Back in May, Sam and I both wrote about grandmothers as athletes in the context of an amazing marathon swim by Amy Appelhans Gubser. At the time, Sam’s son Miles told her “All your athletic achievements could be so much more impressive if I had a kid.”
I struggle to think of myself as an athlete, despite all the positive self-talk. It is getting harder now that I’m retired and we are living through a miserable wet summer that has me unmotivated to go outside. And now I am about to be a grandmother.
A young couple standing on a dock at a lake. The man has one hand around his partner, and the other on her belly. Both are smiling.
I’m thrilled, but also wondering what that will do to my self-image and the preconceptions of people around me.
Will I continue wanting to do my own fitness things or will I turn to a pile of granny goo who just wants to play with the baby whenever I can? How can I adapt what I enjoy doing to incorporate the little one? When I do those activities with a baby (or toddler or child, eventually) will I still be seen as an independent person or just an extension/caregiver playing along? Will it matter what other people think, or can I be comfortable in my own skin?
In other words, can I be a little bit like Amy Appelhans Gubser, even if I never do an amazing marathon swim?
I went out for a ride with my big kid bike gang last night and once again was struck by the gender gap in our cycling group. Out of 24 people, only 7 were women. Sometimes, the disparities are even greater.
Part of our cycling group relaxing at the end of a ride.
It’s a pretty casual bunch of people mostly between the ages of about 30 and 60, and most of them are strong advocates for everyday cycling (a demographic that includes a lot of people who identify as women). So why aren’t the women out for a ride?
Among my friends, some of it boils down to child care. Even with a supportive partner, getting an evening away from the kids to go ride a bike can be difficult. If your kids are big enough to ride on their own, they may not be up to riding to a distant start point and home again after the ride. If they are younger, they might be easy to carry on a cargo bike, but their bedtime falls in the middle of the ride.
There may be other reasons keeping women away, or they don’t even know about our rides. Or they know and just aren’t comfortable joining us. I admit that I was intimidated about showing up for a ride around town with a bunch of strangers the first time I went.
If this happens to women who love riding bikes and use them for transportation every day, imagine what it’s like for women who are more fearful about their safety, more intimidated by harassment and close passes, or who simply don’t have the same opportunities as boys and men to ride bikes at all.
This Shifter YouTube video is an excellent summary of the issues, with their sources in the description.
Have you noticed similar disparities where you live? What has worked to help change that? I would love to hear your ideas.
I was late to the concept of the Fancy Women’s Bike Ride, which I joined for the first time last year. And now it’s ending, and I have very mixed feelings.
As Momentummag notes, “more than just a cycling event, FWBR symbolizes a celebration of women’s strength, unity, and resilience. It serves as a platform for reclaiming public spaces, promoting sustainable transportation, and challenging societal norms.” The ride has gone from a single event in Izmir Turkey to 200 cities in 30 countries.
That leaves out a lot of countries. The ability of women and girls to cycle varies widely around the world. I empathize with the desire of the founders to step away, but I would have loved to see their work continue. After all, “one of its most profound impacts, perhaps its most important, lies in its contribution to empowering women through cycling. By offering free cycling courses and promoting the simple act of riding a bike, FWBR has enabled countless women to challenge stereotypes, embrace their strength, and assert their independence. The movement’s slogan, “Be Women Be Visible,” encapsulates its mission to elevate the visibility of women in public spaces and advocate for inclusive urban planning and traffic management.” (Momentummag)
I am reading several books about city planning from a feminist perspective, and I help out with various women-led rides that focus on making streets safe for all ages. Those efforts to include and center women in alternative transportation and public spaces won’t end, but maybe they won’t continue to spread as quickly or as widely to places where they are desperately needed, without the joyful push of the Fancy Women Bike Ride.
Three women defying the patriarchy through cycling near Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2020. Photo: Zabihulla Habibi in Bicycling.com
Sam recently wrote about Amy Appelhans Gubser, her amazing swim and the way it was portrayed in the media. TL:DR it was bad. Lazy journalists treated it as a “human interest” story about an overweight grandmother who miraculously did a long swim.
