Cycling Doesn’t Harm Women’s Sexual Experiences But It Might Cause Self-Pleasuring in a Field of Flowers*

*Not to be coy but I am trying to stick with words that won’t get us thrown off Facebook.

I love Bicycling magazine’s gradual move to becoming a more inclusive place. I especially like the work of Selene Yeager. She’s the best thing about Bicycling magazine. (I’m a big fan)

And I was really happy to see this story,  Cycling Doesn’t Harm Women’s Sexual Health, Study Finds.

It settles a question that’s been around forever, like since back when doctors worried that cycling caused women to masturbate excessively and possibly caused our uteruses to collapse. See Bicycles: Making good women go bad since the 1800s. See also Vibrating bike seats and the female orgasm and Bike seats, speed, and sexual depravity.

Even in 2012, stories like this were making the news: Riding bikes harmful to female sexual health

But, yay! The new study looked at the experiences of more than three thousand women and found only good news. Here’s this snippet from the Bicycling magazine story.

Two months after the biggest study to date assured men that, contrary to decades of misinformation, cycling won’t kill their erections, women can welcome some good news of their own. The largest study of its kind just reported that cycling had no negative impact on the sexual and urinary function of even the most active women riders. What’s more, women who clocked the highest mileage showed better sexual function than their non-cycling peers.

“Turns out the women who biked more frequently tended to report better experiences in the bedroom. “We found that lifetime miles ridden was associated with better sexual function, as measured by a common, validated questionnaire,” researcher Thomas W. Gaither, a UCSF medical student, said in a press release.

Good news for women who ride.

One question for Bicycling magazine: Why this image? First, not exactly an image of woman who rides her bikes a lot. Second, it looks like she hopped off her bike to pleasure herself in the field. Am I the only person this thought occurred to? (I actually know that’s not true since a Guelph faculty member and friend came up to me in a meeting and said that she hasn’t stopped laughing since she saw the photo with the story. She says she’s going to look at women laying bedside their bikes differently from now on.)

Also, also, the caption: “Women who ride bikes tend to have better experiences riding, well, other things.”