Class/gender/race, and physical space
Oppression and hierarchy in this world usually revolve around class, gender and race; rich people having more power and status than poor people, men over women, white people over people of colour, and so on.
A key component of all this is space. Physical space. A person or group’s superior power and status is often seen through their superior access to and control over physical spaces. The people who are lower down the hierarchy often can’t access spaces, or have no power within them. Some examples:
• Class: virtually everyone who lives in an urban area, anywhere in the world, lives in a place that corresponds to their class. Where human beings are allowed to live is dictated by their wealth - the space you inhabit and live in is determined by class. Class oppression means inequality in residential spaces: wealth inequality means most city dwellers in the world have to live in areas with limited clean running water, limited or non-existent sewage systems, limited electricity. In many cities, middle and upper-middle-class suburbs have ‘gated communities’ and armed security to keep the working class out of their living spaces. In the UK, as the Industrial Revolution went on, cities were increasingly designed to make sure the richest inhabitants lived as a far away from the inner-city working-class slums as they could. This is where ‘suburbs’ comes from. Class oppression is closely linked to space in the city: what spaces the working class are allowed to access, and crucially, what they’re not.
• You could even say the organisation of wealth in this world is around space. The wealthy Western countries create elaborate systems of border control to stop people from the poor countries in the Global South to enter. Wealth is about access to space, with with those from the rich countries able to move freely due to their passports, but also capital able to move freely between countries whilst workers from the Global South are subject to border controls.
• Gender: women are often excluded from public space. In most cities around the world, women are virtually invisible on the streets; public space is for men. In Western cities where women are out in public, they frequently get harassed by men, in a sexual way. The purpose of this harassment is for those men to exert power, but this is to do with space: street harassment is men telling women that they don’t belong in public space, that men control the public space. Hence the men’s ability to confidently harass the women in public.
• Race: the most obvious examples are apartheid South Africa and Jim Crow in the American Deep South. The racial hierarchy in those societies was organised around whites having open access to public space, while black people were banned from it. (As well segregated cities, another key aspect of apartheid was black people being banned from entering the cities entirely, unless they complied with a strict permit system. The whites decided to give black people permission to enter the space of the city; the hierarchy operated through space).
Apartheid is an extreme example, but there are many others. In 21st century Britain, white men often attack mosques, usually with vandalism but sometimes with full scale arson. For them, this is an attempt to control space: in their own words their motivation is to ‘take their country (or city) back’. These white men feel they are in a battle with Muslim men for control of space in their city. The way the whites try to express their perceived racial superiority is through trying to assert control of public space in their city, by trying to assert control over Muslim spaces - the space of the perceived inferior group. Attacking the mosques show that the Muslim spaces are not safe from white control. Racism operates through control of space.
There’s more to say about gender. Masculinity and masculine power are very closely linked to space. The violent masculinity around gang culture has always been about the gangs controlling space and ‘territory’, attacking people from other gangs who come into the space that they supposedly control. Whilst that’s an extreme example, more normal ‘professional’ middle-class masculinity revolves around space, with hierarchy within companies often symbolised by the powerful men having their own office, their own bathroom, and/or working on a higher floor within the building.
These attitudes are learnt during childhood. When children play in the park, the boys are playing in a way where they occupy the maximum amount of physical space, often by running around. In contrast the girls are stood in a corner amongst themselves, occupying the least amount of physical space possible. Men’s access to space is socialised early, as a way for men to be socialised into their superior role within a hierarchical society.
This post is going to talk about one specific public space: roads. Roads are obviously important, with millions of people spending hours on them every day. And it’s in this seemingly mundane space, used for the daily commute, that we can see how a hierarchical and often brutal society operates.
Roads, cars and masculinity
What’s the relationship between roads as a space and masculinity? One of the main spaces men try to assert control over is the roads. But first let’s look at how driving a car itself has an important link with masculinity and power for many men.