Since I follow a lot of marathon swimmers and marathon swimming enthusiasts, the coverage I saw what quite different. Everyone was respectful (in awe) of what she achieved. No-one commented on her age, family status, weight or anything else. I assume it’s because women are very well represented in marathon swim records (which do not have separate categories for men and women) and extra weight may actually be an advantage when you are swimming for many hours in cold water. And they can understand just how tough that swim was, and that it wasn’t undertaken lightly by some kooky old lady who miraculously succeeded.
Here’s what Amy accomplished:
Golden Gate Bridge to SE Farallon Island
47.7 km (29.6 miles) in 17 hours, 3 minutes on 11 May 2024
First to complete route in outbound direction (mainland to island)
That’s impressive all by itself, but here’s what her friend and fellow marathon swimmer Simon Dominguez had to say:
“I am still marveling at Amy’s swim. What some might not know is why this is such a difficult swim so I thought I would tell you.
28.5 miles of open water swimming. A long way but there are other swims of the same distance that are not nearly as tough. Why is it so tough ? (and thanks for asking). Because of the following:
The cold While the temperature ranged from 48 to 57 degrees F, I know that it touched down at a low of 43 near the islands. 17+ hours of swimming in these temperatures should not be possible but were for Amy because of the work she put in training in very cold water for a number of years preparing for this swim. Also, you need to remember that the longer you swim, the more exhausted you get, the more you feel the cold. Add this to the fact that as you head out to the Farallones, the water temperature continues to drop so you get the double whammy of exhaustion and cold combining to make this an almost impossible undertaking.
The currents While Amy whipped out extremely quickly at the start of the swim on a strong ebb, she then had to fight a flood. Amy told me that she got stuck in place for over an hour at one stage as she fought the tide. And it was near the end of the swim when she was the most depleted. Truly amazing.
Sea creatures Luckily Amy did not encounter any men in grey suits but they are out there all year long. I have no doubt that she was watched while she was swimming. The Farallon Islands sit in the Red Triangle – the largest great white shark breeding ground in the world. Amy respects that she is a visitor in their world. This is not the first swim that Amy has done in shark inhabited waters.
I attempted this swim in 2015 and did not make it due to a shark encounter about three miles from the finish. I could not be happier that the first person to successfully complete this swim is the amazing Amy Appelhans Gubser. A fierce competitor who has no quit in her and who is the first person to put her hand up to help others in need.
I salute you Amy. I know you probably feel like you have gone 10 rounds with Mike Tyson. But your name will now go down in history as a true South End Rowing Club badass.”
Amy Appelhans Gubser showing off the badass T Shirt her husband brought her from Dublin, where he had been while she was doing her Farallon Island swim. Photo shared by Amy Appelhans Gubser on Facebook
Amy is well-known and respected as a long-time marathon swimmer. Her first major marathon swim was across the Strait of Gibraltar in 2015: 14.4 km in 4 hours. There have been many great swims since, and she was named one of the World’s 50 Most Adventurous Open Water Women in 2019 by the World Open Water Swimming Association.
But somehow all that pales in importance imparted to her status as a grandmother (sarcasm). Sam’s son Miles made me laugh by telling Sam “All your athletic achievements could be so much more impressive if I had a kid.” I have a feeling Amy would laugh at the absurdity of it too, secure in the knowledge that people who understand marathon swimming appreciate what she achieved.
Motherload is a movie about cargo bikes and the people who use them. It’s going to be shown as part of June Bike Month in Ottawa. I won’t be able to attend, so I watched it on-line. Here’s my review:
Given that it is a self-funded documentary about an arguably niche topic, I was not prepared for a joyful, feminist movie.
There is quite a bit about the development of cargo bikes in the USA, with acknowledgement of the huge role cargo bikes play in everyday life in much of the developing world.
There is also plenty about the links between cycling, suffragettes and feminism going back more than a century. There is recognition of the inequitable access to transportation in the USA, and how cargo bikes could make a difference for poor and racialized communities, if cycling safely was possible.
