hu cares | wandering uterus

Jenny Lewis was the cool older sister I always wanted. Rilo Kiley’s The Execution of All Things was on repeat in the Volvo I drove as a teen; I loved blasting it with all the windows open, ping-ponging between despair and gratitude. I got into More Adventurous in college, when I was very much leaning into being bad news, and I bought Rabbit Fur Coat at a Brooklyn vinyl shop, which made me feel very sophisticated. When I moved to Seattle for my first real job, Lewis had just released The Voyager. I rode my bike to work every day, three miles on the Burke Gilman, just long enough to always show up out of breath and a little sweaty. I’d don my headphones and put on that album. The chorus from the third track, “One of the Guys,” was my favorite for awhile: 

No matter how hard I try

To be one of the guys

There’s a little something inside

That won’t let me

As a recovering pick-me girl, I felt that. But nearly a decade later, it’s not the chorus but the bridge that sticks out to me now: 

There's only one difference between you and me

When I look at myself, all I can see

I'm just another lady without a baby

That last line hits hard in your late thirties, especially lately, as “childless cat ladies” have come under fire, and politicians are actually proposing that people who don’t have kids should have less of a say in our country’s direction. In a way, I appreciate that J.D. Vance finally said the quiet part out loud: so many people, especially conservative men, truly believe that a woman’s* worth is determined by her ability and willingness to bear and raise children. Because what would she do otherwise? 

If Lewis’s latest album is any indication, the answer is “whatever she wants.” Joy’All has been described as Lewis’s “yacht rock” era: maracas, rhythm guitar, dreamy wah pedal effects. You can picture Lewis as an extra in the first season of White Lotus, muu muu clad, drinking some neon tropical cocktail with a little umbrella by the ocean. It doesn’t get more straightforward than the opening lines of her first single off the album, “Puppy and a Truck”: My 40s are kicking my ass / And handing 'em to me in a margarita glass. The chorus of the single is, of course, about how she’s got a puppy and a truck. Lewis’s itinerant lifestyle is one major theme:

I don't got no kids, I don't got no kids

I don't got no roots

I'm an orphan

Catch me if you can

I'm lacing up my boots

Whether one’s rootlessness is seen as a problem depends on your gender. If you’re not male, wandering is an affliction. Physicians once believed that women’s* health issues were due to her uterus moving around her body, a condition they called “wandering womb.” The womb, wrote 2nd century physician Aretaeus, was “like an animal within an animal,” and wherever it roamed, it caused trouble along the way. A cough? The uterus has migrated to your throat. Chest pains? It’s in your ribs. (Don’t worry, it’s definitely not a misdiagnosed heart attack.) 

Doctors would try to lure the womb back in place with genital massage and pleasant smells like honey, because according to Aretaeus, the womb “delights also in fragrant smells, and advances towards them.” But the only permanent fix was to get pregnant, to give that uterus a job. Put a woman* in her place and her uterus would fall into place, too. 

Like Lewis, I’ve been lacing up my boots instead. Or, more accurately, winching down my cycling shoes; my wandering mostly takes place on two wheels. I love bombing down 3rd Ave on my way to the climbing gym, the way my mind goes blank as I’m winding around the curves of Mercer Island. Catching a glimpse of the glittering sound foregrounding the Olympics reliably inspires that a-ha moment of awe; I’ve rarely felt more gracious than that time the kind people at the Carnation farm stand refilled my bottles in their cool tap. There is something so satisfying about moving through the world on your own power.

Baby Jane on her first bike.

As it turns out, that’s precisely why men didn’t want women riding bikes in the first place. During the bicycle boom of the late 1800s, two-wheeled transportation gave women the ability to be in public by themselves, to go places unchaperoned. “Bicycle-riding women were seen as exemplars of the New Woman, who didn't necessarily want to have children, be deprived of a career, or have no political voice, and were accordingly praised and/or browbeaten as such,” JR Thorpe writes in a 2017 Bustle piece on feminism and the history of cycling.

The men of the day found all sorts of pseudo-scientific reasons to justify keeping women off bikes. There was pearl-clutching about how sitting in a bike saddle could harm women’s reproductive health; the vibrations of the road, some doctors claimed, could “rattle the insides” and cause a range of ailments, from tuberculosis to gout. Other doctors were concerned cycling would arouse women and encourage masturbation. (As any cyclist with a vagina knows, there is nothing pleasurable about bike saddles, and in fact, many are known to cause numbness and pain, hardly the stuff of orgasms.) 

