Three of the top five ladies chosen in this year’s Surfer Poll Awards have bared glistening, bronzed bodies to the world in nearly naked poses that range from playful and flirty to sexual and seductive.
The only reason Alana trumped Sally Fitzgibbons in the polls is because Fitzgibbons didn’t get her skin-show on before the polls closed. Poor assertion? Or blunt truth?
No one wants to believe or admit that intentional sexism is being pushed by Big Surfing and lapped up by fans. The girls are just “embracing their femininity,” right? After all, its the 21st century! The performance gap is closing! Women are making more money in pro surfing than they ever have!
Then again, isn’t it inevitable that the performance of second and third generation wahines, who took to water before they could walk and were encouraged to cross-train from an early age (because for the first time, the generation of women before them trained with professional sports trainers), would be an immense leap? And haven’t the men’s salaries increased as well? If you want to discuss how chronologically higher salaries for women might somehow automatically equal “due respect” or climbing the social ladder for women, we can compare a stripper’s wage to a woman who has a bachelor’s degree struggling to get a job in this economy, if you’d like…
This belief is grounded, absolutely mired in a sexism that values women for their looks and their ability to tantalize the male libido over and above anything else. Performance is secondary. It’s right there… plain as day. The blunt truth.
This message of the rise of femininity in surfing and how it is catapulting women’s surfing to the next level can be found wherever female surfers are advertised, interviewed or otherwise displayed. What that “next level” is has been defined by an industry that has its own agenda for the “feminine” in surfing.
As female surfers of this “feminine generation” grow up under the watchful eye of the predominantly male surfing hegemony, we see their right-of-passage being marked by the stripping of what is left of their school-girl uniforms. Where do we go after the bikini? Tan lines are the blood stains on twisted sheets, marking the shift to womanhood and the sexual availability of the once innocent, now “fair game.”
This past October, Stephanie Gilmore posed nude in ESPN’s Body Issue. Sally Fitzgibbons just posed topless and sultry in Stab Magazine’s 53rd issue and Alana has had a history of playing the flirty seductress to the (always male) audience beyond the camera lens. Her “coming of age” video was marked as such.
My opinion on Gilmore’s nude shot in ESPN was, at the time:
“Women are sexual beings. We should no more hide this sexuality than we should parade it around perversely. There is a fine balance to be had between a healthy sexuality and one that is objectified and controlled by a sponsor or any other person. Just as we women, need to own our stories, so too must we own our bodies, our sexuality. Being only sexual, having only sex appeal, is limiting in just the same way that being asexual is limiting. Celebrating the complexity of being a woman, having this modeled to the youth in an empowering way, showing a healthy body image that has sexuality and style… I’m all for it!”
I still agree with this premise in general, but now I wonder if I was too hasty to embrace Gilmore’s choice given the environment from whence she rose, too optimistic in my assessment of the atmosphere for either gender in surfing, too premature… and I wonder about Gilmore and Fitzgibbons and their link through Quiksilver/Roxy and what influence that had in Fitzgibbons’ decision to do the nearly nude video for Stab.
Additionally, I did not take into account the greater social ramifications and pressures at work behind the scenes: high unemployment-mostly men due to sectoral composition of job loss; crashing economies; plummeting stocks; delegitimized governments; loss of a sense of security (financial/shelter/job); recession…
“The economy is terrible, and in an extended period of bad times, it’s common for people to wax nostalgic about an earlier era.”
-Susan Milligan
In these socio-economic times, there is extra pressure on industries that sell shadows and snake oil (i.e. fetishes) to interpret the world for consumers as safe, knowable, and unintimidating. The illusion created is where one runs to when the world outside is too competitive, too overwhelming, too unfair. This illusion includes invigorating a nostalgia that involves the reinforcement of a polarized feminine ideal and masculine ideal. In Big Surfing, which has a predominantly male following, this means celebrating ladies who are unchallenging, easy-going, unintimidating, and most of all, even if they are “absolutely ripping while they are doing it,” do it with a flirty little smile and come-hither eyes.
The subtext of the statement:
“…the crew of young ladies that are changing the face of women’s surfing by embracing their femininity…”
is that past generations of female surfers were somehow less feminine or did not “embrace their femininity.” But by whose standards? A quick glance at recent history shows that the last generation of female surfers was less invested in satiating the voyeuristic tendencies of male surfers (no videos of pillow fights and dance antics, although there invariably were both) and were more interested in training, performing, and achieving. They had their own surf media and were “breaking down the doors” in their own right, independent of male surfers. These were women… how could they not be feminine?
“A man is the sum of his actions, of what he has done, of what he can do. Nothing else.”
-Gandhi
Julia Schneider, 15. Newest winner of this year’s most prestigious elite fashion contest.
‘Skeletons are meant jump out of closets not on to fashion runways. Why are only male models generally allowed to have an adult’s body shape?’
The answer, I hope, is clear. Femininity is not judged by its actions; it is judged by its presentation. It is valued, not for what it accomplishes independently in the world, but for its underwhelming character in chiaroscuro with a dominating masculinity that is active in the world.
How can anyone, male or female, live to their fullest potential with this definition strapped to their back; if gender is such a key aspect of their valuation? If a man is deemed “too feminine,” hasn’t he lost the virility to “do” anything in the world of men? Indeed, the very fact that the worst slur the insulted masculine-ego can think to throw is an emasculating “gay” or “ghey” verbal dart, is proof enough of the regard the masculine holds for the feminine.
The Feminine is being vivified, outside of the eye of commodification, just as the Masculine is, by sovereign human beings, who aren’t motivated by stature in some illusion created solely to pad the pockets of slick business people (men and women). Those invested in maintaining the polarization of socially constructed gender identities, abuse the fluidity of human identity and expression when they present superficial images that seem solid and static. Yet, just as ice upon a river is want to crack, fragment, and ultimately to be washed away, these static images will not hold atop the liquid motion beneath, try as one might to hold them in place.
It is incredibly sad to think that an activity such as surfing, an endeavor that is founded on finding harmony with a force that does not judge the gender, sex, creed, nationality, ethnicity… of those who undertake it, would be disabused of this inherent equanimity by the very industry that pretends to glorify it. What a profoundly absurd conundrum.
(EDIT 12/16/2011: Since writing this piece, I stumbled upon a photo feature of Erica Hosseini in STAB Magazine’s Australian Hard Cover Book, December 2011, that pushes Big Surfing’s fetishized “feminine” to it’s most hyper-sexualized yet.
STAB ostensibly tries to get away with this image by using a play on Hosseini’s last name, a double entendre, a “joke” used to present the young surfer as a “little horse.” What does one do with a horse? Taking the “joke” to its inevitable conclusion, are we not meant to see “little Hoss” ready to be ridden from behind?
With a recent report out by the CDC that puts the amount of women raped in the US at about 20%, and the connections made by the American Psychological Association Report on the Sexualization of Girls (find link below), regarding the incidences of violence toward women being positively correlated to images like this one, such a “joke,” such an image, in any context, is greatly concerning.)
Sex Sells Sex, Not Women’s Sports
What Women in Boardsports can DO
2010, Report of the APA on the Sexualization of Girls
Thank you to Di Mattison for inspiring this post.
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