“Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.”
– H.G. Wells, avid bicyclist and “free love” enthusiast
Bikes are sexy. Everyone knows that. They’re fluid, aerodynamic, and immensely pleasurable to straddle and pump, and enjoying them requires zero prophylactic aftermarket mods, no matter how long it’s been since that raggedy-looking leather saddle has been, uh, debrided. (They come with their own rubber!) A good bike can be hard to find, but a hard bike is always a good find. And Austin, not only Bat City but also bike city, is positively febrile with velocipede l’amour fou. From those curvaceous, feminine wheels with their rims and valves to that bifriendly seat post and that angularly manly frame, bicycles are sex incarnate. And let’s not even get started on that rear derailleur and the rhythmic interplay between chain and gears. Or the head tube.
That’s Bike Smut’s territory, not ours. Billed as “a film festival of radical pleasure,” Bike Smut’s Bike Porn Film Festival is a Portland, Ore.-born collective of bike enthusiasts and filmmakers – or as they put it, “a coalition of the horny” – who for the past five years have been traveling the globe screening lusty visions of bike-sexuality with the goal of promoting “sexual and transportation liberation.”
Bike Smut Queen Poppy Cox puts it this way: “[Mainstream] porn generally isn’t very good and doesn’t make you feel very good. Bike people are always fixing their own bikes, making their own bikes, and using their own bodies to get them places. So why would you want to let somebody else make the porn that you want to watch? Why not just make that yourself, too? And make it better while you’re at it?”
So what exactly makes for good bike porn? Presumably, maintaining a proper pleasure-pressure ratio comes into it somewhere, but cinematically, the Bike Smut Film Festival is all over the road and often off it. Turns out “stop” does sometimes mean “go,” when consenting, pedal-powered pump rockers are involved.
“It all comes down to fun,” says Cox. “Sex is fun, and it should make you feel good. There’s a lot of shame attached to the way we think about sex in our society today. Hopefully with Bike Smut, if we all decide we don’t want to think that way anymore, we can change the way our community views sex, sexuality, and pornography.”
The Bike Smut Film Fest takes place Sunday, Dec. 18, 8pm, at the 29th Street Ballroom. The afterparty will be DJ’d by PopNoir Soundsystem. For more info, see www.bikesmut.com.
This article appears in December 16 • 2011.