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I think this attitude comes from having grown up as helmet adoption was first spreading. The cool kids did not wear helmets. It was the dorks who had helmets forced on them by their parents, and were too obedient to discard them once out of sight.
The helmet campaign was totalizing and successful. Kids born in the late 90s see them in all the media they consume and every kid wears them. Though as an elder millennial of a toddler I do notice the other dads my age sometimes give in to their kids hopping on a balance bike while leaving their helmets on the ground.
People who graduated high school before roughly 1992 wouldn’t have been exposed to the dynamics introduced by the helmet campaign and so can reasonably view them as the domain of Lance Armstrongs.
Well, now, I wouldn't go so far as to say that I saw no "aw, making sure to put your helmet first, are we? what are you, a baby?" grandstanding from wannabe-toughies. "It's dorky to wear a helmet" is not an alien sentiment to me. What I objected to was the idea that it is a truth universally acknowledged that bicycle helmets, as a piece of gear, look dorky. An oversized one painted in bright primary colors, such as a worrywart mother might give to a nine-year-old - sure, that looks a bit dorky. But a sleek pro-type one, I just don't see it.
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