If you have ever wondered what it means when someone talks about gender being performed and produced, then look no further – I have the perfect example for you from my everyday life. I attended a one-day motorcycle training workshop for beginners in London, and my time there was fraught with moments that reinforced and created stereotypical gender and sexuality roles.
Gender is embedded into virtually every aspect of our lives, yet it often has such subtlety and pervasiveness that it mostly falls off our radar. Of course, there are times when gender is forced to the surface of our consciousness through highly clichéd and overtly gendered environments. As it turns out, a conventional motorcycle training day serves as one such environment.
I was there to get my license for scooter riding, a transport that I had thought was more gender-neutral than a motorbike – but I was clearly wrong about that. I was the only woman in the class of eight, the rest being predominantly teenage boys. As the instructor, a British veteran who had fought in Afghanistan, was teaching us about the rules and regulations of scooter riding, his words and metaphors took on a life of their own. It was probably most apparent to me because I was the only woman and his rhetoric was excluding me on this basis alone. Still, I found the force and agency of his language to be fascinating. It was literally making men out of those boys; it was replicating a certain type of masculinity right there in front of my eyes.
The trainer’s speech was solely geared towards the young men in the classroom. In his laid-back tone, he started off by telling us that we couldn’t carry our “girlfriends” on the back of the scooter, as our license didn’t allow for passengers. Then he talked about the benefits of wearing leather for a cyclist since it offered a level of protection from injuries that other materials don’t. Plus, he continued, it offers an undeniable sex appeal to girls. As an example, he said that when him and his mates go out for a drink, he pops on his leather jacket and the girls are drawn to him like a magnet.
Like any good teacher, he livened up the class with stories, captivating accounts of his accidents as well as his countless bruises and fractures. He told us about the time he had collided with a careless fellow and killed him. That story had the intended affect, startling us. He continued, “I then wrote an apology letter to his family… no I am joking, I didn’t. But it pissed me off that I had to fill in a bunch of paper work.” In his view, the victim didn’t deserve any sympathy because he had brought it on himself by being ‘so stupid’. He cautioned us, however, that we should be aware of the “lollipop ladies,” as ‘they take care of our kids’.
He then went on to talk about safety on the roads. “You have to leave two seconds between your bike and the front vehicle,” he said. But before the boys dozed off, he flashed on his experience as a soldier in Afghanistan. “I also had to count ‘1000, 2000’ before I jumped off the plane after my mate.” Our swiftness at roundabouts also needed to be soldier-like. Our decisions had to be made fast if we did not want to kill or be killed – just as diligent as he was in Afghanistan so not to be shot.
By drawing constant parallels between the danger on the roads and that of his fighting as a soldier in the British army, his metaphors and images generated a tough, fearless and unemotional masculinity. He became the ideal of what it means to be a man: someone who takes risks, endures pain and tragedies and potentially even death, a person who is unforgiving towards those he deems undeserving, a countryman who is heterosexual, probably promiscuous as well as patriotic and family loving.
As if all of this wasn’t enough, what summed up the gendered space most plainly was that the only toilet in the facility opened into the classroom and had a broken lock on the door. Needless to say, I didn’t use it and ended up dehydrated with a splitting headache…’Gender’ can indeed hurt.
