I enrolled in a Master’s programme last year and my institute’s campus is beautiful and massive. It’s a residential campus, and the hostels and academic blocks are apart by some distance. So we use bicycles to ride around the campus.
While going in and around the campus, I observed something usual that goes unnoticed. The girls mostly use bicycles with a front basket, while the boys don’t. There are girls who use cycles without a basket; however, no boy uses one with a basket, though it is helpful to carry useful things while on our way.
The probable reason that boys usually do not use a bicycle with a basket is that it is given feminine attributes. This thought invokes the idea of women and fragility that is inherent in people’s opinions. It suggests that only women need to alleviate the heaviness of things from their shoulders or hands, while men are built stronger to carry their own things, their shoulders not hurting with heavy bags.
This highlights the perception of women in people’s minds: frail as they are, women are not capable of carrying weight as efficiently as men can; men are physically better than women.
Even if some men would want to have a front basket or feel the need for it, they would not attach one to their bicycles. The thought of getting teased would certainly make them think twice before attaching one. Trying to keep up with society’s idea of ‘maleness’ thus becomes a kind of social barrier for them The male psyche of not using things that are associated with feminine attributes and the whole point of ‘baskets’ being feminine is a social construct.
A kind of hypocrisy that society follows is that women have the choice of riding any type of bicycle they want and wouldn’t be teased for it; however, men cannot ride around with cycles termed as ‘feminine’. The entire usefulness of a cycle with a basket has become gendered in most societies. The stereotyping of such useful commodities should be avoided and the youth can certainly derail such stereotypes. Men can use the basket because of its usefulness or simply because they want to. For instance, when you are already running late for classes, you can just drop off the load of your bag in the basket and ride freely as fast as you can and reach in time obviously keeping safety in mind and escape your professor’s frown.
p.sannyashi@iitg.ac.in