For many men, getting a car is a symbol of masculine independence and power. It means being your own man who can go where he wants when he wants, instead of relying on others (getting a lift, public transport, etc). Margaret Thatcher said that 'A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure'. While that quote is about her hostility to public transport in some ways, it’s also about what it is to be a man - she chose the word ‘man’ instead of ‘person’. A man, as he grows up and become a real man, becomes independent, shown by how he uses a car instead of public transport.
A more successful and powerful man, within capitalist society, can afford to buy a better car. Driving a flash car symbolises status and power. Men who buy flash cars do so because they want to show off their masculine and sexual power, so that’s why you get men calling flash cars things like ‘pussy magnet’. The car symbolises their masculine power, which they think will attract straight women. Most male drivers don’t own a flash car, but most about it: that’s why Top Gear is so popular. When they watch Top Gear and its white-straight-man-stereotype presenter Jeremy Clarkson, men indulge in the fantasy of heterosexual masculine power symbolised by driving a flash car. (Clarkson’s popularity remained amongst these men despite - or maybe because of - him punching a worker in the face for not giving him a steak quick enough…)
Clarkson’s violence is the logical conclusion. Masculinity is often performed through aggression and we see this in the way men drive. Surveys have shown men honk their horns three times more quickly than women when drivers in front don’t move on a green light. Additionally, “whereas women have more crashes based on [concentration] slips or lapses, men’s crashes are due to driving violations that tend to be more deliberate and risky - speeding, non-seat belt use and drinking.”
And of course, this behaviour is linked to space. Quoting again from the linked article: “Peter Marsh and Peter Collett, authors of Driving Passion: The Psychology of the Car consider ‘territorial imperative’ and the aggressive defensive behavior associated with it as an answer. They suggest that the car is often the first symbol of independent ownership for a young man – his home turf, and when ‘invaded’ by tailgating or perceived aggressive behaviors, he responds aggressively with territorial defense”.
So masculine urges to control space take place on the roads. More on this later.
Capitalism and the urge to compete with other people
It’s not just masculinity that makes men aggressive on the road though. It’s also capitalist society - in other words, the way our society is organised and the place of roads within that. Roads are mostly used by people getting to work or working themselves (e.g. deliveries). Getting to work or doing delivery work is all based on time. You have to get to where you’re going on time. Our society wouldn’t function if people stopped caring about being on time. The time pressure is everywhere in capitalist society. This means most people driving cars on a given day are feeling time pressure. The stress makes people aggressive.
Those people are driving to work by themselves, not taking public transport. Travelling by yourself, in your own space (your own car), creates an individualism. You’re not travelling with the other drivers, you’re not working together with them. You’re against them: they’re in your way of getting to work as quickly as possible, and this leads to drivers being aggressive to each other. There’s a competition for space, a competition between drivers for space on the roads. This is because of capitalist individualism: everyone is looking out for themselves, everyone is driving for themselves. In such an individualist context, individuals are going to compete with each other instead of cooperate.
I’ve seen this loads of times I’ve rode in a car. Drivers are ridiculously competitive and aggressive with each other. A former colleague of mine was one of the nicest people I’ve met. He was extremely generous, friendly, and made subtle but very real and effective efforts to ensure that everyone in the office got on well with each other. I think he was one of the reasons our office had no nasty workplace politics. But as soon as he got into a car, he turned into a horrible person. I got a lift with him home daily (he lived on the road next to mine), and everyday he would get extremely irritated with other drivers in a way that was totally out of character. He even swore about them, when he never swore at all at work. Driving wise he’d try to cut up other drivers and pull into their space all the time.
It was all unlike him personality wise, but the way we act isn’t only because of our personality. Our actions are based on our environment: what we can and can’t do, what we’re expected to do, what’s appropriate to do, etc, in whatever environment we’re in. The fact his personality was nice and cooperative is irrelevant: the environment he found himself in, on the road, meant that he had to be competitive with others.
Violence on the roads
So what does this all lead to? Violence.