But it was also a film with joyful scenes of kids having fun riding in, on or beside cargo bikes. My friend Cassie said her family had ordered their cargo bike before seeing the movie back in 2020, but it reaffirmed that decision! For her, being able to bike as a parent means freedom, reliability, physical and mental wellness, fun, and allows her to feel like she’s doing something to address the climate crisis. She just wishes more people had access to safe routes and could see cargo bikes as a possibility in their lives.
Though most of the cargo bike users in the movie live in places where there’s no snow, lots of people use them year-round in all weather, in Canada.
People with their cargo bikes at a recent event in Ottawa. Cassie is riding her cargo bike in the bottom right photo.
If you can’t get to a showing of Motherload, you can watch it here (free, with commercials).
Last weekend, I participated in the first Kidical Mass Ride of the season in Ottawa. What is Kidical Mass? From their website, it’s an alliance of hundreds of organizations from Canada to Australia united by the vision that children and young people should be able to move around safely and independently on foot and by bike. Children who are active by bike and on foot from an early age remain so as adults.
So where does the feminism come it? @envirojen.bluesky.social, a safe cycling advocate in Halifax says: “If you’ve attended one of our (Kidical Mass) rides, then you’ll know that many of us were radicalized by pushing a stroller, or cycling with kids. Motherhood has certainly helped me flex my movement building muscles.”
This photo is actually from an anti-pipeline protest in 2016, but I have seen the same sign at many protests around women’s rights, and this one has a bicycle. The older woman in the picture has a sign attached to her mobility device that says “I can’t believe I still have to protest this shit”.
Change requires a mass movement. ‘Stop De Kindermoord’ in the Netherlands (1970s) and the ‘Baby Carriage Blockades’ in the USA (1950 & 60s) are historical examples of safe streets movements organized by parents, and in particular, mothers.
Historian Peter Norton, a professor at the University of Virginia, has been documenting how the movement for safe streets has largely been the work of mothers. He recently wrote about a protest in Montreal in April 1974, when about 70 parents, wearing black arm bands, marched to the office of Montreal’s traffic director, bearing funeral wreaths to present to him. They were calling attention to the deadly peril children faced on their walks to school. On paper, speed limits in school zones were 20 mph. In the absence of any signs near most school zones, however, motorists drove much faster. The parents demanded signs. The marchers were led by three mothers whose children had been injured by drivers. When the three arrived at the traffic director’s office he refused to see them, and had police escort them out. Before leaving, the women left their funeral wreaths for him at his office door.
Black and white image from the Montreal Star newspaper showing women carrying funeral wreaths, protest signs, and their children as they march in pairs.
Fifty years later the fight continues. As Cassie Smith, one of the Kidical Mass organizers in Ottawa says: Even now women have less access to cars and more caregiving responsibility giving us particular insight into the injustice of space.
This week, an eleven year-old child died while riding his bike in a supposedly safe area near his school. He was the friend of the son of one of my colleagues.
I got into cycling advocacy because of climate change and to have more safe access to the public space, especially for people on bikes, and because cycling is fun and practical. I was aware of some of the equity issues around cycling and active transit more generally, but I have learned a lot since, and now I’m angry. I hope I won’t still have to be protesting this shit for years to come, but I’m fully prepared to do so if necessary.
CW: Mention of loss and complex family relationships on Father’s Day
Today is Father’s Day in the US, Canada, India, China and a bunch of other countries. When we celebrate it varies, just as it does for Mother’s Day. How we celebrate it varies also, according to community and family traditions, proximity of family members, relationships among family members, and where we are along the family life trajectory. In short, Father’s Day rarely reflects the simplified messages that we see in cards.
I’m don’t know why so many Father’s Day cards use dogs in human roles to issue greetings, but whatever. They are kind of cute, though.
For my sister and me, Father’s Day has always been complicated. Our father didn’t teach us how to fish, or play chess, or make a bookcase, or do those things that movie-dads (and maybe some others?) seem to excel at. Our parents went through multiple marriages, resulting in both distance and complexity in family relationships. Father’s Day was, at best, awkward for us. We really didn’t know what to do or celebrate because all the other days of the year didn’t give us a clue about what fathers do for and with their children.
My father died young and a long time ago, making Father’s Day complex in a different way– about regret, loss, and wondering what I had actually missed by having that relationship.
