Sex and Cycling. Or why is it OK for a man to get excited about his car, but not his bike?

The Daily Telegraph in London reports a case of a man and his bicycle in flagrant delecto.

A certain Robert Steward was discovered in his room at the Aberley House Hostel in Ayr, Scotland, making love to his bicycle. He was found naked from the waste down.

"The accused was holding the bike and moving his hips back and forth as if to simulate sex", the court was told.

Police were alerted and Mr Stewart placed on the sex offenders' register.

There has long been a love affair between man and machine. Often not reciprocated. Cars do not start on cold mornings, computers crash in the middle of presentations, bicycles go slower than they should, especially as you get older.

But whose business is it to come between a man and his consenting machine? Or a woman's for that matter.

And if a bicycle is not true the seat of passion, what is?

Yeats reminded us exactly where "love has pitched its mansion". And in this case, wrapped tight, sleek, shiny and intimately around a slim piece of leather.

It's where a woman rests her most sensitive parts, and where a man struggles to keep circulation in his.

In fact cycling is rife with what Monty Python calls Naughty Bits. The truth is we ride for exercise, camaraderie, adventure, independence, to get outside, to get from A to B.

And sex.

What? You haven't noticed? Who has not followed a comely bum of the opposite sex (or the same one, depending on your druthers) and not pedaled a little harder?

What long and tedious ascent has not been made more agreeable by the sight of someone in fine physical shape pumping energetically in front of you?

It's not for nothing that spin classes are loud with imprecations to "Push, push, push!", and "Almost there!" over sex-laden disco music.

As objects of transport, bicycles have always been machines to lust after.

And, it would seem, on.


"If you want to get to a better place, start pedaling."

---The Geezer