Motorists on the commute are operating within a competitive environment, a dog-eat-dog capitalist individualism that pits them against each other. Then, add to this men engaging in a masculinity competition to see which man can be most powerful and control the most space. The result is what’s usually known as 'road rage'. Let’s have a look (this video has a really funny ending if you haven’t seen it already):
The above is extreme, but the very fact the motorist felt like he could act like that in the first place is revealing. He doesn’t hesitate for a second to say things like the highway code tells drivers to “knock you c*nts over” (i.e. kill people who ride bikes). He then - again, with no hesitation - makes a death threat (“put me on where you like and I’ll f*cking kill you”). This shows how normal it is for motorists to feel and express such violent aggression towards cyclists. Or, in other words, to express violent aggression towards other men who they think they are competing with for control of space, for control of the roads.
I myself have had an incident like this. Cycling back to work at lunchtime (I lived close-by), I was going down North Finchley High Road. At the lights a white van, which was previously behind me, stopped next to me at the lights and the driver said “what the f*ck are you doing you stupid c*nt!?”. I had no idea what he was referring to. My only guess is that I was cycling in front of him before we stopped, but this couldn’t have caused him too much of a problem - this high street road had enough traffic on it that if I wasn’t in front of him, he wouldn’t really have been able to go any faster. He continued to shout abuse, calling me a c*nt about twenty times. I asked him again and again what his problem was - trying to point the mirror, to make him see his anger was his own problem and nothing to do with me. It didn’t seem to work; he kept saying the problem was me because of how much of a f*cking c*nt I apparently was.
In both of those examples we see this wild, uncontrollable rage from male motorists. Where is this anger, this intensity, coming from? It has to come from these men feeling like their power, their identity as men is being denied from them. As men they are supposed to control space, and so are supposed to control the roads. When cyclists stop them from doing that, even in the most minor way, their reaction is desperate rage. The man who abused me had a thick South African/Afrikaans accent. White men from South Africa are used to having control of space, given apartheid and all. He feels entitled to control space, entitled to control the roads. He feels so entitled that when he can’t have his control, he loses it. He loses control of himself, because he feels like he’s not in control of anything.
Violent male fantasies
Just like Top Gear and the men who fantasise about strengthening their masculinity by owning a flash car, on the internet (especially YouTube), we see men fantasising about violence against cyclists. Like the fantasies about the flash car, the fantasies of violence are another attempt by them to feel masculine power.
These fantasies aren’t hard to find. You’ll see them in comments in lots of places, especially when cyclists are involved. Below are some taken from the YouTube video above.
These kind of comments show the rage the motorists feel in the car but cannot express, stuck in their little individual box. It is a futile rage, directed as much at their own miserable lives as it is at cyclists. It’s a rage at being stuck in the car, stuck in a boring and joyless 9-to-6, commuting and working so much just to survive and exist without really living. This lack of power they feel in their lives, due to capitalism, means they don’t experience the power they feel entitled to, that they expect, as white men. Feeling that they’re being denied what they’re entitled to is a big part of the rage.
Wanting to feel the masculine power they feel entitled to is why they fantasise about killing other people (cyclists). This isn’t like fantasising about murdering other people, though; these are not serial killers. Smashing though cyclists represents a fantasy of having power, of having control over the road, over space, of being able to fulfil their masculine power. The power society tells them that, as men, they should have, yet also denies them by forcing them sit in a little box in traffic for hours every day on the way to their mediocre office job. As a result they try to assert their masculinity in these fantasies, seen especially in language like “beta male” and “soft lad”.
In the above comments (same video), we can also see that it’s about a masculine competition for space, as articulated by the people themselves.
What’s the solution?
There’s a power imbalance between motorists and cyclists. Motorists are infinitely more powerful than cyclists, because, if a cyclist hits their vehicle, they will come out more or less completely unscathed, whilst when a vehicle hits a cyclist, the cyclist is likely to die or be seriously injured. Cars dominate the road in terms of physical space. They also dominate the road by using the fact that they can kill you. Even if motorists are not aggressive, the layout of the roads in most places (I.e. not the Netherlands or Scandinavia) means cyclists will always feel intimidated or unsafe travelling alongside cars.
