Category: Surfing
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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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Welcome to the Aquatorium! (a future of surfing)
Z(er)OSea The Old Man didn’t particularly care to join the frenzied masses that crowded the Aquatoriums to view potential Olympic heroes of surfing as they contended for coveted spots on the Olympic team, but his grandson was positively glowing since he had won the URMovies-Z(er)OSea-sQuik Design Rally. His grandson had been chosen as the American…
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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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“Beyond Gidget” – Cooler Magazine: Issue #38
“Beyond Gidget” in the newest issue (Aug/Sept 2012) of Cooler Magazine Excerpts: “…women’s purchase intentions increase up to 300 percent when exposed to diverse body styles and types in advertising.” “The women in Ben Barry’s study commented that what inspires them most in representations of women is ‘glamour, artistry, and creativity.’ Rather than focusing on…
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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…
