Tag: Big Surfing
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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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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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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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Reconstructing Surfing
Environmental justice, as opposed to simple environmentalism that can be co-opted by corporate consumerism to drive sales in the mode of greenwashing, understands that all forms of oppression are interconnected. That is, oppressions of race, sexuality, gender, class; oppressions that privilege heterosexuality and certain body types over others; oppressions that encourage (often in complicity via…
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Bangladesh: Dying for Fashion
ONE YEAR LATER: 4/24/14. Parent company of REEF and VANS, VF Corp, continues to refuse to sign Bangladesh accord. Updated 5/30 : Along with VOLCOM and REEF, I found BILLABONG men’s shorts, Made in Bangladesh Updated 5/26 : Bangladesh factory banned by Wal-Mart is still used by the VF Corp (see note 2 below), 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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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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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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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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“embracing their femininity”
Three of the top five ladies chosen in this year’s Surfer Poll Awards have bared glistening, bronzed bodies to the world in nearly naked poses that range from playful and flirty to sexual and seductive. The only reason Alana trumped Sally Fitzgibbons in the polls is because Fitzgibbons didn’t get her skin-show on before…