Given motorists are in the driving seat, why are they so angry at the cyclists? Why do motorists feel like cyclists are inflicting such hardship when motorists are so much more powerful? Well because as explained, male motorists feel entitled to full control of space as part off their masculine identity. So any infringement on that by cyclists is enough to provoke the kind of rage described in the previous section.
But it’s also worth noting that people in power often act victimised and hateful towards the powerless. The most racist societies, in terms of segregation of space and disparities in living standards, are Australia, South Africa, Israel, and the USA. I sometimes wonder what motivates the whites in these countries to be so racist and hateful. Why do they hate black people so much, given their living standards are so much higher, they have far more social and political power, and so on? It makes sense to hate people you feel injustice from, people who have oppressed you. But in those countries the whites feel such hatred towards people who they are not oppressed by at all.
The reason for the hate is because those are colonial societies. The successful colonisers, the whites, have to feel hatred against the indigenous, usually black, people, because they are in a contest with them for control of space. Whilst the contest for the control of space is effectively over in those places (except maybe in Israel), the racism continues - no doubt to justify the colonisers’ conquest of the space, to justify their control of it, to justify their regime of oppression.
The powerful will continue to hate so long as they feel they’re engaged in some kind of contest. Applying this to the roads, drivers will continue to hate and be violent towards cyclists, and each other, so long as they feel they’re engaged in a contest. So the solution must be ending this contest, this competition, in some way.
Different approaches to ending the competition
How do we do that? I have no perfect solution, but here are some ideas:
• The nice, smooth approach: Create proper cycle lanes that completely separate cyclists from motorists. You can see these working in countries like the Netherlands or Scandinavia. The problem with this is the roads there were built like that. In the UK they weren’t. Changing them would take masses of time and money, disruption, etc. Also this wouldn’t solve the issue of drivers being aggressive to each other, and the more fundamental cause: men feeling like they should control space and control the roads.
• The confrontational approach: Cyclists fight to take back control of the roads. I got this idea from Critical Mass. It’s basically a mix between a bike ride and a protest. Hundreds of cyclists all cycle together through the central parts of the city, blocking off traffic in the process. The response from the motorists is predictably hostile, and sometimes violent, with some getting out of their cars to punch the cyclists taking part in the Mass. Not surprising: these men feel entitled to control space, to control roads, and thus will use violence against others to achieve that control, to take control of the roads away from cyclists.
Being part of the Mass gives you the thrill of taking the power back, of reclaiming the streets. It gives you a feeling of empowerment when cycling instead of the usual wariness and fear. It gives you the brilliant feeling of being a part of something meaningful with others, part of a mass. There’s also an real creativity and beauty on the Mass, in contrast to the robotic and grey world of the motorist. People taking part in the Mass know they’re trying to create an alternative to the soulless and mechanical world of cars, and so people bring sound systems, weird modifications to their bikes, do bike tricks, among other things.
This is still effectively just a protest though. As great as it is, it’s not a long-term solution. But it gives us an idea of a long-term solution: the beauty of roads without cars. And that leads onto the next approach…
• The Stalinist approach. This would be to ban cars. Bikes take up far less space on the roads. Cars are an illogical and irrational way to divide up space on the roads. Cars, when not used for long-distance travel, contribute enormously to pollution and global warming, which will ultimately destroy our existing society, and in the process, make cars redundant. And cycling is exercise and makes people healthier.
The point here is not to say cycling is a better choice than driving, a better option for getting about. The point here is that a combination of capitalist time-pressure and individualism, and patriarchal masculinity, creates a system where men, through driving cars, feel the need to be aggressive and try to dominate space on the roads. They have created a power struggle against cyclists, pedestrians, and each other. It's in this situation that we, as a society, need to acknowledge the destructive effect of cars on people. Then we can think of some sort of solution or ideal setup.
