I don't deny that a lot of riding--especially without proper conditioning or an ill-fitting bike--can cause pain, numbness and other problems.
I also don't deny that long hours in the saddle--especially if that saddle is wrong for the rider--can cause discomfort and even dysfunction in the genital area.
But it seems that every few years someone manages to whip up hysteria about how cycling causes sterility or worse. Back in the day, some of us used to joke that those folks were right and we indeed had "bike balls."
Yes, cycling can make you radioactive down there! ;-)
They ride bikes together.
Oh, and those bikes are s-s-scary: They’ve got fat wheels and look like Hell’s Angels motorcycles without the motors.
And the kids who ride them—T-they ride in packs and make a lot of noise. A-and, you know, they pop wheelies and stuff.
They’re-they’re teenagers. And they’re...
If you were in New York thirty years ago, you can fill in that last ellipsis. Let’s just say they’re, um, darker than I am—and use words I didn’t learn in Spanish 101.
It seems that every generation or so, some j-school grads with too much time on their hands find new ways to whip up hysteria about groups of urban teenage boys being, well, groups of urban teenage boys. The latest, it seems, is something that’s been dubbed the “bike-out.”
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| A Bike-Out?! Oh, my! |
Indignation over boys riding modern versions of “Choppers” or “Stingrays” has been ignited by a 74-year-old man who was out for a stroll when, he says, he was attacked by a group of “lawless” teenagers on bikes.
My purpose is not to doubt the man. One attack, however, does not a phenomenon make. I am reminded about the hysteria about “wilding” generated by the Central Park Jogger case.
That assault was indeed brutal. But a certain entrepreneur took it upon himself to take out full-page ads in which he demanded the death penalty for the alleged attackers: teenagers whose confessions, as it turned out, were coerced and who were finally released from prison on the cusp of middle age.
I am, of course, referring to Donald Trump. In his ad, he famously bellowed, "I hate them. I want to hate them."
One thing you have got to say for El Cheeto Grande: He knows how to play the media. Or, at least, he shows what one can do with the media if one has, say, a couple of billion lying around.
The "bike-outs" are as much a phantom phenomenon as "wilding" was, and their perpetrators were just as mythical as Hilary Clinton's "super predators." Those ghost stories (pun intended) involve urban teenage boys and young men who are black and Latino. The only difference between them, as far as I can tell, is that in one legend, the bogeyman show up on bicycles.
(Thanks to Eben Weiss for writing about the "Bike-Out" hysteria in Outside magazine.)
