Enforcing an ideal
What’s with the reverse striptease?
A slim, white woman is standing in front of the camera, wearing cycling shorts and a sports bra. As we watch, she stretches her bibs up onto her shoulders, perhaps catching our eye as she does so, or giving a little jut of the hip as if to acknowledge that she knows she’s being watched. The video cuts deftly, and we see her shrugging on a cycling jersey, which she zips up tightly over her exposed midriff. Sometimes that’s it. Sometimes she also puts on a jacket, a helmet, glasses.
It doesn’t really matter who it is. As someone whose algorithm is thoroughly dominated by cycling content, I see these women all the time, whether I follow them or not. They’re always thin, always white, always conventionally good-looking. They’re always dressing themselves in the kind of skin-tight lycra that makes you look like you’ve been sanded and polished.
And… why? Perhaps it’s naïve to question a social media trend, when there are so many, and when they come and go so quickly. But social media trends are now, far more than the content put out by brands and magazines, how we learn the codes of the world we inhabit; how we find our place and calibrate our behaviour; ultimately, how we come to understand ourselves.
It’s at times like this that I wish the cycling universe had its own Anne Helen Petersen, who used to write a Substack called Culture Study1, in which she applied her considerable intellect and learning to pulling apart all sorts of contemporary cultural practices to which most of us wouldn’t give a second thought. I spent a long time last year reading a series of essays in which she dissects Bama Rushtok, a phenomenon I’d never heard of, and still barely understand, in which young women launch incredibly elaborate personal campaigns to gain admission into the University of Alabama’s sororities. You might well think that what American teenagers are getting up to on TikTok holds no interest for you, especially when a lot of their content seems to be make-up tutorials and ‘outfit of the day’ videos, but as Petersen has regularly points out, the apparent fluff and frivolity of Rush content conceals a rich text of politics, history, gender expression and evolving social etiquette that holds far more significance than immediately meets the eye. Before we dismiss it all as ‘harmless,’ ‘silly’ or ‘irrelevant’, she urges us to consider that “disinterest in loci of power has its consequences.”
Sadly I don’t have Petersen’s analytical clout, but the more I notice these reverse striptease videos people are putting up, the more I want to ask them why they’re doing it. I mean, I probably could – I personally know some of the people who are posting their getting-ready routines – but I don’t think I’d get a straight answer, and I’m also worried that my questions will be read as criticism, that people will feel attacked, and that this will be the post that finally gets me cancelled.
So it’s probably worth emphasising from the outset that I’m not trying to tear people down, especially in a world where – as mentioned above – there’s a tendency to criticise women for absolutely anything they do, and a readiness to label their content as silly, vain, basic and ultimately meaningless. All of those assumptions stop us from looking more closely at what’s actually going on when we produce and consume these videos, and the effects they have on us, be they good, bad, or indifferent.
