Sex, aggression, and humour: responses to unicycling

January 14, 2024 2:31 PM

After retiring from a busy university ... I was able follow some of my more extreme inclinations... when choosing a grandson’s gift that I got seriously lost in contemplation of a gleaming chrome unicycle. My wife said “buy the bloody” thing, which I did on the whim of the moment. After months of practice at home ... and finally town roads. I couldn’t avoid being noticed; in turn, I couldn’t avoid observing the form that notice took. Because at the time there were no other unicyclists in the area, such sightings would have been exceptional, yet I soon found that the responses to them were stereotyped and predictable. I realised that this indicated an underlying biological phenomenon and set about its study. Sam Shuster from BMJ. 2007 Dec 22; 335(7633): 1320–1322.

Conclusions:
The response to the unexpected and novel stimulus of seeing a unicyclist was surprisingly consistent even to the words and gestures used, and these varied with age, sex, and stage of sexual development. In males the response moved from curiosity in childhood, to physical and verbal aggression in older boys; this became more verbal as the boys matured into men and evolved into the concealed aggression of a repetitive humorous verbal put-down, which was lost with age. In contrast, the female response was praise and concern for safety. These findings suggest that humour develops from aggression in response to male hormones.

Audio summary in The Constant podcast's episode "A Very BMJ Christmas" at 00:24:42.

NPR explains: Each year, The BMJ, formerly known as the British Medical Journal, publishes a special Christmas issue. The edition spans a wide array of topics and formats that are unlikely to get published any other time of year.

posted by ShooBoo (55 comments total)

My friend collected similar "how people respond to public spectacle" data as a smallish woman walking an enormous dog. She said a truly stunning percentage of waggish (pun intended) observers told her she ought to try and ride, as if they believed they were the first person ever to think of it.
posted by potrzebie at 2:38 PM on January 14 [3 favorites]

Wow, that's a lot of utterly begged questions for one paper.
posted by Pope Guilty at 2:42 PM on January 14 [6 favorites]

I would be interested to see some consideration of learned behaviours in relation to experiencing contact with a unicyclist as a 'new' phenomena for the observers. Do male and female observers have a different set of learned responses to an interaction with someone in an unusual situation, which shapes how they respond to that new interaction?
posted by biffa at 2:58 PM on January 14 [2 favorites]

I got a similar set of responses when I commuted to work with a longboard and paddle/push stick for a couple of years. It's something I've never seen anyone else doing, and evidently nobody else had, either.

Unfortunately, the only science-adjacent data that I collected was that my paddling style led to a shoulder injury that prevented me from lifting my should over my head for a couple of years.

Thinking back, the sex ratio of positive to joke/negative comments was probably similar to that in this study. Somebody here linked to art monsters the other day, which led to a discussion with my sister about the way that selfishness is defined differently for men and women. For most men: As long as you aren't actively taking from someone, you aren't being selfish. For most women: If you aren't actively nurturing someone, you are being selfish. That feels like it's tied, somehow or another, to this.
posted by clawsoon at 3:01 PM on January 14 [20 favorites]

“Hey, you know they sell those in pairs these days?”
posted by cupcakeninja at 3:12 PM on January 14 [6 favorites]

“You’ll never get to Portland at that rate!”
posted by cupcakeninja at 3:15 PM on January 14 [5 favorites]

Wow, that's a lot of utterly begged questions for one paper.

Yeah, the observations were interesting, but the evolutionary Just-So story in the explanation was disappointing, especially with the aside of, "oh, btw, Indian and Asian men didn't do this nearly as much."
posted by clawsoon at 3:16 PM on January 14 [4 favorites]

OK, age- and grnder-appropriate comments aside, this is cool. Shades of Amanda Palmer’s The Art of Asking, or at least the sections where she talks about busking.
posted by cupcakeninja at 3:19 PM on January 14 [1 favorite]

Wow, that's a lot of utterly begged questions for one paper.

