Bicycles are such apparently simple contraptions that it seems kind of dumb that it took us so long to come up with them. You’d think the next step after the invention of the wheel would be “l(fā)et’s see what happens when we put two of ‘em together,” but bikes are actually complicated pieces of machinery, and we’re still not entirely sure how they work. Luckily, they were perfected in the late 19th century, a time when not knowing how things worked never stopped anybody. It also happened to coincide with a period when upper-class white women accomplished a lot for the rights of other upper-class white women — and just kidding, that’s not a coincidence at all.

自行車是如此簡單的機(jī)械，它花了我們這么長時間才搞出來顯得有點兒愚蠢。你也許會想在發(fā)明輪子之后的下一步就是讓我們瞧瞧當(dāng)我們把兩個輪子拼在一起的時候會發(fā)生什么事，但是自行車的確是結(jié)構(gòu)復(fù)雜的機(jī)械。我們?nèi)匀徊煌耆_定它的工作原理，幸運的是在19世紀(jì)晚期的時候得到了完善，在那個時候不知道事情的運作原理從未阻擋過任何人。這同樣也發(fā)生在上層白人女生為其他上層白人女性爭取權(quán)力的時期——只是開個玩笑， 這根本不是巧合。

At that point, most people still relied on horse-drawn carriages to get around, and much like a two-bedroom apartment in a nice neighborhood and her extended family’s respect today, that wasn’t usually something a woman could just own by herself. They were expensive, and because the past made no sense, if a woman had a job back then, it meant she was poor. The horses were the men’s property, and women were only barely not their property, so taking the horses out without permission was like your preteen child taking your car to Tijuana. But bicycles were relatively cheap, so for a lot of fancy ladies, it was the first time in recent memory that no one could physically stop them from going farther than the neighbor’s house.

那時候，大多數(shù)人都是依賴于馬車出行的，就好像是在一個很好的社區(qū)里有一個兩居室的公寓和她在大家族里受到的尊敬，那不是一個女性依靠自己所能通常搞到的東西。這些東西一來是貴，再就是因為過去沒有意義，如果在那時一個女性有一份工作，就意味著她很貧窮。馬是男人的財產(chǎn)，而幾乎只有女人不是男人的財產(chǎn)，所以未經(jīng)允許就把馬帶出去，就像讓你的孩子把你的車開到了Tijuana一樣。但是自行車相對便宜，所以對于許多漂亮的女士而言，這在近期的印象中是第一次可以沒有任何人能夠物理性地阻止她們走過比鄰居家更遠(yuǎn)距離。

Of course, the men in power immediately decided that if women were allowed to go wherever they wanted, where they would go was “up and down on a lot of boners,” so they did everything they could to undermine the bicycle craze, starting with the clothes. It’s really hard to ride a bike in a petticoat, so cycling women began favoring “rational clothes,” including bloomers (or “divided skirts,” as they were sold) and “sport corsets,” because suggesting that Victorian women just not wear corsets could get you burned as a witch.

當(dāng)然，掌握權(quán)力的男人立刻決定如果一個女人可以被允許去往任何她想去往的地方那么她們?nèi)ネ牡胤綄⒌教幎际强莨恰?，所以他們盡一切努力來破壞自行車熱潮，從衣服開始。穿著襯裙騎自行車的確是難事一件，所以當(dāng)時的女性更偏愛理性服裝，包括燈籠褲（包括分叉裙子，也有出售）還有運動型緊身胸衣，因為在維多利亞時代假若你不穿緊身胸衣你就會被當(dāng)作女巫燒死。

If you saw a dude dressed like that, you’d kindly direct him to the historical reenactment drag show, but it was decried as somehow both masculinizing and trampy and generally everything wrong with society. It was the “blue hair and tattoos” of the Victorian era. Entire formal societies sprang up with the intention of growing into a “national anti-bloomer brigade,” consisting of men who “refused to associate with any woman who wore bloomers.” To be fair, you could get wealthy white men to form a society around just about anything back then, but the whole thing blew up into a downright medical concern, with doctors at one medical convention in 1895 declaring bloomers an “abomination,” though modern historians note in a pan as dead as Teflon that “no medical reason was cited.” Sometimes, doctors just say stuff because they know we listen to them.