Some men even feigned concern about "bicycle face.” Women who rode bikes needed to concentrate to ride in traffic, they said, and those expressions would ruin their beauty. They feared that women would become unfeminine, that wearing clothing conducive to cycling would make them too masculine or too loose. For instance, in 1895, a young woman named Hattie Strage was arrested and fined $25 (equivalent to about $935 today!) for cycling down a Chicago road in tights, god forbid. Eighteen centuries after Aretaeus, men were still worried about wandering uteruses.

The image of a woman on a bicycle quickly became a symbol of feisty broads who need to be put in their place. In 1897, male Cambridge students hung an effigy of the much-hated “New Woman” on a bicycle to oppose the university awarding degrees to women. “The effigy was later pulled down and decapitated by the jubilant undergraduates,” the Cambridge University Library’s Head of Special Collections in a recent blog post about the incident.

New Woman on a bicycle, 1897, via Cambridge Library Special Collections.

The other day, I got on my bike and planned to ride a fun swoopy descent in Bothell, only to find it was closed halfway down. A construction worker told me there was a detour, but she didn’t know if it was good for bikes. In any case, according to the map, the car detour was the only way to go. I’m pretty comfortable riding on busy roads, and I like to believe that most drivers are courteous, but the detour turned out to be the perfect recipe for an unpleasant ride: a curvy, uphill half-mile with poor visibility, no shoulder, and impatient drivers buzzing by me at 50. I was relieved to turn off onto the detour side street, when a man in a tan pick-up (it’s always a man in a pick-up) pulled over to roll down his window and yell, voice full of venom: Get out of the fucking road! 

In that man, I saw Aretaeus, I saw the cop who pulled over Strage on her bike, I saw the gaggle of angry Cambridge boys, I saw J.D. Vance. Go home, they say, and stay there. Much to their chagrin, I’ll keep wandering.

*People who do not identify as women can also give birth and/or experience conditions associated with having a uterus, just as people who identify as women cannot necessarily give birth or have a uterus, though I strongly doubt that any of the men who want to prescribe gender roles understand that.

Unsolicited recommendations

• My first piece for the New York Times is a short primer on how wildfire smoke affects human health. It has some very pretty graphics!

• The podcast Tested by Rose Eveleth, which dives into the history of “gender verification testing” in sports. It’s deeply researched and approaches the stories of female athletes barred from their sport with empathy and thoughtfulness. I’ve long been a fan of Rose’s work; if you end up liking this and haven’t listened to their other podcast, Flash Forward, you’re in for a treat.

• Lemon ube soda.

• The Newsroom. Yes, it came out more than a decade ago; yes, I know no human speaks the way a Sorkin character does; yes, it is cringey to set an emotional scene to Coldplay’s “Fix You” — but it’s all working on me big-time. This show is classic Jane-bait. I want to believe in the integrity of newspeople, and that the public ultimately finds value in journalism. I want to root for characters who are deeply committed to the truth, ratings be damned. I love a good will-they-or-won’t-they romance plot; I’m in the first season and so far this simmering Jim/Maggie relationship rivals the other great 2010s-TV Jim-involved romance: Jim and Pam on The Office.

• This video of Charli XCX and Lorde dancing to their remix of “girl so confusing” healed something deep inside of me.

• Rollerskating to Hall and Oates.

Lately

• The FDA rejected MDMA, and while the decision was not completely unexpected, I was still surprised. I covered it for The Microdose.

• Save the date: on September 25 at 1p PT, I’ll be on a panel with fellow journalists Deena Prichep and Arielle Duhaime-Ross about covering psychedelic reform in Oregon.

• On a recent Thursday, my friend Hannah texted me asking what I was up to, and would I want to film a silly bike TikTok for the Washington State Department of Transportation (who have a legendary social media presence, IMO). Couldn’t say no; here’s the result. Very demure, very mindful.

• Feels appropriate to end this very bike-heavy post with a bike update: I’m joining a bike racing team this season! Breakfast (Break Fast - get it?) is a WTFNB team and has raised thousands of dollars to help folks get into racing. For a long time, the bro-y energy of road cycling — especially racing! — turned me off to committing more time to bikes, but riding with Breakfast has shown me there are folks committed to building a more inclusive and diverse culture around bikes. I’ve never raced before and in the words of Jessie Spano, I’m so excited, I’m so scared!

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