*writing furiously* Yes, hmm, please go on.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 3:20 PM on January 14 [2 favorites]

As both a unicycle and tandem rider, I can confirm the findings that everyone thinks they have come up with a funny and original joke, when they have done neither. “Where’s your other wheel?” and “She’s not pedalling!” cease to be humorous after hearing them dozens of times on your very first ride…

(I’ve never received any physical threats so maybe that’s more about the English youth?)
posted by autopilot at 3:20 PM on January 14 [3 favorites]

Although one time Bill Cunningham took my photo while I was riding and my Citibike unicycle ended up in the NYT style section.
posted by autopilot at 3:23 PM on January 14 [15 favorites]

a shoulder injury that prevented me from lifting my shoulder over my head

Frozen shoulder. There is a whole set of physical therapy for that. I was stuck for a year and a half and after six visits for PT it unlocked and the next four were giving me exercises to strengthen the surrounding structures so it's less likely to happen.

If you ever get that, or if anyone reading this has this symptom, it's treatable simply and non-invasively. And that deep tissue infrared thing they do at the end of your visit is worth everything else truly.
posted by hippybear at 3:24 PM on January 14 [10 favorites]

Also, way back in the day when I was helping put on a monthly furry bowling meet, we had one member who apparently used a unicycle to get around a lot. And he had I guess a commuting unicycle, with a much bigger wheel than the unicycle I borrowed from school in junior high and failed to learn to ride had.

I've lost touch with that group and that guy, but I'm sure he'd have opinions to share about this.
posted by hippybear at 3:28 PM on January 14

We have a new puppy, and (like a unicycle) it's something that really gets you attention at the park park. It's like walking round with a celebrity. Every kid wants to pet him, every dog owner wants to know all about him. Reactions from younger men are uniformly about how he's a handsome dog and looks like he'll be big. A lot of kids are surprisingly polite about asking if they can pet him. You get the odd dog-walker who just jerks their little beast away and avoids your gaze, which is an odd one. Waitrose shoppers, I'd guess. Nobody has guessed what sort of crossbreed he is, which is also fun. One young woman told me about how her dad had kicked her out and kept her dog, and then just hugged the puppy for a few minutes (which he liked). He put big muddy prints on a lady in immaculate white clothes, and she was like "fuck the clothes - it's a puppy!" I'm bewildered by this level of constant human interaction. So I've been on a bit of unicycle myself the last couple of weeks.
posted by pipeski at 3:31 PM on January 14 [32 favorites]

I think the jump from "a lot of men behave like jerks when they see someone riding a unicycle" (paraphrasing) to "humour develops from aggression in response to male hormones" (not paraphrasing) is kind of weird (I say this as someone who takes testosterone and doesn't make rude remarks to strangers).
posted by an octopus IRL at 3:37 PM on January 14 [19 favorites]

Be the unicycle your puppy needs you to be.
posted by hippybear at 3:38 PM on January 14 [7 favorites]

but mate,... the bollocks... are they crushed?
posted by midmarch snowman at 3:38 PM on January 14 [5 favorites]

“You’ll never get to Portland at that rate!”

Ironically, I've lived in Portland for 15 years and I've seen one, maybe two unicyclists in person in all that time (not counting the flaming-bagpipe-guy videos).
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:43 PM on January 14 [2 favorites]

Isn't it ironic, don't you think?
It's like PORTLAND....
with no UNICYCLERS..
posted by hippybear at 3:44 PM on January 14 [2 favorites]

furry bowling

As a lucky side effect, the furry bowling balls help keep the lanes polished!
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:46 PM on January 14 [7 favorites]

monthly furry bowling meet

I read that as "monthly furry howling meet".
posted by zengargoyle at 3:52 PM on January 14

I read that as "monthly furry howling meet".

That's more my state of mind at the moment, but I do hope to maybe get back to hosting the bowling meets sometime in the future. They were hella fun.
posted by hippybear at 3:59 PM on January 14 [1 favorite]

Conversely, be the puppy your unicycle needs you to be.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:02 PM on January 14 [4 favorites]

This is fascinatingly English in a way I think only non-English people will see; the author jumps straight to gender and some kind of elaborate Darwinian metaphor when what is obvious, so so obvious, is that all these jokes are ways of performing class. He even notes that 'middle class men' are the most positive (though the jokes are fascinatingly double-edged and ambiguous as only the English middle class can be).

