Category: Feminism
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Road to Roxy

Interspersed in this post are some amazing voices from those who are supporting a petition to ask Roxy to stop using “sexy” to sell their products, a request that I argue pertains to the entire surf industry. You can read about the video that started it all here. You can add your voice to…
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Audre Lorde: Practice Speaking

“I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you…. What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will…
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“quick someone shoot that… feminist dyke”

How controlling is Big Surfing? What are its mechanisms of control? Is this really the happy-go-lucky lifestyle it professes to be? I’ll leave that to the reader’s discretion to determine. 1) People who disagreed with Chad Wells’ comments are not all “dykes” 2) Asking Big Surfing to enter the 21st century does not equal the…
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Lesbian-Baiting, a la roxy surfing 2013

One of the most prevalent tools of sexism in the surf industry has been and continues to be lesbian-baiting. Lesbian baiting occurs most often when rumblings are felt within the sexist status quo, when women gain more power in a hierarchy, or when they are acting more self-assertive and less deferential than their male-counterparts…
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Tell Roxy That Female Surfers Deserve Better

Dear Roxy, Roxy is the world’s most visible and well known women’s surf brand. Recently, Roxy released a trailer for the 2013 Roxy Biarritz Pro contest that showcases a style of marketing women’s surfing that is not conducive to a healthy, empowered vision of women. Instead of women surfers being presented as an alternative to…
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Roxy, #whoamIjustguess: surf-sex w/o a face

The trend of sexualization of women in surfing has been steadily building. It has been building slowly enough that we have had plenty of time to argue back and forth about whether this is a trend that will or already has been, aggravated toward more sexualization of female surfers. Today, something has fundamentally shifted. The…
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Gay Surf Narratives Matter

What does the swallow think of the pelican’s flight? Does Swallow wonder at Pelican’s lack of movement? Does Swallow gape at the protracted lengths of Pelican’s glide? Swallow’s agility and quickness allow it to escape hawkish predators Pelican does not fear. Swallow treats the updraft flurries of salted draughts that press against cliff sides like…
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Endless Cannibalization of Authenticity, Cease

Bruce Brown’s 1966 The Endless Summer(TES) presented an alternative narrative to the shenanigans of the many beach/surfy lifestyle movies that erupted from Hollywood after Gidget emerged to much fanfare in 1958. In TES, there are no post-surf bonfire orgies, no frustrating hetero-love triangles that finally resolve in dramatic Hollywood fashion, and certainly no surfing ladies…
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How Surfing is a Rhetoric of Pro-Globalization and Surfer Girls in the New World Order (video)

…and how the female surfer is an icon for western globalization’s vision for the means of women’s liberation… Krista Comer’s Surfer Girls in the New World Order, published 2010.

