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Hello and welcome to Six Minute English, I'm Neil.
And I'm Sam.
And if I say to you, Sam, motorbike, what do you think of?
Oh, I think of the film Easy Rider with Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda,
cruising the wide open spaces on powerful machines.
How about you, Neil?
Oh, well, I think of the young man on a moped who delivers my pizzas.
Not quite the same image, is it really?
No, but in both cases, we were associating motorbikes with male figures.
Today, we're looking at women and bikes, but before that, a quiz.
In which decade was the first mass-produced motorcycle released?
Was it A, the 1880s, B, the 1890s, or C, the 1900s?
What do you think, Sam?
Tricky question, the 1880s, maybe too early.
So I think I'll play it safe and go for the middle option, the 1890s.
Well, we'll see if you'll write later in the program.
Esperanza Miyake is the author of a new study of the gendered motorcycle in film advertising and TV.
She was interviewed on BBC Radio's thinking aloud program about the topic.