Over the last few years, there has been an exponential increase in conversations about gender (in)equality in the world of surfing. Given that your research adds to the conversation, can you please tell us why you think it’s important to talk about these issues now?
First of all, I think it’s important to highlight that feminism has been a very important movement for bringing some problems to light that we women have been having throughout our lives. I think that feminism has allowed society to know that women have faced a lot of problems – be it work-related, cultural, social – that might have not surfaced if so many women hadn’t spoken out. But to me, the topic of women in surfing is something that I wouldn’t pigeonhole to any movement; it’s important to contextualise it within feminism, but I think this goes beyond it. More specifically, there are cultural and social factors that have made it so that women haven’t had (or have only had very few) female references in surfing – and that is what I talk about in the article.
For instance, when I started surfing, only a handful of female surfers were being featured in magazines and other media outlets (there was no Instagram), namely Cori Schumacher, Lisa Andersen, and a couple more. But besides the issue of how little they were featured, there was the issue of how they were featured. I remember a front page with Lisa Andersen that said “Lisa surfs better than you”. It said so in a way that mocked men, meaning that a woman can surf better than you. And it is this tendency to compare what both encapsulates and potentiates the whole issue of gender dynamics in surfing.
So to answer your question… Sure, there has been a lot of noise around the difficulties that women face when competing. But what interested me was to talk more about the behaviour in the water. And what I have observed is that when a woman surfs radically, aggressively, doing tricks similarly to the way men do, they are more valued. Which is to say, a girl surfs well when she does a trick or manoeuvre that looks like what a man would do (surely you have heard the expression “she surfs like a man”). It seemed to me that the standard of men is the “good one”, that in order to surf well you have to look like a man surfing. And that’s precisely what I wanted to point out with the research: because of the current standard, women often think that their surfing is not “the good one”.
You’ve interviewed a lot of women for this research. Was there a particular comment, point of view, or story that stood out?
One curious thing that happened was that, when I talked about the objective of the research, there was one particular woman, who in addition is my friend, that didn’t understand what I was asking her. She didn’t know what I meant by “the difference between men and women”; she didn’t see it clearly at all! She said she had never witnessed differences, that this notion was very strange. This comment definitely caught my attention.
Otherwise, the common reflection among participants was that indeed these differences are real. In fact, many of them went one step further and asked themselves – And why does that happen? In the end, their answers helped me to reach conclusions such as those I mentioned previously about the problem being the lack of references and, consequently, the fact that oftentimes women don’t seem to be able to develop confidence in themselves when practising a sport which is still very much pigeonholed as a men’s sport.
Another thing that struck me as important was finding out that there is a lot of competitiveness among women in the water, a type of competitiveness that emerges without us noticing, in an unconscious way. On many occasions, participants said that it was surprising to see how they behaved toward a new girl that happened to come to their local spot, checking to see whether she surfed well or not. From this, I concluded that we women are – or can be – highly competitive in the water. Sure, this is probably also the case with men. But it struck me as very curious how many of us women criticise each other, sometimes in a very unfair way.
Yet, perhaps more than anything, I was surprised and grateful for how, in the case of some participants, these reflections changed their perception of their own behaviours in the water, inciting them to consider making a change. It was a beautiful thing and very rewarding, to realise that the research came to mean something for others, that I could help to highlight certain themes that are important to change.
