Category: Deconstructing Surfing
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Surfing’s Culture of Silence
“Platforms are judged by the value generated by their ecosystem, not by the value the platforms directly capture.” -Dalton Caldwell (Please be advised, this post contains explicit language from Twitter feeds.) The language of surfing has long been dominated by the motion and gestures of the body. The narratives we construct, the legends, the mythologies,…
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Bearded Ladies of Surf
Sometimes, the utterly ridiculous offers the possibility of a profound clarity, despite the intentions of its origins and despite how it is initially read. As Surfer Magazine suggests: “Bearded Ladies Nick Rosza is all for equality. Women deserve beards too.” However, there is the opportunity here for a more subversive reading, one that Mr. Rosza…
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Quintessential Girl: Huck Magazine Issue #033
“My mother approached me when I was making a shift in my surfing career at the age of seventeen. She had come with a dire warning, one born of her many years as a competitive surfer. She had been discussing my future in professional surfing with the mother of a well-known local surf icon.” ……
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Manly Men: Fiji Pro, June 7th 2012
The amount of references that are made to how “manly” the men on the ASP World Tour are in video commentary and elsewhere, is utterly overwhelming at times. With comments like “These dudes are manly men”, “He better man-up”, descriptions of turns as “mannish hacks”, or even references to waves as women (“approach accordingly”), it…
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Surfing Mag and its Pathetic Fallacy
A lack of critical analysis of surf media, a loose understanding (or absence of concern), by editors, publishers, of the implications of continuing to showcase (ever greater) sexist content within surf culture has created an environment that begs for attention. For many in the surfing community, surfing is more than just a hobby, it is…
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Come on, Undefined! Move your bloomin’ arse!*
Quandary: How to categorize this activity we do, this communion with, this union between, this time spent upon, beneath (or whichever requisite prepositional elbow word used to marry nouns and verbs you choose) the ocean? Sport? Lifestyle? Experience? Religion? Spirituality? The number of opinions skirting this question are as many and as varied as there…
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strange imperialism and neoliberal ethos of the Surf Industrial Complex
Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net “Surfing is good for the world.” -Fernando Aguerre When I decided to boycott the women’s longboard championship in China last year, I received an email from the then ASP World Tour CEO, Brodie Carr, who suggested that I “proactively go there [China] as an ambassador of a sport that possesses…
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China and Big Surfing
“Sports themselves are not political, but they have important political functions. The close connection between sports and national identity takes different forms in different countries at various stages of development, and in China it has special significance. The phrase ‘a weak country has no sports’ has particularly painful associations for Chinese people [owing to China’s…
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Newest! Sponsored! Imagined bliss
“Separation is the alpha and omega of spectacle (Debord, 1967).” The first, most important single element to grasp about today’s state of affairs, the reality we are currently entrenched in, is the ubiquity of alienation, that is, separation from our food, others, and ourselves: the subject-object duality. The second essential idea to grasp, is that…
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objectification ate my empathy!
A certain level of empathy is involved with revolutionary thought, innovation and social change. When being exposed to social, political and even economic disparities, brutality, inequity, oppression, etc., one of the key elements in motivating individuals to do something in order to better circumstances (for themselves as well as for others), is that there must…
