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Ben’s First Bike

May 8th, 2006 Caroline

There’s a lovely essay by Rebecca Steinitz in Andrea Buchanan’s new anthology, It’s a Girl (more on the anthology later this week). Called “Tough Girls,” the essay opens by describing bike shopping for her four year-old daughter and being confronted at the bike shop, surprisingly, by contemporary American gender stereotypes. Boys and girls both ride bikes, of course, but there was a pink one and a blue one: one for girls, one for boys. “Luckily,” she writes, “the bike clearly meant for boys [black and blue with green pawprints] could be framed as neutral, especially to a four-year-old girl who just wanted off her tricycle.”

I was thinking about the essay this weekend when we went bike-shopping with Ben. We walked into the store and he climbed onto the first bike he saw, announcing, “This one!” It was pink. It might even have had pink streamers attached to the handlebars. I did that little mental check you do when your child tests social conventions: can I back this up? My little boy on a pink bike? And of course I could. My hairclip-wearing, lipstick-loving boy is too young to know how fixed, and how limited, our culture’s ideas are about gender, and I guess in some ways I’m too old to care.
The pink bike, in the end, was too small, so he’s now the proud owner of a blue and yellow bike with yellow flames on the frame and a banana-eating monkey on the handlebars. And all he wants to do is ride his bike.

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