Bondage on a Motocycle?
Phallocentricism seems to be the star of Girl on a Motorcycle rather than the heroine herself or even the road or the motorcycle. This can be obviously seen in the attire of Rebecca while she is on the road: the black leather cat suit, perhaps the ancestor of Britney Spears' red one-piece ensemble in her "Oops..." music video. The fact that Rebecca elects to wear this (and only this) on a road journey where she is exposed to the elements is ridiculous; there is no way a real woman would have chosen to wear something like this (made completely of tight, black leather, thus causing a person to heat up and constricting one's movement) on a trip by herself, and so it seems as though the film's male creators picked something that they would have liked to see on a woman, particularly one with Marianne Faithfull's assets. It is obviously designed for a man's pleasure and not a woman's comfort, thereby prompting the viewer to view Rebecca through a man's eyes. The presence of black leather directly on nude flesh, complete with silver zipper and a ring-like zipper-pull that resembles a cock-ring, brings to mind bondage and S/M, thus fetishizing and objectifying Rebecca. (Continued...)
The male gaze is further brought up through the cat suit by shots of Rebecca when she is either dressing or undressing. This can be seen in one of the very first scenes in the film: Rebecca dresses in the leather suit for the first time while the camera is close up and follows erotically the zipper as it closes the suit, complete with a gratuitous upward-heave of breasts and a look on Rebecca's face that makes her appear to be orgasming. Could she be more like a blow-up doll?
Conversely, when Rebecca offers herself up to Daniel in Germany for the first time in the film, she flops down like a rag-doll waiting to be undressed like a plaything for her male possessor. The scene could very well have been that of a boy undressing his sister's Barbie to see what is underneath the clothes.
The very act of undressing is itself an example of phallocentricism and a heterosexist view that a woman must be penetrated to be subdued or pleased. As I pointed out earlier, the zipper-pull is a circle of metal that is just the correct size for a finger to penetrate completely. In a sensuous scene between Daniel and Rebecca the viewer can blatantly see this as Daniel inserts his finger and the pulls down in the process of undressing her for sex. It's nearly as bad is an earlier scene wherein the pump attendant fills Rebecca's gas tank in a shot that seems like it would have fit nicely into a 1970's porno. Again, the cat suit fetishizes Rebecca and portrays her as a sexual object for both Daniel and the "male" gaze of the external viewer.