Category: History
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A Visible History of Women’s Surfing
“A culture that cultivates silence for half of its population is not a healthy culture, even if the silence is unintentionally cultivated.” As a kid who was dragged along by my parents to events during the longboard renaissance in the late-1980s through the 1990s, I had the opportunity to mingle with the legends of surfing.…
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Constructing a History of Women’s Surfing
“Those who don’t preserve their history end up with their stories told incorrectly or not told at all. It’s incumbent upon all of us to know women’s surfing history and tell it whenever we can.” -Mary Mills The History of Women’s Surfing has not been written. What little history we do have is littered among…
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And what of the current state of women’s pro surfing?
“It’s time to take women’s competitive surfing to the next level.” These words have been echoing through the halls of women’s surfing since pro surfing began in earnest in 1976. Then, only 20% of the total prize purse for competitions was allocated to female competitive surfers. With the exponential growth in participation and interest in…
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The Privilege of Following Your Dreams
I have found that in (nearly) every conversations about and within surfing, the hierarchy of power and privilege is the single most often overlooked underlying assumption to each of these conversations. But I also believe that this open door, this obvious omission, allows the exact rupture needed for intense analysis and change to permeate the…
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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 do we create a lineage of listening and respect amongst women?
I am a woman who has straddled a multi-generational gap in women’s surfing. I have watched, listened, and learned from 3 decades of shift in women’s surfing (from mother to daughter; from daughter to champion; from daughter/champion to student). The one decade I missed out on, those of our earliest modern predecessors (respectfully delaying…
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Kapolioka’ehukai (The Heart of the Sea)
The closest I get to any sort of formal worship is bowing my head each time I enter the ocean in Hawai’i. There are three things I bow my head in gratitude to in these moments. Auntie Rell is one of them. The other two are the gift of surfing and that inexpressible gulf between…
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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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The Patriarchy?
“There is, it should be evident, no universal patriarchal framework that [global feminism] attempts to counter and resist – unless one posits an international male conspiracy or a monolithic, ahistorical power structure. There is, however, a particular world balance of power within which any analysis of culture, ideology, and socioeconomic conditions necessarily has to be…
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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…