The findings may also be relevant to the great male-female divide in humour—women tell fewer jokes than men

My dude, if what you want to study is aggression concealed by wit, pay attention to womens' jokes.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 4:10 PM on January 14 [22 favorites]

#notalltestosteroneusers
posted by tigrrrlily at 4:16 PM on January 14 [6 favorites]

I've been off the wheel for a few years now, despite fitful efforts to get back on. But I used to go on pretty long nighttime rides with my dog. Never really had any trouble, just people sometimes making loud noises to try to make me lose my balance. Generally people gave me a respectful distance, as one might a person riding a unicycle after midnight with a blacker-than-night dog coursing alongside. But one night as we were riding on a pleasantly deserted stretch of back road we were overtaken by a carload of loud, drunken teenagers. As they roared past a boy in the car leaned out and yelled "YOU'RE MY HERO!"

I dunno, it was odd. Just a counterpoint I guess.
posted by Not A Thing at 4:52 PM on January 14 [10 favorites]

furry bowling

As a lucky side effect, the furry bowling balls help keep the lanes polished!

Also, if you used furry bowling pins, it wouldn't be such a loud activity...

ok I'm done
posted by Greg_Ace at 5:00 PM on January 14 [2 favorites]

I don't know about sex aggression but an American friend of mine unicycled through Laos. And his blog is just full of photos of smiling kids. Because when a bunch of unicycles come rolling through a small town everyone comes out to look and it's just the most fun, random thing for everyone that day. Laos unicycle tours are a whole thing, it turns out.
posted by Nelson at 5:00 PM on January 14 [6 favorites]

“You’ll never get to Portland at that rate!”

When I rode the Seattle to Portland bicycling event there were several unicyclists that did in fact make it to Portland.

Maybe it's because I'm a bicyclist, but I love seeing unicyclists. I'm amazed and impressed every time. There's a guy here in my upstate NY small town I've seen a few times riding through the snow, which blows me away.
posted by cccorlew at 5:44 PM on January 14 [7 favorites]

I have seen tall bikes around Portland, but don’t believe I ever saw a unicyclist. I have 2 tandems and alsways wanted a tall bike.

Famously we owe the entire Information Age to a juggling unicyclist Claude Shannon also of Bell Labs and MIT.
posted by CostcoCultist at 6:53 PM on January 14 [5 favorites]

I've upon a time I went in a random group bike ride and ended up chatting with a woman who (though currently on a bicycle) had just finished a cross-US unicycle tour, towing a small wagon the whole way.

I never saw her again, but a couple years later saw her featured in the new York times for winning the women's division of the McMurdo Marathon, which is, in fact, a marathon in Antarctica.

Some people just wake up on a different side of the bed...
posted by kaibutsu at 7:08 PM on January 14 [10 favorites]

Nelson, I saw one such group many years ago.
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 7:16 PM on January 14

Because when a bunch of unicycles come rolling through a small town everyone comes out to look and it's just the most fun, random thing for everyone that day.

To be fair, I was once at a furry convention when a bunch of furry performance artists had coordinated for maybe 20-30 people to be wearing crow costumes and they went through the convention space like a giant murder of crows, causing mayhem and weirdness for a couple of hours as they went around and encountered as many people as possible while they were assembled.

It's not really a unicycle tour, but even in something as really full of weirdness as a furry convention is IS possible to engineer fun, random things just by having a bunch of people do a thing together for a while.

If they're doing it as a tour, that's even more amazing.
posted by hippybear at 7:31 PM on January 14 [2 favorites]

it’s really hard for me to tell if the author is being sincere or if this is an extremely dry parody of evolutionary or simplistic biological explanations of human behavior
posted by dis_integration at 7:48 PM on January 14 [3 favorites]

I think it's weird (in a good way) that 'people who can ride a unicycle' is a very small fraction of the world, and 'people on metafilter' is a very small fraction, and that there are several mefites who can ride a unicycle. More than I would predict, anyway. The venn diagram i'm picturing is two tiny dots in a big circle, and yet the dots overlap.
posted by ctmf at 12:20 AM on January 15 [1 favorite]

kaibatsu, I know exactly who you mean - she and I were in a band together. Small world.
posted by inexorably_forward at 12:53 AM on January 15 [5 favorites]

From BMJ: Less than 5% of people—mostly elderly men, women, and teenage girls—showed no reaction.
Find it hard to get how, on the busy streets of Newcastle, that absence of evidence might have been counted.
To paraphrase St Isaac of Newton “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the roadway, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother quip or a uglier pun than ordinary, whilst the great landscape of obliviousness lay all undiscovered before me.”
posted by BobTheScientist at 2:24 AM on January 15 [4 favorites]

I used to ride a bicycle, a bicycle with big back baskets. (I hope to get back to it, details below.)