如果你看到了一個男性作同樣的穿著，那么你大概會友好地引導(dǎo)他去參加的歷史重演扮裝秀，但是這某種程度上被批評為既有男子氣概又放蕩不羈，常常是所有的社會問題。這就是維多利亞時代的”藍(lán)發(fā)和紋身“。整個社團(tuán)的興起是為了成立一支”國家級的反燈籠褲軍團(tuán)“，由那些拒絕和穿燈籠褲的女性約會的男性構(gòu)成。公平地說，在當(dāng)時的社會，你可以使得健康白男組成關(guān)于任何事的社團(tuán)，但是整件事情在當(dāng)時最張成了一件徹底的醫(yī)療事件，1895年，有醫(yī)生在一次醫(yī)學(xué)會議上宣布燈籠褲是‘可憎的事物”，盡管現(xiàn)代歷學(xué)家在一個過時得像特弗龍的盤子里指出’沒有任何理由被引用“。一些時候，醫(yī)生只不過是在胡咧咧，因為他們知道我們肯定聽他們的。

That’s not to say they didn’t try to come up with medical reasons cycling would make women ugly and slutty, the funniest of which was “bicycle face.” Doctors warned that their little girl bodies were no match for the “overexertion, the upright position on the wheel and the unconscious effort to maintain one’s balance” of cycling, resulting in withered lips, under-eye circles and a constant “expression of weariness,” all of which are more likely the result of living in Victorian times. They also claimed that cycling could cause everything from appendicitis to goiters and exposure to the elements “may suppress or render irregular and fearfully painful the menses.” It just so happened that the key to a happy uterus was “staying home and washing my socks.”

這里并不是說他們不試圖提出騎自行車會使女性變丑變騷的醫(yī)學(xué)理由，其中最有趣的是自行車臉。黑眼圈和持續(xù)騎車之后的疲憊，這些都可以是維多利亞時代發(fā)生的事，他們還聲稱騎行還可能會展致從闌尾炎到甲狀腺腫的一切疾病，暴露在環(huán)境中可能會抑制或?qū)е虏灰?guī)律或特別疼痛的月事。恰好讓子宮幸福的做法就是待在家里洗襪子、

But the real problem, medically and otherwise, was that bicycle seats touched ladies’ no-no bads, and anything that does that runs the risk of making them horny, or worse, horny and then not horny anymore. Leaving aside the adorable ignorance of the clitoral orgasm this displays, everyone knows that once you experience one, you start rubbing your crotch on everything you see, and before you know it, we’ve all starved to death. Manufacturers went so far as to build bicycles that could be (theoretically, at least) ridden side-saddle and seats with holes in them at the potentially offending location, which worked about as well as you’d expect. What it all came down to is that men were really, really scared that women would like their bikes more than them.

但是真正的問題是，醫(yī)學(xué)和其它意義上的，問題是自行車座碰了女性的那個部位，任何這樣做的事情都可能使她們變得性感，或者更糟的是，性感之后又不性感了。拋開這表現(xiàn)出的對于高潮的可愛無知不談，每個人都知道一旦有了相關(guān)經(jīng)歷了，那么每個人都會不停地用胯部摩擦所看到的一切，而且在你回過神兒來之前，我們都已餓死了。制造商甚至制造出了理論上可以騎在邊上的自行車。以及在可能的問題的地方有著洞的座椅，正是你所想象的那種作用。這一切歸根結(jié)底是男人們怕女人愛自行車勝過愛他們。

So how did all of this get resolved? It didn’t, really. Although no less a luminary than Susan B. Anthony once said that bicycles had “done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world,” the cycling craze of the turn of the century was extremely short-lived.

所以這一切是怎么解決的？并沒有解決。雖然蘇珊曾經(jīng)說過沒有什么能比自行車更能解放女性，但是在世紀(jì)之交的時候，自行車仍然短命。

Soon enough, cars happened, and rich white ladies thought they were just as bitchin’ as everyone else and ditched their bikes — for the same reasons most of us stopped riding bikes when we were 16. Obviously, cars have all the downsides that bikes don’t — they were and still are much more expensive, and to this day, car culture is stupidly gendered — but, well, air-conditioning is its own kind of liberation, isn’t it?

很快，汽車來臨了，富有的白人女性認(rèn)為她們和其他人一樣的優(yōu)秀并且拋棄了她們的自行車——出于同樣的原因我們之中的大多數(shù)人都在16歲的時候停止騎自行車了。顯然，汽車擁有所有自行車沒有缺點——汽車仍然是昂貴的物品，到今天而言，汽車文化被愚蠢的性別化了，但是，好吧，空調(diào)系統(tǒng)是它自己的一種解放，不是嗎？