What exactly is it that’s so cool about being a Biker Babe? This book will show you how to rev up your SheBiker energy to become a part of the philosophic and spiritual revolution of women in the Biker Age.
Book Review of Kick Start by Amy Ruth Tobol
When I fell in love with motorcycles and made the decision to learn to ride, I knew no women riders. I found out about women bikers by surfing the Internet. Some of the images I came across I had expected, that is, barely dressed buxom babes riding on the back of bikes. I expected these images because I came of age in the sixties and seventies when the phrase “women and motorcycles” meant women who were “fast” (i.e. promiscuous). They rode on the backs of motorcycles driven by macho, beer drinking bearded men whose lives seem to revolve around bars, brawls, and booty. I knew nothing about Bessie Springfield, or Dot Robinson, or any of the other women motorcyclists who rode in the front. What I knew about motorcycles growing up had nothing to do with me; I was female, a good girl, and destined for “better” things.
What I also discovered on the Internet, however, was that real women ride motorcycles, too. Other Internet images, and my discovery of the Sirens, provided me with different possibilities. These women represented the possibility that even if riding a motorcycle meant I’d be a “gender traitor” (Jones 89) that would be something to be proud of. They represented the realization of the kind of power, independence, and freedom that the women’s movement of the sixties and seventies had promised. They are the “shebikers” that Carol Setters chooses as her metaphor for liberation in her recently published self-help book, Kickstart: A Cosmic Biker Babe’s Guide to Life and Changing the Planet.
For Setters, the images of “shebiker” and “cosmic biker babe” capture the spirit and core of her approach to self-actualization and liberation: it takes courage to buck tradition and be yourself. Setters’s message may very well be aimed at women in the baby boomer generation who have occupied a difficult place in the evolution of gender roles. Many of us, particularly those from middle-class and white communities, who came of age in the sixties and seventies have straddled traditional gender roles of the fifties and the new ideas about gender of the eighties, nineties and beyond. Many of us can relate to Setters’s stories of women who have submerged their selves in dangerous, exhausting, or unsatisfying lives. Setters challenges us to embrace the “shebiker” within: “A person unafraid to take on the danger of being out there in the world with nothing but her will to survive and the ability to endure the ridicule of being different”. Embracing an authentic life, according to Setters, also means escaping from the “Land of the Consumer Zombies” in order to “love the world into a saving grace”. Living the lives we were meant to live can help save the world.
Possibly even more important than the advice Setters offers to women is her use of “shebiker” and “cosmic biker babe” as metaphors in celebration of being different, that is, strong, powerful, free women. Women motorcyclists, even more than male motorcyclists, have personified the courage of being different, of breaking out of traditional gender roles and expectations (see, for example, Ferrar). Until fairly recently, popular cultural images have created and perpetuated the notion that the only seat for aspiring female motorcyclists was on the back. Films such as The Wild One (1954), The Wild Angels (1966), The Cycle Savages (1969)and Easy Rider (1969) epitomize this representation.
More recent representations of women motorcyclists such as the “shebiker” of Kickstart are a significant departure from the past. Sasha Mullins’s “bikerlady” or Samantha Hatch’s “bikerbabe” website, where to be called a “bikerbabe” is a mark of respect, reflects these changes. Concurrently, there has been an explosion of travelogues, personal nonfiction and websites also written by women and celebrating the real lives of women motorcyclists (see Larsen, Dicks, Pierson, www.cyclewoman.com). Academic studies of real women motorcyclists energize these images by validating the confidence, sense of freedom, and control over life that riding a motorcycle can generate (McDonald-Walker, Jones).
Within this larger context, Setters’s “shebiker” is not simply a self-help book for self-actualization, but also a contribution to the growing stable of positive images of women motorcyclists. As Setters illustrates, positive representations of women motorcyclists can be powerful and transformative metaphors for women stuck in uncomfortable lives. Whether the advice Setters offers leads to learning to ride a motorcycle, ditching a destructive relationship, or changing jobs, any avenue that will encourage women to lead more authentic lives and “love the world into a saving grace” is to be applauded.