Oppression and hierarchy in this world usually revolve around class, gender and race; rich people having more power and status than poor people, men over women, white people over people of colour, and so on.
A key component of all this is space. Physical space. A person or group’s superior power and status is often seen through their superior access to and control over physical spaces. The people who are lower down the hierarchy often can’t access spaces, or have no power within them. Some examples:
• Class: virtually everyone who lives in an urban area, anywhere in the world, lives in a place that corresponds to their class. Where human beings are allowed to live is dictated by their wealth - the space you inhabit and live in is determined by class. Class oppression means inequality in residential spaces: wealth inequality means most city dwellers in the world have to live in areas with limited clean running water, limited or non-existent sewage systems, limited electricity. In many cities, middle and upper-middle-class suburbs have ‘gated communities’ and armed security to keep the working class out of their living spaces. In the UK, as the Industrial Revolution went on, cities were increasingly designed to make sure the richest inhabitants lived as a far away from the inner-city working-class slums as they could. This is where ‘suburbs’ comes from. Class oppression is closely linked to space in the city: what spaces the working class are allowed to access, and crucially, what they’re not.
• You could even say the organisation of wealth in this world is around space. The wealthy Western countries create elaborate systems of border control to stop people from the poor countries in the Global South to enter. Wealth is about access to space, with with those from the rich countries able to move freely due to their passports, but also capital able to move freely between countries whilst workers from the Global South are subject to border controls.
• Gender: women are often excluded from public space. In most cities around the world, women are virtually invisible on the streets; public space is for men. In Western cities where women are out in public, they frequently get harassed by men, in a sexual way. The purpose of this harassment is for those men to exert power, but this is to do with space: street harassment is men telling women that they don’t belong in public space, that men control the public space. Hence the men’s ability to confidently harass the women in public.
• Race: the most obvious examples are apartheid South Africa and Jim Crow in the American Deep South. The racial hierarchy in those societies was organised around whites having open access to public space, while black people were banned from it. (As well segregated cities, another key aspect of apartheid was black people being banned from entering the cities entirely, unless they complied with a strict permit system. The whites decided to give black people permission to enter the space of the city; the hierarchy operated through space).
Apartheid is an extreme example, but there are many others. In 21st century Britain, white men often attack mosques, usually with vandalism but sometimes with full scale arson. For them, this is an attempt to control space: in their own words their motivation is to ‘take their country (or city) back’. These white men feel they are in a battle with Muslim men for control of space in their city. The way the whites try to express their perceived racial superiority is through trying to assert control of public space in their city, by trying to assert control over Muslim spaces - the space of the perceived inferior group. Attacking the mosques show that the Muslim spaces are not safe from white control. Racism operates through control of space.
There’s more to say about gender. Masculinity and masculine power are very closely linked to space. The violent masculinity around gang culture has always been about the gangs controlling space and ‘territory’, attacking people from other gangs who come into the space that they supposedly control. Whilst that’s an extreme example, more normal ‘professional’ middle-class masculinity revolves around space, with hierarchy within companies often symbolised by the powerful men having their own office, their own bathroom, and/or working on a higher floor within the building.
These attitudes are learnt during childhood. When children play in the park, the boys are playing in a way where they occupy the maximum amount of physical space, often by running around. In contrast the girls are stood in a corner amongst themselves, occupying the least amount of physical space possible. Men’s access to space is socialised early, as a way for men to be socialised into their superior role within a hierarchical society.
This post is going to talk about one specific public space: roads. Roads are obviously important, with millions of people spending hours on them every day. And it’s in this seemingly mundane space, used for the daily commute, that we can see how a hierarchical and often brutal society operates.
Roads, cars and masculinity
What’s the relationship between roads as a space and masculinity? One of the main spaces men try to assert control over is the roads. But first let’s look at how driving a car itself has an important link with masculinity and power for many men.