Today, though, I am not feeling that sense of loss. I’ve been visiting my family for the past two weeks, seeing a lot of relatives. I’ve been seeing and hearing about the fathers in my family– uncles and cousins who have been attending to their children in ways they feel like they can and should contribute. From school work to boogie-boarding in the surf, these men are doing what they know how to do and learning how to do what they’re not good at, all geared toward teaching and loving and making the world as safe and wonderful as they can for their kids.
Once I took all this in, I looked around and saw how fathering happens in my family. My sister and I do these things– for each other and for her children. I’m the one who takes the lead on travel plans and outdoorsy activities. I do the major gear-buying (read bikes at every age) and opportunities to use them (rail trails for the win). My sister teaches the kids about money– how to manage it, how to save it– and about living in the world of grown-up things to do (like oil changes, bill paying, house maintenance, etc.)
We also do this for each other, providing structure and security when it’s needed, helping each other learn or get more comfortable or just push through things that are hard. Travel planning isn’t my sister’s forte, but I love it. Doing car things for my car isn’t mine (see? I can’t even word it precisely…) but she helps me, even from afar.
Elizabeth and I agree on the importance of planning ahead, the necessity of contingency/back-up plans, the simple pleasure of dog walking, and the superiority of beaches over mountains (fight us). Beyond that, we help parent each other and her kids in our own inimitable ways.
Dear readers, wherever you are with your father, we wish you a Happy Father’s Day. And wherever you are, we hope you find some ways to let yourself father and be fathered today and all days.
Father’s Day (and general) greetings from the Womack sisters, Catherine (left) and Elizabeth (right).
I once called my mother a whore. We were playing double solitaire. A game that, between the two of us at, was a full contact sport. Slapping our cards down with no mind as to whether the other person’s hand might be in the way. In this particular game, we were neck-a-neck, cards piling up in the center at the speed of light, then we were both going to the same stack with the same card and my mum’s hand was quicksilver, hitting the mark before me. You whore. I shouted loud enough for the house to hear. She laughed with gleeful satisfaction. I wasn’t even grounded. That’s how complicit we were in our intensity. Even calling her a whore was allowed. I don’t know why, but that was one of the insults au-courant between my best friend and I. We felt very dangerous and risqué when we used the word.
Now, I hate the word. I hate all its implications. Of women demeaned. Of the judgment reserved for women and never their client-suitors. So, when a Soul Cycle instructor used the word the other day in class, my whole body snapped to angry attention. Here’s the context. Into the third song of the 45-minute workout he asked, Are you all sweating like a whore in church? ‘Cause if you’re not, you should be working harder.
First, it took me a minute to figure out what the expression even meant. The word whore had sidelined my reasoning capacity. Then, as my mind picked back through the expression, it dawned on me. Oh. She’s sweating, because her work is deemed a sin according to the doctrine of the religious institution, whose pews she’s seated in. Sweating because she has too much to repent. Judgment Day is coming for her. Sweating because she’s a woman who leverages her sexuality. Sweating because the lord on high will be displeased by her presence. Maybe he will smite her.
Why (oh why) would someone use that expression in a room full of strong, modern women? A young gay man, no less. He could have substituted himself into the expression, the implications are the same. And he would, at least, have been making a joke on himself (still not a nice joke, though humor is more excusable when we make ourselves the butt of the humor). Instead, he regurgitated what was, no doubt, an expression he heard in his childhood. Perpetuating values infused with religiosity and thus with patriarchal misogyny. I’m going to hazard a guess that the largest proportion of the women spinning that day did not look to the church as their arbiter of moral values. I doubt that even the instructor looks to the church as his moral beacon. Yet, there he was quipping in support of organized religion’s apparent mandate to control women and their bodies.
Sweating bottles (I chose this image because it is beautiful, IMHO, and I wasn’t keen on putting an image of a sweating whore), by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash
I contemplated speaking to him afterward. Trying to make light, yet still make clear what I’d found disturbing. I reasoned that he probably was not even aware of what he was saying, even that he might appreciate me pointing out the dissonance. Then I worried that he’d dismiss me as a cranky older woman. Then I worried that I was a cranky older woman, too easily triggered because my current life circumstance is high stress. And the result is that I have zero tolerance for any demeaning treatment of women.
