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Apparently being a man means splattering your brains on the road.

Sorry, JC, but that statement would make a nanny-stater proud. I and all, and I mean ALL, of my friends rode our bikes everywhere, all the time, and we never once wore a helmet. Guess what? Not one of us ever got hurt, even when we crashed.

And please don't respond with something liberal like, "If it saves only one child....."

exactly.
We did jumps, cross country, skids, tricks etc , fell off many times, even went head first off the front but to say brains being spattered on the road and we shoudl wear helmets is a little drama.

Boys are being treated like little girls today, get them pads and helmets for sports all the time, bandaids for their little boo boos , ice pack for a scratch ARF.

The way some mothers raise their boys today only adds to my opinion why many boys today have become little sissies.

and spandex should be outlawed on men LOL.

Helmets on motorcycles are understandable (and actually look cool) but there is something emasculating about wearing a helmet on a bicycle. When I was a boy, I rode my Huffy all over town and had more than a couple of crashes. Usually when trying to launch off a ramp or jump off a high curbing. When I crashed, I'd dust myself off and get right back on the bike and when I got home, my mother would put on a band-aid if needed. I don't remember girls wearing bicycle helmets either. It just wasn't done back in the 1960s and 1970s and I don't remember a rash of bicycle fatalities - though pretty much every kid in that era had a bicycle. Then again, in that era, we'd ride around in the back of open pickup trucks and seatbelts were never worn. Hell, I remember my father cutting the seatbelts out of a new car he bought because they "just got in the way."

As for all the controversy in this thread over boys playing with "girl" things, it never was an issue for me growing up. When I was a boy, we always played with boys and girls and never really thought too much about it. I'd play "house" with my sister and her friends but just as often, she'd be joining me and my friends for stickball and touch football (we always played on concrete so tackle wasn't a good option). I say let kids be kids. Back in those days, we were always out of the house playing outside. For if we ventured indoors, our parents would tend to put a broom in our hands and put us to work - and none of us wanted that!

So I pretty much spent my entire childhood out of doors (winter and summer) and remember mothers passing peanut butter sandwiches and Kool-Aid out the windows to us for lunch so we didn't have to go indoors and "mess up" their houses. We'd hang out on picnic benches listening to Top 40 music on "transistor" radios and playing board games like Monopoly and Risk for hours on end, when we weren't tearing up the neighborhood on our bikes and gorging on penny candy from the local mom-and-pop variety store.

It's definitely different today. I go out in my neighborhood on a nice day and there are no kids to be seen. They are all indoors playing video games, watching television or texting each other. If they do go outdoors, they have "helicopter parents" watching their every move.

“Sorry, JC, but that statement would make a nanny-stater proud. I and all, and I mean ALL, of my friends rode our bikes everywhere, all the time, and we never once wore a helmet. Guess what? Not one of us ever got hurt, even when we crashed.”

Great. I’ve seen plenty of accidents and some of them pretty gruesome. I’ve seen a friend crippled for life who’s in a wheelchair now and his folks look after them.