Bike Porn

Now, there are two words most people don’t put together. If you read my post HERE, however, you know that things are pretty crazy in my world, and bike porn is to blame, at least in part, for that craziness.

As sex researchers have shown, men are visual creatures. I know this because I read Discover Magazine, which reports juicy little tidbits of this nature. Men like visual stimulation and respond positively to images of things they desire. Bike porn is visual representation of bicycles created to stimulate desire in men (and a few women, too) in the same way Godiva chocolate advertisements stimulate desire in women (and a few men). Chocolate is well-documented as an aphrodisiac, but bikes?

I’m not feeling the love, if you know what I mean.

Unlike regular porn, which for the most part exists only to sell itself, bike porn exists to sell bikes by appealing directly to visually-stimulated sex-drive circuits in some men’s brains. Not all men are attracted by the perverse allure of bike porn; some prefer cars or computers as objects of their desire. Some even like trains or model rockets or cigars, the sexual symbolism of which we can discuss some other time. Men’s brains really are very strange places.

Bike porn, however, is just the thin edge of an insidious wedge. You can’t buy the naked women in magazine or internet pictures (not legally, at least) but the whole point behind most bike porn is that you, too, can ride this beauty, if only your bank account can handle her. Bike porn leads to an ever-increasing need to possess and obsess over the objects of bike lust. Obviously, bike porn is NOT pictures of skanky bikes you can buy at Toys R Us or Kmart. Bike porn aficionados have standards, by golly, and don’t you forget it.

You would think that just a bike frame without wheels or gears or handlebars or a place to put your backside would be, I don’t know, sort of pointless and not worth looking at. In the world of bike porn, however, bare naked frames are sexy. Bare naked frames made of carbon fiber or titanium are the sexiest, because there is a geeky, high-tech aspect of bike porn that is integral to its charm. George once shared with me some porn of a bamboo bike frame, which, I assume, is porn for those bike lovers who prefer exotic Asian looks.

Then there are the accessories. My personal favorites are the Zipp Wheels with a Powertap Hub, George’s gift when he retired from the Air Force. He started showing me porn of the wheels about a year before he got them. At Ironman Wisconsin last month, I guess roughly two-thirds of the bikes had Zipp wheels, so George is definitely on trend with this. Zipps are clearly labeled and easy to spot for an Ironmate like myself, but I’m not sure what the Powertap hub looks like, so I have no idea how many of the racers had them. I bet it was lots. These hubs come with software and measure the wattage the cyclist generates on rides, so they are really, really sexy. Bike porn gets into the collective consciousness of the biking community and just takes over. You don’t even want to know how much the wheels and hub cost us. Okay, about $2,500.00, but George got a heck of a deal. Honestly.

I could buy a lot of paper-crafting supplies with that much money.

George has kept virtually every bike porn magazine he’s bought in the past 20 years and frequently peruses these old magazines, though he usually claims it’s for the articles, not the porn. Yeah, right. I, on the other hand, purge my Discover and paper crafting magazines annually because I’ve learned that I won’t go back through them. But then, I’m not passionately in love with my paper craft tools, either. They are cool and all, and I am very happy to have them, but I don’t stroke them lovingly, talk to them, or dry them with a diaper when they get wet.

George also has numerous valuable brain bytes dedicated to remembering which article appeared in a 1990 copy of Velo News or a tidbit of training advice from a 2001 copy of Triathlon Magazine. How does he remember these things? I had a hard time remembering that I was supposed to make pumpkin-scented play-dough for the preschool this month. I certainly don’t remember a particular card I saw in a 2004 issue of Rubber Stamper Magazine. Sure, it’s buried in my subconscious somewhere, but it’s refusing to be exhumed by conscious thought, which is fine with me.

I’m convinced it’s the porn. Bike porn sears itself on some very conscious and very primitive part of my husband’s brain, making this sort of information recall possible. When George opens a bike porn magazine to a particularly sexy bike advertisement, he shows it to me and says, in a deeper voice than usual, “Isn’t she beeeauutifulllll?” He’s not referring to some scantily clad model, such as you might see leaning provocatively over a car in a car magazine. “She” refers to the bike.

There’s a lot of bike porn on the internet, too. George’s computer is in the dining room, and my computer is around the corner in the kitchen. So when he’s trolling Slowtwitch (a triathlon forum) for bike porn, he’ll call me into the dining room. “You’ve got to SEE this!” The awe in his voice always hooks me, and I get up from reading paper-craft blogs or posting on Splitcoast (a rubber-stamping forum) or writing—you know, things that actually interest me—and go check out the bike porn. I pat his shoulder and tell him, “She’s beautiful, honey.”

I want to support him, honestly, I do. I wish I could share his enthusiasm, but it’s a bike, for heaven’s sake. Two wheels, some gears, a seat, handlebars, a frame…what’s so sexy about that? My own bike languishes pathetically in the basement, disabled by a broken chain, flat tires and neglect. She’s envious of his Cannondale, who sits perkily on a $250-trainer but feels sorry for herself because she’s George’s bad-weather bike and never gets to go out on the open road anymore.

George keeps the rest of his “harem” in the garage now, but that’s only because I put my foot down. He’d be happier if his girls were in a climate-controlled location like the living room. He also used to buy Yakima bike racks for the tops of our cars to transport the girls. He even dressed them in bike bikinis to protect them from bugs that might splat onto them and mar their good looks.

That was before carbon fiber. His girls used to be made out of sturdy steel or aluminum, but due to the irresistible allure of carbon-fiber bike porn, several aluminum girls (except the Cannondale and a Cervelo) got dumped and now he has two light-weight carbon-fiber girls (another Cervelo and a Kuota). Carbon fiber is really strong yet vulnerable to breakage and largely unfixable if damaged. This makes no sense to me—how can something be strong and yet easily damaged at the same time? And why does carbon fiber cost so much? I gave up trying to understand it all a long time ago. I do know that George would rather put our children on top of the car than one of his carbon-fiber girls. One thrown rock hitting that carbon fiber would be disastrous.

I’ve toyed with the idea of staging an intervention to get rid of all bike porn that’s more than a decade old, but what’s the point? As vices go, bike porn is pretty harmless even if it is weird. And if I let him buy all he wants, I don’t have to justify my own magazine purchases or my rubber-stamp addiction. Always look on the bright side, I say.

Besides, let’s face it. I can’t fulfill the same needs as the girls in his harem. The girls roll; I walk. The girls like the open road; I like my craft room. Their accessories are expensive and sometimes even have software; mine are as cheap as possible because I’d rather spend the money on rubber stamps. The girls stick with him on the 112 miles of the bike course at an Ironman race; I cheer him on comfortably sweat-free at transitions and the finish.

The girls cost thousands of dollars; I, however, am priceless. This makes me first wife in the harem, and as long as the girls don’t get in my way, they can stay.

Lately, however, I’ve been seeing a lot of titanium-bike porn and folding-bike porn, and I think George is trying to tell me something. Will this craziness ever end?

Please don’t answer that.