Gender

Gender

By Lewis Gillham aka The Harley Dude

Looking back over the last hundred years of changing gender roles, we can easily mark the shifts in common perceptions of masculine/feminine identity: from the first response to Freud’s call for the end of sexual repression, through the rumble seat love of the 20’s, the road-ramblers of the Great Depression, Rosie the Riveter, the Brooks Brothers man, to the “liberated women” and “sensitive men” that emerged from some of the countercultural foment in the fabled years of the 1960s and 70s. More recently, men have sought to reassert a deep masculinity in the post feminist climate of the new millennium, blazing and following paths that range from Robert Bly’s mythopoetic, neo-Jungian drumming and howling through the fundamentalist-filled stadiums of Promise Keepers to the syncretistic balance John Eldredge has tried to strike in his best-selling Wild at Heart.So, what does any of this have to do with motorcycles? In a word, everything.In the time when war-weary men of the late 40s and early 50s sought security and found identity through marriage, mortgage, and membership in the growing American Middle Class common culture, a relatively small incident in Hollister, California, made headlines in Life magazine and inspired what many would call the first of a seemingly interminable series of biker flicks – The Wild Ones. Marlon Brando’s film persona moved slightly further out - from that of salt-of-the-earth Stanley Kowalski, whom he had played in Tennessee Williams’ Streetcar Named Desire—to the existentially troubled, but physically and metaphysically free, eponymous antihero Johnny. Johnny’s rebellion – expressed most memorably in the Socratic dialogue “What are you rebelling against?” “What have you got?” is nihilistic only if isolated from the limiting roles to which post-war masculinity itself was confined. Indeed, what did men have?  Conformity and responsibility to a very gray world of machines -- industrial,  economic, and social -- that enclose us: the factory, of course, but also the office cubicle; the mass-produced business suit; the suburban cul-de-sac; and maybe most to the point, the respectable four-door sedan.  Thus, the matrix of the so-called nanny government, sheltering her little boys from harm and from any unneeded risk is really The Mother Machine.The motorcycle, by contrast, is held by is rider – not insignificantly, between the legs, knees on the tank – and is thus a very different kind of woman from mom.When Kathy, Johnny’s love interest in The Wild One, says to him, “I’ve never ridden a motorcycle before. It’s fast. It scared me, but it felt good. Is that what you do?” the sexual metaphor is both obvious and laughable, but more enduring five decades later are the other dimensions with which her question reverberates: What is it a man does? What is it, now, after five decades of sexual revolution, liberation, and deconstruction of what postmodernists self-consciously call “gender, as distinct from sex,” that characterizes the masculine? The feminine?In “The Art of the Motorcycle: Outlaws, Animals, and Sex Machines,” Ted Polhemus has argued that the cultural icons of leather, tattoos, scruffy hair and flowing beards, and body piercing which emerged first in the early post-war biker culture extolled in The Wild One are really the last plumage – perhaps the only one enduring through the last half-century – of the ancient and wider-than-human reality of The Peacock Male.Might we also say that Kathy sang the swan-song of the equally repressed “female eunuch,” as Germaine Greer eventually named the post-war wife of the corporate man? A woman whose proper skirt and sweater set could, by analogy, be replaced by the tank top and leather pants of the biker babe, legs wrapped around her driver, as his wrap the machine that moves them both?Moreover, women are no longer confined to the role of pillion – or some less savory term – for non-steering passenger. In the last five years women are purchasing motorcycles and acquiring operator’s licenses in record numbers. How will this change the roles of men and women – both those who ride and, through the influence of popular media – those who don’t – in the next fifty years?In this show, and in some shows to come, we’ll explore the role of women – and, of course, of their male counterparts – in riding.