Katie Monroe, Philadelphia, PA, USA, SSH Blog Correspondent

On November 7th, Hollaback! Philly organized the second-ever City Council Hearing on Street Harassment. Stop Street Harassment’s Holly Kearl attended the event and documented it thoroughly.

I was invited to testify from my position as a feminist bicycle advocate in Philly. In 2013, I founded the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia’s Women Bike PHL program, which provides rides, workshops, and social events to help Philadelphia women get the skills and community support they need to start riding a bicycle. Last fall, I also started working for Gearing Up, a Philly nonprofit that gives women in transition from incarceration, addiction, and/or abuse the opportunity to ride a bicycle for exercise, transportation, and personal growth. If there are two topics in this world I care about, they are bicycles and gender equality. At the City Council hearing in November, my testimony (watch it here or read it here) focused on my personal experiences as a woman bicyclist in Philadelphia, and also drew from the experiences of some of the women bicyclists I’ve met through my work.

Conversations about street harassment often focus on the experiences of pedestrians. However, as more and more people start to use bicycles for transportation, especially in cities, I think it’s important to bring the experiences of bicyclists into conversations about street harassment as well. Similarly, perspectives from women — including their experiences being harassed while riding — tend not to be at the forefront of the bicycling advocacy movement. This also needs to change. (I’m working on it.)

In my testimony in November, I spoke about how riding a bicycle can feel like an escape from the gender-based street harassment that plagues me as a pedestrian. I ride my bike through neighborhoods where I wouldn’t feel safe walking. I’m moving too fast to be forced to respond to harassment — even if someone calls out to me from the sidewalk, I can often just ignore it and pedal on. Biking is door-to-door transportation that eliminates the periods of waiting at the bus stop, or walking to the subway, where street harassment is such a constant threat. Biking for transportation, to me and to many other women in Philadelphia, can be profoundly liberating.

But there’s a flipside — and I spoke about this in my testimony, too. In reality, biking isn’t actually a magical escape-button from harassment. The harassment doesn’t go away. It just changes. When I get on my bike, I might feel safer from men walking on the sidewalk — but men and women driving cars pose a whole new threat.

When I asked the Women Bike PHL Facebook forum for stories about being harassed while riding their bikes, the stories I got were mostly not gender-based. (Some were, of course — e.g. men calling out “I wish I were that bike seat”). More often, though, the stories were about harassment based on transportation mode — women were being harassed because they were riding a bike, not necessarily because they were women. Women frequently spoke about aggressive drivers honking, trying to run them off the road, and yelling at them for taking up lane space to which the motorists thought they had exclusive rights. (Guess what? They don’t. But it’s pretty hard to argue with someone commanding a two-ton piece of metal.)

These experiences certainly aren’t unique to female cyclists. Unfortunately, every biker I know has had terrifying experiences with aggressive drivers these while riding on city streets. For women, though, it can feel like a double bind: if you leave your house, there’s no escape from harassment of some kind — whether you’re on two feet or two wheels.

I find both bike-based harassment and gender-based harassment completely unacceptable, and I am actively working to fight both of them. However, while they can sometimes occur simultaneously, it’s important to maintain a distinction between them. Yes, both are fundamentally based in power imbalances, and it is tempting to draw a clean analogy between “car privilege” and “male privilege.” But as feminist bike advocate and writer Elly Blue thoughtfully explores in a recent piece, Is Bicycling A Civil Rights Issue?, they’re not the same. After all, I don’t choose to be a female-bodied person when I’m walking down the street. I do choose to get on my bicycle.

What’s the takeaway? I’m not sure yet. I am interested in whether anyone is doing more formal research on the distinctions between, and intersections among, different forms of street harassment. (My “data” is merely anecdotal, however powerful the anecdotes may be!) I certainly think that harassment of bicyclists by motorists is a form of street harassment. It makes people who are lawfully using public space feel unsafe, and efforts to fight it should be under the umbrella of the anti-street-harassment movement. At the same time, bike-based harassment is different from gender-based harassment (experienced, as we know, in all modes of transportation) in fundamental ways, and we can’t lose sight of that, either.

Katie Monroe founded the Women Bike PHL campaign at the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia and she works at the Philly nonprofit Gearing Up, which gives some of Philadelphia’s most marginalized women – those in transition from incarceration, addiction, and/or abuse – the opportunity to ride bicycles for exercise, transportation, and personal growth. Follow her on Twitter, @cmon_roe.