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 “let’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.

自行车是如此简单的机械，它花了我们这么长时间才搞出来显得有点儿愚蠢。你也许会想在发明轮子之后的下一步就是让我们瞧瞧当我们把两个轮子拼在一起的时候会发生什么事，但是自行车的确是结构复杂的机械。我们仍然不完全确定它的工作原理，幸运的是在19世纪晚期的时候得到了完善，在那个时候不知道事情的运作原理从未阻挡过任何人。这同样也发生在上层白人女生为其他上层白人女性争取权力的时期——只是开个玩笑， 这根本不是巧合。

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.

那时候，大多数人都是依赖于马车出行的，就好像是在一个很好的社区里有一个两居室的公寓和她在大家族里受到的尊敬，那不是一个女性依靠自己所能通常搞到的东西。这些东西一来是贵，再就是因为过去没有意义，如果在那时一个女性有一份工作，就意味着她很贫穷。马是男人的财产，而几乎只有女人不是男人的财产，所以未经允许就把马带出去，就像让你的孩子把你的车开到了Tijuana一样。但是自行车相对便宜，所以对于许多漂亮的女士而言，这在近期的印象中是第一次可以没有任何人能够物理性地阻止她们走过比邻居家更远距离。

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.

当然，掌握权力的男人立刻决定如果一个女人可以被允许去往任何她想去往的地方那么她们去往的地方将到处都是枯骨“，所以他们尽一切努力来破坏自行车热潮，从衣服开始。穿着衬裙骑自行车的确是难事一件，所以当时的女性更偏爱理性服装，包括灯笼裤（包括分叉裙子，也有出售）还有运动型紧身胸衣，因为在维多利亚时代假若你不穿紧身胸衣你就会被当作女巫烧死。
原创翻译：龙腾网 http://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处


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.

如果你看到了一个男性作同样的穿着，那么你大概会友好地引导他去参加的历史重演扮装秀，但是这某种程度上被批评为既有男子气概又放荡不羁，常常是所有的社会问题。这就是维多利亚时代的”蓝发和纹身“。整个社团的兴起是为了成立一支”国家级的反灯笼裤军团“，由那些拒绝和穿灯笼裤的女性约会的男性构成。公平地说，在当时的社会，你可以使得健康白男组成关于任何事的社团，但是整件事情在当时最张成了一件彻底的医疗事件，1895年，有医生在一次医学会议上宣布灯笼裤是‘可憎的事物”，尽管现代历学家在一个过时得像特弗龙的盘子里指出’没有任何理由被引用“。一些时候，医生只不过是在胡咧咧，因为他们知道我们肯定听他们的。

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.”

这里并不是说他们不试图提出骑自行车会使女性变丑变骚的医学理由，其中最有趣的是自行车脸。黑眼圈和持续骑车之后的疲惫，这些都可以是维多利亚时代发生的事，他们还声称骑行还可能会展致从阑尾炎到甲状腺肿的一切疾病，暴露在环境中可能会抑制或导致不规律或特别疼痛的月事。恰好让子宫幸福的做法就是待在家里洗袜子、

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.

但是真正的问题是，医学和其它意义上的，问题是自行车座碰了女性的那个部位，任何这样做的事情都可能使她们变得性感，或者更糟的是，性感之后又不性感了。抛开这表现出的对于高潮的可爱无知不谈，每个人都知道一旦有了相关经历了，那么每个人都会不停地用胯部摩擦所看到的一切，而且在你回过神儿来之前，我们都已饿死了。制造商甚至制造出了理论上可以骑在边上的自行车。以及在可能的问题的地方有着洞的座椅，正是你所想象的那种作用。这一切归根结底是男人们怕女人爱自行车胜过爱他们。

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.

所以这一切是怎么解决的？并没有解决。虽然苏珊曾经说过没有什么能比自行车更能解放女性，但是在世纪之交的时候，自行车仍然短命。

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，汽车来临了，富有的白人女性认为她们和其他人一样的优秀并且抛弃了她们的自行车——出于同样的原因我们之中的大多数人都在16岁的时候停止骑自行车了。显然，汽车拥有所有自行车没有缺点——汽车仍然是昂贵的物品，到今天而言，汽车文化被愚蠢的性别化了，但是，好吧，空调系统是它自己的一种解放，不是吗？