What's stopping teenage girls from riding bikes?

squired

One of the common arguments I hear from women against cycling is that they don't want to get "muscular masculine legs". My 16 year old cousin is desperate to avoid anything that would make her less feminine and attractive. Her whole life at the moment is based around boys it seems, so anything that she perceives as potentially making her less attractive is a big no-no.

When boys hit their teenage years they start reading magazines like Men's Health. They see guys like Ronaldo with killer bodies. For a guy to look like that there is only one answer - exercise. You do not get a six pack from just watching what you eat. In contrast, girls seem (and I can only give my perception here as I'm not a girl) to read magazines that have little content about keeping in shape through exercise. The big difference is that a girl can eat well (or diet occasionally) and have boys falling all over her as her body shape isn't based on muscle tone. She doesn't need to exercise to look good.

There are some great potential female role models in cycling that could be used to attempt to get girls on bikes. One who is not that far beyond her teenage years, that jumps to mind, is Lizzie Armistead. Having said that, a couple of photos of celebs like Jordan and Cheryl Cole on bicycles would probably do more for female teenage cycling than anything else.

cee

so to re-iterate my question from earlier....

like LIT...I too noticed at school that the majority of girls in the class did not take part in PE lessons, for some reasonable reasons, but mostly lame excuses.

Is the problem really just cycling....or is it sport in general?

if you can't get a girl to play hockey/squash/badminton/whatever in a compulsory class....how the feck do you get them to choose a bicycle as a mode of transport!

Some of their parents even arranged the excuse for them....i.e. girlie A cannot do pe today...soz!

*edit after site recovered!
when boys forgot their kit, they got a choice 'the spare kit' or do it in your pants.

...this was enough of a deterent (especially in swimming classes) so that boys very rarely had the usual lamo excuses.

i am not suggesting this was appropriate even for boys...but how do you force pupils to take part? i do not know that you can.

Porgy

The genders do seem to have polarised a bit in the latest generation of teenagers - back in the 80s i thought we were on the verge of abolishing gender difference altogether (well, nearly :oops: ).

I noticed this obsession with pink with my own daughter - and it seemed to be peer pressure. Girls my age certainly never seemed to be particularly interested in pink - and I don;t remember that much pink stuff in the shops back then - other than Pink Panther bars

Has everyone become really sexually insecure in the last 15 years?

Flasheart

My 13 yr old daughter was never into pink ..lilac and lavendar ...meh :roll:

deptfordmarmoset

Porgy wrote:

The genders do seem to have polarised a bit in the latest generation of teenagers - back in the 80s i thought we were on the verge of abolishing gender difference altogether (well, nearly :oops: ).

I noticed this obsession with pink with my own daughter - and it seemed to be peer pressure. Girls my age certainly never seemed to be particularly interested in pink - and I don;t remember that much pink stuff in the shops back then - other than Pink Panther bars

Has everyone become really sexually insecure in the last 15 years?

Your avatar seems partial to pink, though

That seems to ring true to me - up to maybe the mid-80s there appeared to be a homogenising trend in which women in general moved away from standard ideas of the feminine. Then came a point where a number of prominent feminists changed tack and, while holding onto whatever scraps of equality they'd gained in the workplace, began to embrace the feminine again. It was no longer an ''all-the-same kind of equality'', the new direction was ''different but still equal.'' I'm not at all sure whether this replacement doctrine has been a success - but as a man, I have little say in the matter.

An observation on the current state of gender roles: earlier this year the primary school where I was working had a ''dress as you wish'' day. Down in the reception/year 1 classes, some children dressed up individually in a home-made kind of way, a significant number, however, came to school in ready-made outfits. Power-rangers and spidermen to the left, pink princesses to the right. It seemed to show a kind of default role division - a very marked division - between male and female. And you can buy these delineated roles - hyper-masculine and hyper-feminine - for 4 and 5-year olds in the supermarkets.