PEDALPHILIA
Within a historically patriarchal society, feminine sexuality has often remained obscure. Lacking obvious visual cues upon arousal, “normal” women have been socially and medically classified as having less sexual desire than overtly stimulated men. “All healthy women, according to traditional medical view, desire penetration by males and are sexually incomplete and unsatisfied unless so penetrated.”1 With the beginning of the twentieth century, the development of two seemingly disparate inventions, the bicycle and the electrical vibrator, changed the lives of women forever. These machines of desire were prominent in unveiling the modern sphere of female individualism and sexual liberation: sports and exercise, personal transportation, the invention of bloomers, the discarding of the corset, and discreet and efficient autoeroticism.
The intention of my ongoing project, Pedalphilia, is to “enlighten” society about desire in a positive and often humorous way.
The two powerful icons aforementioned are the premise for Merry Saddles™, my assumed company specializing in the realm of erotic cycling supplies. Under the pretense of Merry Saddles™, I have proceeded to investigate intellections of desire, the female fetish, voyeurism, and the ambiguous interface of sexual attraction and bicycles. Specifically, this peculiar space can be referred to as Pedalphilia, the erotic attraction or sexual contact with bicycles. My project exhibition, Pedalphilia, featured fine art “products” from Merry Saddles™ varying from nineteenth-century advertisement-style lithographic posters and hand-bound erotic artist books to life-size, three-dimensional “bedroom bicycles” adorned with fanciful costumes and various erotic attachments.
An avid cyclist for the past five years, I began to create art about one of my favorite objects: the bicycle. Shifting from an earlier body of work based on spirituality and Eastern philosophies, I produced the bicycle installation, I Love to Ride My Bicycle. Serving as a shrine for paying homage to a “two-wheeled god,” this piece was a celebration of the bicycle’s power to elevate the human body to a transcendental state of awareness. Within the gallery the viewer could pedal atop the bicycle while simultaneously triggering a cassette tape that narrated “first bicycle stories” and “bicycle crash stories” from random interviews. A batik fiber piece hung directly in front of the bicycle to serve as a point of meditational focus, dawning a glorified bicycle adorned with colorful beads and sequin rims. Many viewers walked away from this interactive bicycle piece with a sense of nostalgia and a renewed desire to ride their bicycles. The entire installation screamed, “Ride me for ultimate bliss!”
On my journey of self-discovery via bicycling and artistic practice, I began to explore the history of feminism in relation to bicycles. Upon reading instances of taboo circumstances concerning feminine arousal and/or internal damage to the female reproductive system due to cycling, my thoughts began to conspire, envisioning a truly arousing bicycle. With endless ideas flooding into my mind, my pornographic imagination took hold and steered my work full force into this new, libertine direction. Being raised within a patriarchal household, not to mention the surrounding society, I rebelled against sexism at an early age. Thus, my impetus for creating this body of work was powerful and undeniable. I knew that I was a feminist, but I was not quite sure what that meant.
Do feminists hate men? What are the different kinds of feminism, and why are they different? Do men like feminists?
Feminism had always been a mystery to me and had never been simply defined throughout my twenty-two years of education. Do feminists hate men? What are the different kinds of feminism, and why are they different? Are all women entitled to be feminists simply due to their biological makeup? Do men like feminists?
A long awaited introduction to feminism was delivered to me in an exceptional art history seminar during my final year of graduate school. The focus of Dr. Karen Kleinfelder’s class, From Cartesian Dualism to the Cyborg Manifesto: The Mind/Body Problem, was learning how to think beyond dualisms that have existed in our society for centuries. Assigned readings, such as Refiguring Bodies by Elizabeth Grosz, investigated differences of feminist positions in relation to mind/body issues. New to feminism, I found it quite difficult to wade through the academic jargon within Grosz’s text. More ideas that related to my work, like Cartesian dualism and the cyborg, were also examined intensively during my studies in Kleinfelder’s class. Moreover, musings about “desiring machines” and “bodies without organs” by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari brought new meaning to my work, describing human desire as a sort of flowing machine.2 However, I was still unclear as to exactly what feminism was and how it applied to me.
Most people have received all of their knowledge about the feminist movement from capitalist patriarchal mass media.
Through extensive research I finally found an excerpt by feminist theorist and cultural critic bell hooks [sic], and it all made sense. “Simply put, feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.”3 She explains in her book, Feminism is for Everybody, that most people have received all of their knowledge about the feminist movement from capitalist patriarchal mass media. Since the 1970s, mass media has portrayed women’s liberation by merely focusing “on the freedom to have abortions, to be lesbians, to challenge rape and domestic violence.”4 Along with many other women and men that I have known, I had definitely received this dose of poisonous feminist backlash from mass media. bell hooks proceeds to clarify the dualism that resides within feminism: reformist vs. revolutionary feminists. Reformist feminists seek to disrupt the existing system and “break free of male domination in the workforce and be more self-determining in their lifestyles.”5 Conversely, revolutionary feminists want to transform the existing system and “bring an end to patriarchy and sexism.”6 Hesitating to classify myself within a group of any kind, I propose that I tend to lean toward the latter camp, as ending sexism seems to cover all bases of feminist contention.
Armed with knowledge and persistence, I produced and continue to produce feminist artworks using the bicycle as the primary symbol for liberation. The intention of my ongoing project, Pedalphilia, is to “enlighten” society about desire in a positive and often humorous way. Poster propaganda was the primary medium of choice in which dildos attached to bicycle seats began to erect themselves in my lithographic prints. Subsequently, I designed hand bound erotic artist books, echoing literary smut that has been distributed throughout underground circles for ages. These books share intimate stories about my fetishistic alter ego and her desire for bicycles as sexual objects. Additional bicycle perversions surfaced in my imagination, bringing about the flamboyant Merry Saddles™ bicycles parading in custom lingerie and bicycles that have been physically transformed to accommodate intimate riding situations for couples. Theoretically stated, the bicycle has served as a loaded signifier within my work, oscillating between transcendentalism, feminism, and gender issues. Simply put, I love to ride my bicycle(s).
