Opening words for the March 8th International Women’s Day Event hosted by my organization, The Inspire Initiative, and Waves of Freedom (read full recap of the event here).
“Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you for joining us tonight for surfing’s first International Women’s Day celebration.
Every great shift in surfing has been heralded by an evolution in technology and design: from bolsa wood to shortboard, from polyester foam to epoxy, from single fins to quads, from cottage industry to global industry via a pair of surf trunks.
In addition to tech and design, shifts have also come through our visual storytelling, rag-tag adventures shared on film where we hoot and holler and throw shakas at silverscreens. Surfers have been inspired by movies such as The Endless Summer, which filled us with a wander-lust that keeps us constantly exploring the farthest reaches of the globe for the golden dream of unspoiled seascapes and empty waves… even if now it is more a search for the endless winter than the endless summer because of the influx of surfers who now fill the surf breaks of warm water surfing locales.
We are a tactile, visual, border-crossing subculture, connected locally and globally by a shared passion for riding waves and a deep desire to explore and discover.
In the mid-1990s, the doors were thrown wide for women’s surfing. Women began crossing the threshold of beach-to-ocean in numbers never before seen (one report noted the growth of women surfers grew from 5% to 18% of the total surfing population in a little over a year in the mid-’90s). This was due in large part to the movie Blue Crush, an increased visibility of surfing women in media, and surf gear (for the most part) tailored to our bodies and tastes.
While surf brands, surf schools, and media lauded the economic boom brought by encouraging the other half of the surfing population, no one could have predicted just how women’s participation in surfing might affect surfing or surf culture.
What has this rising tide of women brought? A generation in and we can now see the shape of it. The current shift in surfing is not a shift driven or heralded by technology or design, but a grassroots social movement grounded in equality, diversity, sustainability, and environmental and social justice.
Storytelling, as always, remains central, but new voices, new histories, new ways of seeing and being in, on, and upon the ocean are pulsing through surf culture at breathtaking speeds.
Surf culture is awakening to new surfing possibilities* and women are not simply participating with this revolution, we are driving it.”
*This idea is borrowed from a project by Farhana Huq of Brown Girl Surf which can be found here.
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