can any one help me with some valid stereotypes that have been established pertaining to us one-wheelers?
-I realize that it is selfish of me to ask you to respond for my personal gain as that I have decided to make a paper out of the results, but it should be a laugh any way.-
do you mean like being stereotyped as clowns?
I find a lot of people think unicyclists spend all their time in internet forums discussing trivia.
The main definite stereotype is the clown/circus thing. I was once out on a Coker, miles from the road, mudded up to the eyeballs and riding up a deeply rutted bridle path. I was dressed in Lycra cycle shorts, a cycling shirt and helmet and wearing a rucksack. A pedestrian asked me, “On your way to the circus?” I can sort of understand it when I’m on the 20" and practising “skills” but…
thats just a bit dumb really. We are seen as clowns, and not a people practising a unique sport… its annoying really.
Dunno if it qualifies as a stereotype, but there’s the common misconception that (male) unicyclists are sterilizing themselves through the process of riding.
I usually joke that, yes, unicycling is another form of birth control.
Pheew 
One that gets me is that people seem to think I have some other-worldly type of balance that no one else could possibly achieve…this simply isn’t the case, and people just don’t seem to get it when I tell them that they, too, could learn to ride.
I don’t know what age/shape that people expect unicyclists to be but I seem to be the antistereotype (if there is such a thing).
Also I think there is generally a stereotype that only men/boys engage in exciting and extreme sports.
no joke! i have so many people say “WOW (not world of warcraft) now that’s REAL talent!!”
Isn’t that kind of an oxymoron? Stereotypes are usually misconceptions, therefore they aren’t generally valid.
But every stereotype has at least a grain of truth to it. Fortunately the world, for the most part, doesn’t associate us unicyclists with the nerds we seem to be… 
ahh your right…
thank you for your anality!
Always plenty to go around in these forums… 
a valid stereotype in the UK atleast is that unicyclists are ‘science’ rath than ‘arts’ people. If you run down the list of UK riders and see how many of them are engineers, computer programmers, electricians etc. it really is quite shocking.
A common misconception is that they don’t trust you’ll stop when you have no brakes.
Hahahaha that’s totally true.
And, about the guys… it’s true too!
People think that only guys do that… even my family think like this! Heheh
My mom always say “Why don’t you do things that other girls do?” hahaha. I know that in Europe and ohter countries that have really good unicycles stores and etc, there’s many more people who ride unis so, obviously, there are more girls doing it. But here in Brazil… it’s almost impossible to see a girl riding one! In my city, I thinks it’s only me. I have never seen another girl doing it… that’s bad =/
I don’t know if that counts as a stereotype, if it’s what the unicyclists perceive of each other, especially when appears to be the truth and not a wrong assumption. Doesn’t the average citizen perceive UK unicyclists as clowns or geeks like most other Western countries?
this is another stereotype: engineers and computer programmers as “science” people.
quite the contrary: the bible of computer programmers is TAOCP (big books!)
“The Art Of Computer Programming”… if you are not art-oriented then you can’t program properly ! for sure there are weird and dull engineers and programmers that just pretend not to be artists but they are doomed to be inefficient. (I have been teaching programming for years and I assure you that this is true!).
then our deffinitions obviously differ. The people I define as ‘artists’ are genreally incapable and uninterested in maths. Maths is required for engineering. I would happily define all 185 of my engineering colleges at uni as ‘science’ people.
Every unicyclist is an engineer, at least mentally. Also, every unicyclist is an individual, or else why the hell would they ride a unicycle?
Because all their friends do?