....Like Your Bicycle Needs A Fish

Contrary to what many believe, it wasn't Gloria Steinem who said, "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle."  She herself admitted as much, and credited Irina Dunn, an Australian educator, journalist and politician with coining the phrase--which, as Ms. Dunn admits, was a "smart-arse" take on "Man needs God like a fish needs a bicycle."

Anyway, those fish will never know what they're missing. But, apparently, someone decided that his or her (or someone else's) bicycle needed a fish:

or two:

You really can buy anything on Amazon--whether it's for your fish, or your bicycle!

Who Needs What?

A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.

When I first heard that phrase, it was attributed to Gloria Steinem or Flo Kennedy.  Neither, though, has ever claimed authorship of it. Steinem, however,  once attributed it to Irene Dunn, who in turn says she was paraphrasing Charles Harris, an American psychologist who supposedly wrote "A man without faith is like a fish without a bicycle" in an article he wrote for the Swarthmore College newspaper while he was an undergraduate there during the 1950s.

But even Harris admitted that the expression probably existed long before then.  Indeed, an 1898 editorial in the Hartford Courant, a Connecticut newspaper, opined:

   The place [Aragon, Spain] didn't need an American consul any more than a cow needs a bicycle; for it had no trade with America and no American tourist ever dreamed of stopping there.  

Well, as Groucho Marx said, "You've got a point there.  Now why don't you go and put a hat over it."  I mean, a cow or a fish may not need a bicycle.  But so what?  Who's to say they can't have a bicycle if that's what they want?

Better yet--what if the fish wants to be a bicycle?

From Web Ecoist

What If The Fish Is--Or Was--A Bicycle?

A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.

Gloria Steinem popularized that expression in the early days of the modern feminist movement.  Many people believe she coined it, though she has never taken credit for doing so.

Whatever its origins, sometimes it seems that every woman in the world has uttered it--whether out loud or to herself--at some time or another.  I am no exception.  In fact, I muttered it more than a few times--without irony or sarcasm--when I was living as a man.  

Of course, people have substituted all sorts of things for "A woman" and "a man".  After I read Nietzsche, I inserted "People" and "God".  Later, I would modify the latter to "religion".  

In this depressing election cycle, we could say "This country needs Hillary/Trump" (take your pick).   

All right, I'll stop preaching politics.  After all, you didn't come to this blog for that, did you?

Instead, I'll come back to the fish-and-bicycle dilemma.  Perhaps a fish doesn't need a bicycle.  But does that mean a fish can't be a bicycle?

Maybe not.  But a pike or pickerel  can be made from bike bits.  At least, French sculptor Edouard Martinet pulled off that feat:

He has also made birds and insects from bike parts and other objects he's found.  

Think about them the next time you toss out that worn chain:  A bird or a bug or a fish might actually need your bike--your bike parts, anyway!