What did I do? Nothing.
Except canvas various of my friends about their responses. Everyone, except me, had heard the expression before. While they all agreed it was offensive, when considered closely, they were split on whether I should have said something or not. Some agreed with my do nothing approach and others thought it was important to call such things out.
And, in case you think that calling women whores is a relic of church jokes, this happened to me and a woman friend the other day. We were out for a brisk morning walk together in a mixed-use bike-walk lane. Or so we thought. Until a cyclist zipping by said, Slut!
At first, as with the whore joke, we were both perplexed. We verified with each other that we’d heard correctly. Never mind that I was confused by the singular, when there were two of us. Was only one of us a slut? If so, which one? We deduced the angry cyclist thought we were infringing on the bike lane, after studying the available lanes more closely and noticing there was indeed a walking lane further over. I wonder if the insult applies only to women walking in bike lanes, or if it’s any woman doing an activity in an unsanctioned location. Push ups on a tennis court. Cycling in a walking lane. Is any unsanctioned activity by definition slutty? Does slut retain any sexual connotation? Or is the unsanctioned activity viewed as an indicator of loose morals? A gateway to turpitude.
What I’m sure of is that the cyclist wasn’t having a good morning.
There’s no true equivalence for whore and slut to describe a man. They are words with ugly intent. Normally I like to reclaim words and expressions and transmute them into a feminine power expression. I haven’t figured out how to do that yet with these words.
This ad just came across the FIFI social media outlets (thanks, Nicole, for bringing this to our attention). It shows a bunch of 46-year-old white women in an ad for Geritol. The fact that all of them are the same age is supposed to be shocking to us. What separates them, the ad tells us, is that some of the women “take care of themselves”, while others apparently don’t.
This vintage ad came across the FIFI social media feed (thanks, Nicole for bringing this to our attention)– it’s for Geritol (a vitamin and iron supplement later pulled off the market; more on this below) featuring a bunch of 46-year-old white women. The ad singles some of them out, although it doesn’t say which ones. But it’s got some concerns:
A bunch of 46-year-old white women, posing for a misogynistic ad for snake oil.
I don’t know about you, but these women all look around the same age to me. But, the ad implies that some of them clearly look older, and it’s THEIR OWN FAULT. Why? Because they are not “the ones who take care of themselves”.
(Parenthetical comment: props to the woman in the blue jacket for pioneering resting bitch face in a good way. She’s having none of this.)
(One more parenthetical comment: the product in question, Geritol, was marketed as an iron and B-vitamin tonic in the 1950s. It was supposed to relieve tiredness, and was 12% alcohol. It was pulled off the market because of risk of diseases associated with too much iron, and also because Geritol engaged in “conduct amounted to gross negligence and bordered on recklessness”. The FTC ruled them as making false and misleading claims and heavily penalized with fines totaling $812,000 (equivalent to $4.96 million in 2021 dollars). See their Wikipedia page for more details.)
Back to the main rant. According to the fine folks at Geritol, women who “take care of themselves”:
Never eat too much or too little;
get a good night’s sleep every night;
exercise every day;
do all the things that women leading busy women’s lives in the mid-20th century have to do, regardless of income;
and of course take Geritol every day.
But how, pray, can we tell which women are “taking care of themselves” and which women aren’t? By how they look, of course! Aren’t you silly…
I have to say that just writing about this nonsense is getting me a little worked up.
Yeah, that’s a little better. I hope it helps you too.
Okay, I’m back. Here, in no particular order, are some problems with a culture in which this ad is just one little horrid illustration:
“Looking your age” or “better yet–younger!” is assumed to be a universal imperative for women.
The markers for “looking your age” or “better yet– younger!” are based on classist, racist, misogynist and (I might add) boring and bland criteria, which are unattainable by most women (even the ones who made it in into that ad, for goodness’ sake).
The notion of “taking care of yourself” (subject to same influences as “looking your age”) censures all women whose busy lives involve burdens of family care, domestic labor, paid work, and endless waking and working hours, with no time for bridge club, facials or golf.
