The Joy of Riding Bitch

On Trust

I sit perched on the backseat of a motorcycle. A motorcycle built for speed, not for comfort. There is no cushy backrest. Behind me is nothing but air and the open road. I feel vulnerable, and exposed. I grab on to the bottom of Matt’s jacket, right around his hips. He has instructed me to make myself as unnoticeable, as unobtrusive, as I can, and above all to not impede his movements. Were I to grab at his shoulders, I might unintentionally jerk one of his arms, which could cause us to crash. Though I want to cling to the reassuring solidity of his chest, I listen when he tells me that I must not, and instead grip him more tightly between my thighs.

A few quick turns out of a sleepy suburban neighbourhood, and we are merging onto the freeway. I know that he is about to accelerate quickly to get into the flow of traffic. More than this, I sense it in his body. My grip tightens around the bottom of his jacket, but even then I am not fully prepared for the bike’s sudden surge of speed. For a moment I feel that flying off the back of this machine is a real possibility. But I know that he expects me to be able to handle myself, and somehow his expectation steadies me. As he accelerates my grip becomes more natural, and I become more alert to the world around me. The holding on between my thighs becomes both a way to anchor myself to him and a way to release myself to experience the freedom of bike’s movement. I can feel the bumps on the road through the seat of my pants. It is a sensitivity I need in order to fit my positions to the movement of the driver. The joy of “riding bitch” comes from both surrendering to the driver’s decisions, and from being able to tune my own responsiveness to his will. I look ahead, as he does, to a spot just ahead on the freeway where there is a gap in the traffic. I know at once that he’s going to take us there. He accelerates again, and I hazard a glance at the digital speedometer. Ninety six, it says. “Pretty fast,” I think. And then my Canadian mind catches up to my surroundings, and I remember that I am currently in the United States, and they operate by miles, not kilometers. Ninety six miles an hour on the back of bike, with nothing between me and the hereafter but the hem of a leather jacket gripped by my delicate fingers. In that moment, I think I glimpsed the pearly gates. Hallelujah.

Riding on the back of that motorcycle was, among other things, an act of putting my faith in another person in a way that feels increasingly foreign in our culture. I had been an independent, self-reliant woman for many years, after all. My experience tells me that feminism has been successful: I’m well educated, financially independent, professionally respected. I had been a single mother for many years, and had been so successfully. I have agency. And yet sitting on the back of that motorcycle, entirely submissive to the man driving it, I feel freer than I do during the daily responsibilities of my independent life. Surrendered to another, I am liberated from the heavy burden of agency itself. More than that, I feel existentially bonded with another person; our very lives intwined. Riding bitch is the antidote to modern alienation.

Riding pillion also makes me feel deeply and intensely feminine. There are few occasions for women to feel this way in contemporary Western culture. The messaging is that women should roll up their sleeves and get to work. “We can do it!” Far from being indoctrinated into becoming submissive, gentle things, today girls are taught to be tough and assertive. There is a badassery that is marketed exclusively to girls. The tough girl. And as we grow older we are taught to be “agents,” rather than “subjects.” I don’t disagree with this program. The world is unaccommodating towards individuals who cannot tooth and claw their way through it. Women’s liberation is a necessary acquisition in a culture where the media dictates virtue, and unrestrained capitalism dictates the social order. We have the world we deserve; this is our tragedy. But it’s tiring to be tough. And so it is with gratitude, and almost a newfound sense of innocence, that I embrace my own dependency on the back of motorcycle. It is with relief that I experience the joy of submission to a man’s authority. I’m a feminist heretic. I know. But I am at least a happy one.

It’s funny how uninterested I am in riding a motorcycle on my own, though I know I’d be quite capable of it. But the main part of the thrill for me is that riding is something I do intimately with another person, with my husband. It’s like sex on wheels. On the bike we have different roles to play. It is a feudal arrangement. He acts. I yield. He protects. I obey. He risks. I trust. We misunderstand the concept of submission if we believe it to be a form of defeat, or something that has been coerced. Giving myself over to his action is a demanding role, and it is a form of personal freedom. In choosing to yield, I open myself to possibilities that exist outside of myself. He drives (much) faster than I would; he leans into corners at a more aggressive angle. Because I let him decide where he wants to take me, and how we’re going to get there, I get to experience things I never would if left to my own inclinations. Surrendering my will to another enlarges me.

The trust we must have in each other is complete. If I don’t anticipate his maneuver, we can both get hurt. And if he isn’t certain that I am ready for what he is about to do, if, because of my hesitation, he doesn’t act confidently and decisively, we could get hurt. Really hurt. He has my consent to make every decision in advance of it being made, and he has faith in my ability to respond to his movement, even in the moment of its happening. We act as one. It is an exercise of exposure to each other: any mistake I make will be felt by him; and any misjudgment he makes will be experienced by both of us. To think that because he is in charge makes him any less vulnerable than I am is to misunderstand the situation entirely. It is his ego that is on the line, not mine; the consequence for any lack of competence will be swift and severe. But the reward is joy for both of us if he performs with skill, finesse, and just the right amount of cocky aggression. Riding behind him makes me feel like an aristocrat of the road.

“The heightened feeling of exposure one has on a dirt bike,” writes Matthew B Crawford, “recalls one to a basic truth: we are fragile, embodied beings.” It is a pretty neat thing to be able to read in Matt’s book what he has already shown me on the back of his bike. Matt shows me that driving is an act of self sovereignty, deference, command, and skill, and that the road is political. His book is about the beauty in risk, the necessity of learning our limits, and about what the experience of our body’s movement has to teach us about what it means to be uniquely human. As his passenger and his wife, I’ve learned from him about risk and reward and also how to trust, how to let go of myself while holding tightly to him. (What he has learned he might have to tell you on his own, but I think it has to do mostly with the joy of sharing oneself with another.)