For many men, getting a car is a symbol of masculine independence and power. It means being your own man who can go where he wants when he wants, instead of relying on others (getting a lift, public transport, etc). Margaret Thatcher said that 'A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure'. While that quote is about her hostility to public transport in some ways, it’s also about what it is to be a man - she chose the word ‘man’ instead of ‘person’. A man, as he grows up and become a real man, becomes independent, shown by how he uses a car instead of public transport.
A more successful and powerful man, within capitalist society, can afford to buy a better car. Driving a flash car symbolises status and power. Men who buy flash cars do so because they want to show off their masculine and sexual power, so that’s why you get men calling flash cars things like ‘pussy magnet’. The car symbolises their masculine power, which they think will attract straight women. Most male drivers don’t own a flash car, but most about it: that’s why Top Gear is so popular. When they watch Top Gear and its white-straight-man-stereotype presenter Jeremy Clarkson, men indulge in the fantasy of heterosexual masculine power symbolised by driving a flash car. (Clarkson’s popularity remained amongst these men despite - or maybe because of - him punching a worker in the face for not giving him a steak quick enough…)
Clarkson’s violence is the logical conclusion. Masculinity is often performed through aggression and we see this in the way men drive. Surveys have shown men honk their horns three times more quickly than women when drivers in front don’t move on a green light. Additionally, “whereas women have more crashes based on [concentration] slips or lapses, men’s crashes are due to driving violations that tend to be more deliberate and risky - speeding, non-seat belt use and drinking.”
And of course, this behaviour is linked to space. Quoting again from the linked article: “Peter Marsh and Peter Collett, authors of Driving Passion: The Psychology of the Car consider ‘territorial imperative’ and the aggressive defensive behavior associated with it as an answer. They suggest that the car is often the first symbol of independent ownership for a young man – his home turf, and when ‘invaded’ by tailgating or perceived aggressive behaviors, he responds aggressively with territorial defense”.
So masculine urges to control space take place on the roads. More on this later.
Capitalism and the urge to compete with other people
It’s not just masculinity that makes men aggressive on the road though. It’s also capitalist society - in other words, the way our society is organised and the place of roads within that. Roads are mostly used by people getting to work or working themselves (e.g. deliveries). Getting to work or doing delivery work is all based on time. You have to get to where you’re going on time. Our society wouldn’t function if people stopped caring about being on time. The time pressure is everywhere in capitalist society. This means most people driving cars on a given day are feeling time pressure. The stress makes people aggressive.
Those people are driving to work by themselves, not taking public transport. Travelling by yourself, in your own space (your own car), creates an individualism. You’re not travelling with the other drivers, you’re not working together with them. You’re against them: they’re in your way of getting to work as quickly as possible, and this leads to drivers being aggressive to each other. There’s a competition for space, a competition between drivers for space on the roads. This is because of capitalist individualism: everyone is looking out for themselves, everyone is driving for themselves. In such an individualist context, individuals are going to compete with each other instead of cooperate.
I’ve seen this loads of times I’ve rode in a car. Drivers are ridiculously competitive and aggressive with each other. A former colleague of mine was one of the nicest people I’ve met. He was extremely generous, friendly, and made subtle but very real and effective efforts to ensure that everyone in the office got on well with each other. I think he was one of the reasons our office had no nasty workplace politics. But as soon as he got into a car, he turned into a horrible person. I got a lift with him home daily (he lived on the road next to mine), and everyday he would get extremely irritated with other drivers in a way that was totally out of character. He even swore about them, when he never swore at all at work. Driving wise he’d try to cut up other drivers and pull into their space all the time.
It was all unlike him personality wise, but the way we act isn’t only because of our personality. Our actions are based on our environment: what we can and can’t do, what we’re expected to do, what’s appropriate to do, etc, in whatever environment we’re in. The fact his personality was nice and cooperative is irrelevant: the environment he found himself in, on the road, meant that he had to be competitive with others.
Violence on the roads
So what does this all lead to? Violence.