Geritol was harmful alcoholic snake oil, marketed by lies, targeting consumers with money but also vulnerabilities.
The idea that “taking care of yourself” is, for women: a) a lifelong obligation; b) something whose success can be read off women’s faces and bodies is false and also vicious.
How can we take back the notion of “taking care of ourselves”? I think we’re doing it already– right here on this blog, out in the working and playing and political world, in our homes, and with our friends and families. And what are we doing in this updated version?
We prioritize ourselves as best we can, given our constraints and connections and interests. That means choosing– as we can– the aspects of our lives to focus on. And, in cases where we currently can’t choose (e.g. reproductive health and safety in the US right now), we speak up, fight back, disobey, organize, and act. Oh, and vote, too.
We set boundaries– again, as best we can– so to protect time and resources for activities of our own choosing. Where the boundaries aren’t there, again we work to change them.
We dare to love ourselves as dearest members of our families (sometimes, families of one). We do this all the time– or as much as we can.
But who am I to go on and on about self-care? Let me step aside for someone who said it better.
Words from poet and activist Audre Lorde. “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” From A Burst of Light, 1988.
Readers, how do you understand the phrase “taking care of yourselves” these days? What do you do? I’d love to hear from you.
It is summer swim season! I know this because I see on my Facebook feed “beach body” memes and a dramatic uptick in swimsuit advertising.
The least repulsive of the repulsive memes about beach bodies. Because cute seal.
I normally don’t pay much attention to swimwear ads because swimsuits are not that important to me. However, I can understand the appeal of shopping online: no store assistants, no dressing rooms, no drama with wrestling with ill-fitting suits.
Swimsuits from a Facebook ad that have no models wearing them. Okay, there’s one person, but the suit looks drawn on!
But this year, I have noticed that a few swimwear ads that feature either 3D-drawn images or the actual suits put on photoshopped-out mannequins. I don’t remember seeing before ads with these hovering bodies that are legless, armless, torsoless.
Tracy has noticed how the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated gives women equal opportunity to be objectified. Obviously that’s not good. If sexified suits objectify women regardless of age, and if a steady diet of these images still perpetuates body ideals, then is no body in the swimsuits our inclusive and evolved solution?
The decision to dis-embody models in these ads is likely far more economic than activist: I’m sure it’s cheaper to use realistic pictures or torso mannequins than to hire real people, and shoppers may have an easier time imagining themselves in the suit without a real body in it for comparison.
And maybe I’m making too much of these ads, but they weird me out. They make me think of Kevin Bacon as the Hollow Man in a tankini. The disembodied swimsuit model–as imperfectly resembling a human being in a way that causes “uneasiness and revulsion”–should be added to the graph visualizing the uncanny valley hypothesis.
From my feminist perspective, the no-body in these ads is not equivalent to everybody: it removes the one thing people need to wear these suits in the first place. These ads may avoid replicating images of so-called ideal bodies, but they also remove the bodies people have–complete with colour, fat, wrinkles, blemishes, scars, and hair. Ironically, the absence of real bodies features the ultimate normative body, one that is stripped of all uniqueness of size, shape, and mobility differences. In the case of the leaky, hysterical cis-female body so feared and scorned by patriarchy, what body is more “perfect” than the one that does not exist at all?
I tried to find answers to my questions (except the last one, which was rhetorical) with more Internet. While many web articles give advice on purchasing swimsuits by size, fit, fabric, style, cost, coverage, quality, versatility, quality, and “features” (like pockets), none described whether I should buy online a suit modelled by a real but photoshopped body or by an invisible but perfect fake body. I did notice that a few articles–such as Teen Vogue and TripSavvy–used these body-less swimsuit images in their feature banners as well.
For the record, in all this web searching I did notice more body-diverse swimwear than I have seen in the past. After staring at row upon row of swim-suited no-bodies, I was comforted and excited by these all-too-human ads.
Then, I realized that online shopping has its own trappings, and I closed my laptop altogether. Maybe going into an actual store to try swimwear on my own body is looking not be so bad after all.