When I lived in Newark Delaware, a small college town, it was no big deal.

When I moved to Philadelphia, people kept demanding to ride in my baskets and/or singing the witch song from the Wizard of Oz at me. White people, black people, men, women, and some of them were middle-aged or older. I have no sense of humor, apparently, and I hated it.

One time a man was on my case and the woman with him tried to apologize. I don't accept that sort of apology.

Me and the bike: something weird happened, and I would lose impetus-- I'd push a pedal down, and somehow lose track of the need to push down on the other pedal. I'm thinking about getting training wheels so I can feel safe while rebuilding the habit of pedaling. I've never heard of anyone else with the pedaling problem.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 5:30 AM on January 15 [1 favorite]

These findings suggest that humour develops from aggression in response to male hormones.

I'm trying really hard not to read this as implying that men invented humor and women aren't funny, an idea so many men have tried to advance that...like I said, I'm trying not to hear it that way.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:43 AM on January 15 [1 favorite]

And the female response? Embryologically, the female is the fundamental body form from which the male develops. Could it be that without androgens the human response would be female, with its favourable, warm, tolerant concern? Perhaps male aggression is too high a price for humour.

Ok, puke. Sorry I wasted a minute on this. 🙄
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:45 AM on January 15 [6 favorites]

Yes, I was initially intrigued by the article's premise, but the Darwinian gender stuff is oof. And that it's "sex stuff" in the article and not "gender stuff" is also weird, by almost any measurement. BMJ is not averse to articles treating gender, and yet somehow this article takes place in a parallel universe where sex and gender are a unified whole.
posted by cupcakeninja at 6:53 AM on January 15 [1 favorite]

Oh I took most of the article as parody, dry humor about the silliness of extending evopsych ideas ad absurdum. That'd be in keeping with the BMJ Christmas tradition. I can't read text like this without laughing out loud:

from Freud on male humour as an aggressive response to women to the priapic interpretations of Roman sculptures and the effect of salacious comic cartoons on subsequent aggressive behaviour. The range of theoretical options on offer is too great and unproved for interpreting or extending a simple experimental study such as the response to unicycling.

posted by Nelson at 7:25 AM on January 15 [4 favorites]

The younger generation will never know the aggravation of the twenty year period where one could not run in public without some jackass shouting, "RUN, FORREST, RUN."
posted by AlSweigart at 7:26 AM on January 15 [5 favorites]

Male and female cultural experiences and values are different. Toxic masculinity is hopefully not biological.
posted by Ansible at 8:48 AM on January 15 [1 favorite]

There used to be a guy who rode around Berkeley on a unicycle while wearing a pink body suit and cape. The first time I saw him I was standing on the corner waiting to cross the street when he swung around from behind me, totally unseen, and surprised the hell of me with a little loop-de-loop and a big goofy grin like someone from another planet. That was around 30 years ago, but I can still remember the look on his face.

You couldn't see that guy and not smile. Usually you'd bust out laughing. I imagine a lot of people got their kicks out of mocking him, but even for them, he brought a little joy into the lives of nearly everyone who saw him.

I haven't seen him for years, but if he popped out from around a corner tomorrow, I'd be very glad to know he's still out there.
posted by mikeand1 at 9:04 AM on January 15 [3 favorites]

Apparently my wife learned how to ride a unicycle in school but we've never come upon one so I've never seen her do it. I wonder if you can forget how to ride a unicycle or if it's like a bicycle and it'll all just come back to you.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 12:50 PM on January 15

Ironically, I've lived in Portland for 15 years and I've seen one, maybe two unicyclists in person in all that time (not counting the flaming-bagpipe-guy videos).

