Category: Surfing
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Emboldening the Renaissance of Surfing

Decentralizing the male competitive/professional surfer as the measure by which good surfing is gauged may be the most important shift in surfing’s renaissance. I make no apologies if using the word “renaissance” comes off sounding grandiose. Rather than focus on the “hipster” conversation and its idea of authenticity, that evokes little more than opinions surrounding…
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“Women Who Run With The Tides” (video premiere)

WOMEN WHO RUN WITH THE TIDES: a film about older women in surfing will be premiering October 4th in Lennox Head, Australia. For those of us unable to make the long trek to Lennox Head, filmmaker Michelle Shearer has offered us a wonderful opportunity to share in the spirit of this film the world over.…
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(Video) Roxy Petition Delivery Summary

Discussing content and outcome of the petition delivery meeting and the packet left with Danielle Beck and Cathey Curtis. Petition Update: The campaign asking Roxy to Stop their use of “all sex, no surf” ads continues to grow and has reached nearly 21,800 supporters. Shifts in the industry: Yesterday, the Association of Surfing Professionals announced…
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Roxy Trailer Petition Delivery

Yesterday, September 12, 2013, Krista Comer (Professor of Literature and Women’s Studies at Rice University in Texas, and author of Surfer Girls in the New World Order) and I met with Danielle Beck (VP of Marketing) and Cathey Curtis (Senior VP of Marketing) at the Roxy Headquarters in Huntington Beach to deliver the signatures and…
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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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The journey continues…

Working on ideas/stories/projects after a 2 week vacation where I was able to decompress from the last month of feverish activity. There is much work to be done (and it is being done) but while I work and before more updates or newsy items, I’d like to re-post a subtle story about what surfing might…
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Wetsuits from plants? Yes, says Patagonia.

Patagonia is up to its old antics, forging a sustainable and responsible path forward in the surf industry. This time they tackle the fossil-based wetsuit material neoprene, replacing the majority of their wetsuit material with a rubber gleaned from the Guayule plant. I hope they plan to make women’s wetsuits out of this material as…
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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…

