by putting too much pressure on them, & others thought the problem was that the placement/shape of the seat might cause too much pleasure! Of course there were inventions to help with this:
The sense of freedom afforded to women was obviously very dangerous to their virtue. After all, if you can wander too far from your home, you might be able to meet the wrong sort of man. You know the sort.
Bicycling would of course cause women to develop masculine muscles, body types, and even behavior. Oh, heaven forbid!
Watch out for bicycle face--the lines that result from having to maintain an expression of concentration as you hurtle through town, exacerbated by the fact that you can't bike with a parasol to protect you from the sun! Look at this poor soul:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_face
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_face
Also beware cyclomania, the addiction to bicycling and insatiable need for speed that also made you impulsive and disheveled.
So no, bicycles were not just a neutral tool that nobody worried about. Not by a long shot. And the fact that nobody corrected this error in the Social Dilemma makes me very skeptical about the rest of it...