I think I encountered one on about 10 occasions in Corvallis OR in what appeared to be a commuter unicycle. Often at a good 15-20mph. Still, If the purpose of vehicles is to make locomotion less physically onerous, then a unicycle seems counter productive.

This logic, combined with the author's own focus on gendered social reactions, tells me far more about the motivations of unicyclists than it does social responses to them.
posted by pwnguin at 1:07 PM on January 15

The guy who rode a unicycle around Berkeley in pink unitard.

Interview with him, which is supportive of Shuster's thesis.
posted by mikeand1 at 1:12 PM on January 15 [1 favorite]

OK, one more piece about Pink Man -- it's a delight! Also, one helluva milkshake duck...

posted by mikeand1 at 1:20 PM on January 15 [1 favorite]

I learned to ride a unicycle 30-odd years ago when I had a summer job at a bike shop that also hired out bikes to tourists at one end of a popular bike trail. The bikes would all go out between 9-10am, and came back after 4pm. So I had about six hours a day to kill all through the summer, and the shop had a unicycle. That thing ended up pretty banged up by the time I taught myself to ride it. I have no idea if I could ride one now though. Often tempted to try. I remember it being completely unlike riding a bike.
posted by pipeski at 2:05 PM on January 15 [2 favorites]

I expect Dr. Shuster expected us to see this as funny: 2007 is the year Chris Hitchens published his ridiculous just-so essay on Why Women Aren’t Funny, from which the author seems to have cribbed most of his “hypotheses”.

This kind of nature-vs.-nurture intellectual masturbation was having a whole moment around that time, with the popularization of evolutionary psychology specifically around gender differences and mating strategies: Geoffrey Miller’s The Mating Mind was 2003, Neil Strauss’ The Game was 2005, and facile evo-psych hot takes were gobbled up and regurgitated by MRA/PUA/anti-PC types and media figures alike.
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 2:26 PM on January 15 [3 favorites]

One day, sitting in a sidewalk cafe, in Interlaken, Switzerland, and a guy comes by on a unicycle. Only, blow my mind, he was playing a violin while doing it! I found it awesome.
posted by Goofyy at 6:09 PM on January 15

The notes made me chuckle:

Competing interests: None, apart from owning a bicycle as well as a unicycle.
posted by Probabilitics at 11:02 AM on January 16

As someone who unicycled extensively for many years, the author's experiences ring true with me. The most common reaction is surprise, but a significant fraction of young suburban men are downright menacing when presented with an individual on a unicycle. Like, I was worried I was going to get beat up. I was wearing normal clothes, riding a normal unicycle with a 24 inch / 60 cm wheel. Can't speak to Berkeley, but perhaps the presence of a world-class (yes, literally) unicycle basketball team there makes it a different environment.

Other observations from the field: Fast food drive-thru cashiers typically, but not always, refuse service to a four-wheeled vehicle consisting of unicyclists holding hands. Police typically, but not always, will ticket unicyclists in pedestrian zones, even if the unicyclist can cite the relevant portion of the California vehicle code. (Fun fact, at least in California an ordinary unicycle is technically a pedestrian [as is a skateboarder, inline skater, etc.], while a tall "giraffe" unicycle or geared "alpine" unicycle is technically a bicycle, despite having only one wheel.) Finally, at least for this data collector, if you exclusively ride a unicycle to and from class for several months, you might just fall off a bicycle the next time you ride it.

And also for the record, in my unicycling community, if an out-group insult is needed, it is invariably "Wheel waster!".

For what it's worth, I read the author's comments from a biological standpoint to be pure parody. IMHO. It doesn't seem like "ironic" mysogyny, though sufficiently advanced sarcasm can be tricky.
posted by wnissen at 2:53 PM on January 16

wnissen, have we met? I used to play uni bball with the people that later became the Berkeley team. (I moved to Boston in 2008, where I used to ride big wheels (29 or 36ers) on the bike path near the red line. )

Ah, I miss those days. I only own two unicycles now, and really I should give the mountain unicycle away to someone who will actually use it.

Mefi does have a noticeable chunk of unicyclists, I suppose. It’s no Harvey Mudd though.
posted by nat at 8:55 PM on January 22