This Hilarious Instagram Account Trolls Sexist Cycling Ads and It’s Awesome

From Bicycling

If you’re a cyclist who’s active on Instagram, you’ve seen the mysterious preponderance of photos of scantily clad women posing suggestively with bikes. I call them mysterious because they make me genuinely wonder, “Who’s double-tapping this stuff? Who is overlooking how this woman is going to ride this bike without pedals for long enough to think this is sexy?”

That’s why I was thrilled when a friend introduced me to @gravel_tryhard. The Instagram account has only been around since January 8, but already it’s amassed more than 3,000 followers for its hilarious parody photos and videos of highly sexualized images.

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I asked the creator of @gravel_tryhard for a Q&A, and she agreed on the condition that she could remain anonymous. (“I am, among other things, the social media face for the company I work for,” she explains. She knows it’s just a matter of time before someone connects her with the account. “But we’ll burn that bridge when we get there.”) I knew our chat would be entertaining-which it was-but we also had a surprisingly thoughtful discussion about the real harm of sexist images on cycling social media, and how humor can be one of the most powerful weapons against it.

BICYCLING: What inspired you to start this account?

@gravel_tryhard: It’s been this long-standing inside joke among myself and some cycling friends that there’s this niche of the cycling community online that’s basically beautifully shot, high-definition photography of women’s behinds on a bicycle. Whenever we stumbled across particularly bizarre instances of this genre, we’d send them to each other.

I am not a social media person. I don’t have Facebook, I don’t have Twitter. But a friend talked me into starting an Instagram. Somehow those two ideas just got merged in my head.

What’s your goal for @gravel_tryhard?

I’ve been doing the cycling thing for a while, so when I see this stuff, I laugh. I’m like, “How is she wearing those stilettos on that bicycle? How did this company think this ad was a good idea?” It’s ludicrous. But imagine a woman who’s trying to decide whether to get into cycling, and she searches “women’s cycling” on Instagram-what does she see? If that was me years ago, before I bought my first road bike, I would have turned around and left. I would’ve thought, “Well obviously this sport is for boys. Obviously it’s about looking cute, it’s not about working hard and getting muddy and conquering your limitations. It’s clearly just about impressing men.” I wanted to find a way to talk to that woman and tell her, no, female cyclists look at this stuff and it makes us sad but it also makes us laugh. And if I can flood those tags with stuff that makes that woman laugh, instead of stuff that makes her think, “I’m not good enough, this sport’s not for me,” then instead of thinking that, she’s smiling.

Most of your parody pokes fun at sexist advertising portrayals of women. But I noticed that influencers, like @wattage_cottage and @getliftedmiami, and even men like @ultraromance, are not off-limits. Is the account also a way of poking fun at influencer culture?

This is a really sensitive and complex topic. What I’m making fun of is pictures. And of course it’s hard to separate that from making fun of people. I imagine there are people out there who think that the influencer stuff isn’t fair game, or not as much so as making fun of advertising. But if you’ve got an influencer who’s created this curated image of a cycling lifestyle that is toxic and dangerous to women, but that is also coming from her heart, is that okay? Influencer advertising is advertising. @getliftedmiami has her Bianchi thing, @wattage_cottage is selling her socks. Saying that this kind of marketing shouldn’t be be subject to satire, I don’t think that’s right in 2019.

I’ve tried to find ways to be gentle. Actually, a lot of the influencers I’ve parodied have ended up leaving positive comments and following me. Which tells me that I’m doing this right. Because I don’t want to hurt women. My goal is not to get these women to take their photos down or put some clothes on. My goal is to produce something for the woman who’s viewing their pictures.

I really love that you’ve thought this through so much. And I’ve noticed that in your posts, you call a lot of the people that you’re parodying, including those influencers, “boss babes.” I detect some non-irony there, a genuine affection.

I am pleased and grateful that you noticed that. I do have absolutely genuine affection for almost all of the people who I’ve created these responses to. I respect them. You can tell just looking at them that the majority have athletes’ bodies. They’re obviously working hard. It takes a hell of a lot of work, too, to get yourself made up like that, to create beautiful, curated, consistent lifestyle images. I am genuinely and sincerely impressed by it.

You generally tag people in your posts. Why?

Giving credit for the photo. It does lead to something interesting: Every time I parody someone, they get a notification. I think that is for the best, because I don’t want to talk about people behind their backs. This is another rule of thumb that I use: I imagine that someone else is posting a similar picture of me, and I ask myself, “Would it make me sad, or angry, or would it make me laugh?” I try to keep it to stuff that would make me laugh.

Is that why humor is your weapon of choice?

It’s funny, because humor doesn’t come incredibly naturally to me. But one good thing about using humor to approach this stuff is that I would rather make someone’s day than make them outraged. I’d rather make someone’s day better than make it worse. That doesn’t mean that I’m opposed to conventional forms of protest. There’s a time and a place for being outraged. But my goal personally here is to make people feel happier.

So, be honest-How much time does this take every day? And do you have help? Like, who takes these photos?

[Laughs] No, I do not have help. Two or three of the photos, where I just couldn’t get the angle right, were taken by another person. The overwhelming majority of them were taken in various ways that would probably be really funny if you were able to see behind the scenes. There was one very early one where I had to climb up this 8-foot dirt ridge, toss my camera on a tree stump, set the timer, and run back across the road before the timer went off. I’ve since learned to use the remote control feature on my camera.

I actually do a lot of this in the middle of training rides, which means sometimes I’m doing a tempo ride with a bag full of cucumbers strapped to my bicycle. Or I’m standing in the middle of a park halfway through my ride doing something truly strange. I tell people I’m doing a scavenger hunt.

A friend of mine and I have always talked about doing something like this.

You are probably the fifth person to say that to me. Some people have even told me, “I’ve taken shots like this, and just shared them with my friends.”

I think what stops a lot of people from actually posting this kind of humorous or satirical stuff is they’re afraid it’s not going to land. How do you know if something’s going to be funny?

I don’t. [Laughs] And that’s why I post every day. If what I post today just doesn’t hit, I’m not going to delete it. Tomorrow’s post will land. I have 2,500 source photos in a folder on my computer, so I’m not going to run out of material anytime soon.

I know that I’ve done well when I look at something I’ve created right before I put it up, and it makes me laugh. I’ve also found that people really respond strongly to the ones where I push the limits: ones where I take my clothes off, where I dump a bottle of Gatorade over my head. It’s visceral. The one I sent to Ted King where I’m pouring maple syrup in my cleavage, people really liked that.

Did Ted King respond to that?

[Laughs] Yeah, he posted it in his story.

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