Motorists on the commute are operating within a competitive environment, a dog-eat-dog capitalist individualism that pits them against each other. Then, add to this men engaging in a masculinity competition to see which man can be most powerful and control the most space. The result is what’s usually known as 'road rage'. Let’s have a look (this video has a really funny ending if you haven’t seen it already):
The above is extreme, but the very fact the motorist felt like he could act like that in the first place is revealing. He doesn’t hesitate for a second to say things like the highway code tells drivers to “knock you c*nts over” (i.e. kill people who ride bikes). He then - again, with no hesitation - makes a death threat (“put me on where you like and I’ll f*cking kill you”). This shows how normal it is for motorists to feel and express such violent aggression towards cyclists. Or, in other words, to express violent aggression towards other men who they think they are competing with for control of space, for control of the roads.
I myself have had an incident like this. Cycling back to work at lunchtime (I lived close-by), I was going down North Finchley High Road. At the lights a white van, which was previously behind me, stopped next to me at the lights and the driver said “what the f*ck are you doing you stupid c*nt!?”. I had no idea what he was referring to. My only guess is that I was cycling in front of him before we stopped, but this couldn’t have caused him too much of a problem - this high street road had enough traffic on it that if I wasn’t in front of him, he wouldn’t really have been able to go any faster. He continued to shout abuse, calling me a c*nt about twenty times. I asked him again and again what his problem was - trying to point the mirror, to make him see his anger was his own problem and nothing to do with me. It didn’t seem to work; he kept saying the problem was me because of how much of a f*cking c*nt I apparently was.
In both of those examples we see this wild, uncontrollable rage from male motorists. Where is this anger, this intensity, coming from? It has to come from these men feeling like their power, their identity as men is being denied from them. As men they are supposed to control space, and so are supposed to control the roads. When cyclists stop them from doing that, even in the most minor way, their reaction is desperate rage. The man who abused me had a thick South African/Afrikaans accent. White men from South Africa are used to having control of space, given apartheid and all. He feels entitled to control space, entitled to control the roads. He feels so entitled that when he can’t have his control, he loses it. He loses control of himself, because he feels like he’s not in control of anything.
Violent male fantasies
Just like Top Gear and the men who fantasise about strengthening their masculinity by owning a flash car, on the internet (especially YouTube), we see men fantasising about violence against cyclists. Like the fantasies about the flash car, the fantasies of violence are another attempt by them to feel masculine power.
These fantasies aren’t hard to find. You’ll see them in comments in lots of places, especially when cyclists are involved. Below are some taken from the YouTube video above.
These kind of comments show the rage the motorists feel in the car but cannot express, stuck in their little individual box. It is a futile rage, directed as much at their own miserable lives as it is at cyclists. It’s a rage at being stuck in the car, stuck in a boring and joyless 9-to-6, commuting and working so much just to survive and exist without really living. This lack of power they feel in their lives, due to capitalism, means they don’t experience the power they feel entitled to, that they expect, as white men. Feeling that they’re being denied what they’re entitled to is a big part of the rage.
Wanting to feel the masculine power they feel entitled to is why they fantasise about killing other people (cyclists). This isn’t like fantasising about murdering other people, though; these are not serial killers. Smashing though cyclists represents a fantasy of having power, of having control over the road, over space, of being able to fulfil their masculine power. The power society tells them that, as men, they should have, yet also denies them by forcing them sit in a little box in traffic for hours every day on the way to their mediocre office job. As a result they try to assert their masculinity in these fantasies, seen especially in language like “beta male” and “soft lad”.
In the above comments (same video), we can also see that it’s about a masculine competition for space, as articulated by the people themselves.
What’s the solution?
There’s a power imbalance between motorists and cyclists. Motorists are infinitely more powerful than cyclists, because, if a cyclist hits their vehicle, they will come out more or less completely unscathed, whilst when a vehicle hits a cyclist, the cyclist is likely to die or be seriously injured. Cars dominate the road in terms of physical space. They also dominate the road by using the fact that they can kill you. Even if motorists are not aggressive, the layout of the roads in most places (I.e. not the Netherlands or Scandinavia) means cyclists will always feel intimidated or unsafe travelling alongside cars.
