Bicycle Face
In case you’re unaware back in the 19th century Bicycle Face was diagnosed as a dangerous health condition by doctors. Of course we now know that’s bogus.
However what doctors back then totally missed was the face that came before Bicycle Face:
If you ask me Ennui Face was the real health scare for women. No wonder what came next was a real shock.
I wondered if you saw that link on Twitter, I was hoping you would do something on it.
Apart perhaps from masturbation, few things more starkly show up the essential idiocy of “expert medical opinion” than the arrant nonsense that’s been written about women and cycling.
In 1890s Holland, when bicycles were beginning to catch on among the male population, the country’s physicians – all but one of them men – supported by the Dutch Reformed Church were dead-set against women riding bicycles on the entirely evidence-free grounds that contact with the saddle would produce illicit sexual exstasy outside of wedlock, with the result that the polders would soon be littered with Dutchwomen moaning in extra-marital orgasm, many of them no doubt going on to give birth to two-headed calves, children with wheels instead of legs and other such monsters. In the end (the story goes) the main Dutch bicycle manufacturer of those days, Fongers, had to hire two out-of-work male actors to dress up as women and pedal round the platteland dorps in order to show the village women that it waspossible to ride a bicycle without serious risk to their health.
Even so, I believe that until quite recently there was one extreme-Calvinist village, Staphorst, where women were liable to be stoned if they rode a bicycle.
There was also one (I think) French invention to preserve female modesty, which was a side-saddle bicycle propelled by working a sort of sewing-machine treadle to one side. It never caught on.
NEVER cease to get a great good natured lift and smile when I read bikeyface!!