Have you ever seen a woman riding a bike?
Hello everyone! It’s taken me a little while to digest the coverage of the Tuesday Night Bike Ride in last week’s Tucson Weekly. While I am happy that the Weekly decided to come out and get involved in the ride, and offer a supportive voice for the ride’s continuing autonomy from police escort, the invisibility of the women cyclists in this article is very disappointing. I’m sure it was apparent to all of us that the article failed to include more than one interview with a woman involved with the ride and did not feature a single photograph of any of the women involved. This is disappointing not only because women have been dedicated to this ride and actively involved in supporting it and advocating for it to continue, but also because people who are not familiar with the ride may not want to come if they think it is nothing more than another boys club.
The article also described our friend Varo as the “mascot” of the ride. This is tokenism and is offensive. What should be said is that the cyclists of the Tuesday Night Bike Ride support Varo as a participant in the ride and as a friend in his dealings with the Tucson Police Department after they singled him out at the ride a few weeks ago and arrested him for “not obeying an officer.” But this is not what the article said, and the given description is something that again could discourage people who were introduced to the Tuesday Night Community Bike Ride through this article from attending.
For anyone who is feeling unsure, we are all there- female, male, straight, queer, tall bike, trike, students, bums, working folk, parents, and kids. Everyone is welcome and it’s important that everyone is there!
Thank you Greta for the support on this. Check out the LTE section in this week’s Tucson Weekly for our comments.
-elizabeth
November 14th, 2007 at 2:52 pm
Excellent point Elizabeth! Oone of the many things I enjoy about the Tuesday Night Bike Ride is the camaraderie of other women cyclists.
I was the lone woman the Weekly interviewed, and I have my own bone to pick with them. Here’s the letter I sent the editor:
“I was pleased that the Weekly covered the Community Bike Ride, but I was sorry that your writer Mari Herreras cherry-picked my most idiotic comments and quoted them verbatim while she paraphrased the rest of what I said.
I apologize to your readers for my ugly and inarticulate language, and would like a chance to rephrase my point:
It seems absurd to me that the Community Bike Ride and Critical Mass rides are perceived to disrupt traffic and shut down streets. I believe they are the gentlest reminder of the peaceful presence of cyclists. If the hundreds of cyclists who ride every day as an alternative to driving were serious about civil disobedience and really wanted to snarl traffic, we would get off of our bicycles and drive instead, adding hundreds of cars to Tucson’s already congested streets and thousands of pounds of carbon to the atmosphere. The problems caused by the worst cyclists are nothing compared with the problems caused by the best drivers.
Remember when you’re out there driving around: bicycles are the solution, not the problem.
Janet K. Miller”
November 16th, 2007 at 1:47 pm
I thought your comments were the best part of the article Janet. I understand your concerns, but I loved the double F-bomb dropping! No regrets.
November 19th, 2007 at 3:44 pm
On the bright side the article led myself and probably hundreds of others to this website – no thanks to the fact that the Weakly printed the URL without the “www” which doesn’t work.
Since I work on campus I’ve seen the flyers for the Tuesday ride, but I’ve never been very big on group rides. Although it’s nice to see *someone* taking up a cause that everyone else seems to be trying very hard to ignore.
November 19th, 2007 at 5:06 pm
Sorry Scott, I fixed the “www” problem — it works without those magic letters now.
–Erik