Given motorists are in the driving seat, why are they so angry at the cyclists? Why do motorists feel like cyclists are inflicting such hardship when motorists are so much more powerful? Well because as explained, male motorists feel entitled to full control of space as part off their masculine identity. So any infringement on that by cyclists is enough to provoke the kind of rage described in the previous section.
But it’s also worth noting that people in power often act victimised and hateful towards the powerless. The most racist societies, in terms of segregation of space and disparities in living standards, are Australia, South Africa, Israel, and the USA. I sometimes wonder what motivates the whites in these countries to be so racist and hateful. Why do they hate black people so much, given their living standards are so much higher, they have far more social and political power, and so on? It makes sense to hate people you feel injustice from, people who have oppressed you. But in those countries the whites feel such hatred towards people who they are not oppressed by at all.
The reason for the hate is because those are colonial societies. The successful colonisers, the whites, have to feel hatred against the indigenous, usually black, people, because they are in a contest with them for control of space. Whilst the contest for the control of space is effectively over in those places (except maybe in Israel), the racism continues - no doubt to justify the colonisers’ conquest of the space, to justify their control of it, to justify their regime of oppression.
The powerful will continue to hate so long as they feel they’re engaged in some kind of contest. Applying this to the roads, drivers will continue to hate and be violent towards cyclists, and each other, so long as they feel they’re engaged in a contest. So the solution must be ending this contest, this competition, in some way.
Different approaches to ending the competition
How do we do that? I have no perfect solution, but here are some ideas:
• The nice, smooth approach: Create proper cycle lanes that completely separate cyclists from motorists. You can see these working in countries like the Netherlands or Scandinavia. The problem with this is the roads there were built like that. In the UK they weren’t. Changing them would take masses of time and money, disruption, etc. Also this wouldn’t solve the issue of drivers being aggressive to each other, and the more fundamental cause: men feeling like they should control space and control the roads.
• The confrontational approach: Cyclists fight to take back control of the roads. I got this idea from Critical Mass. It’s basically a mix between a bike ride and a protest. Hundreds of cyclists all cycle together through the central parts of the city, blocking off traffic in the process. The response from the motorists is predictably hostile, and sometimes violent, with some getting out of their cars to punch the cyclists taking part in the Mass. Not surprising: these men feel entitled to control space, to control roads, and thus will use violence against others to achieve that control, to take control of the roads away from cyclists.
Being part of the Mass gives you the thrill of taking the power back, of reclaiming the streets. It gives you a feeling of empowerment when cycling instead of the usual wariness and fear. It gives you the brilliant feeling of being a part of something meaningful with others, part of a mass. There’s also an real creativity and beauty on the Mass, in contrast to the robotic and grey world of the motorist. People taking part in the Mass know they’re trying to create an alternative to the soulless and mechanical world of cars, and so people bring sound systems, weird modifications to their bikes, do bike tricks, among other things.
This is still effectively just a protest though. As great as it is, it’s not a long-term solution. But it gives us an idea of a long-term solution: the beauty of roads without cars. And that leads onto the next approach…
• The Stalinist approach. This would be to ban cars. Bikes take up far less space on the roads. Cars are an illogical and irrational way to divide up space on the roads. Cars, when not used for long-distance travel, contribute enormously to pollution and global warming, which will ultimately destroy our existing society, and in the process, make cars redundant. And cycling is exercise and makes people healthier.
The point here is not to say cycling is a better choice than driving, a better option for getting about. The point here is that a combination of capitalist time-pressure and individualism, and patriarchal masculinity, creates a system where men, through driving cars, feel the need to be aggressive and try to dominate space on the roads. They have created a power struggle against cyclists, pedestrians, and each other. It's in this situation that we, as a society, need to acknowledge the destructive effect of cars on people. Then we can think of some sort of solution or ideal setup.
