Credit: Duke University Press

Only after weeding through nearly 100 years of surfing history, only after reading first-person accounts and speaking with experienced surfers, only after understanding my own experience in the water a bit better, do I feel prepared to comment on one of the most critical aspects of this project: taking a close look at women’s role in the sport.

Krista Comer lays out her thesis clearly, arguing, “Surfer Girls in the New World Order (Duke University Press 2010) makes use of the claim for girlhood as a constitutive feature of the new global order and links it to third-wave calls for intergenerational conversation to frame a larger thesis about surfing girls’ and women’s politics” (17).

I suggest you read the book, lest I further finagle Comer’s impressive scholarly digestion of the sport, which she weaves through three waves of feminism, calls out for its surprising lack of critical inquiry thus far, and gives credit where credit is due to female trailblazers who have surfed for over half a century. Interestingly, Ed “Club Ed” Guzman’s grandmother, Dorothy Becker, was a pathfinder herself as the first woman to perform a headstand on a surfboard back in 1915.

As with all the books I’ve read, invariably — when speaking of women’s role in the sport — the conversation starts with Gidget. In real life, Gidget was Kathy Kohner, the 15-year-old-avid-Malibu-surfing daughter of screenwriter Frederick Kohner. A crass yet literal combination of “girl” and “midget,” (Warshaw 156) the diminutive icon of the surfer girl took over the culture much like an athletic, adolescent Shirley Temple, with film after film (and novel after novel penned by her father) inspired by her rather unthreatening appeal. Diminutive or not, within four years of the release of the first Gidget film, American surfers multiplied from five thousand to two or three million (Moore 28). As a pioneer, Gidget was a teenage role model for a liberated female, unrestricted by the expectation of who surfed. She inverted the gaze from the passive bystander who watched from shore to the girl who was watched for her physical prowess. Talk about girl power. (See Comer 43). Why do any of us join in except to make the same inversion?

Comer draws a fascinating through-line from the Gidget phenomenon to contemporary markets for girl surfing stories. “A young women’s surf video is local news, women’s international surf camps are travel news, women’s surf shops sponsoring women’s surf films are arts and entertainment news…if surfing wants to be part of the current news cycle (and it does), it has found itself invested like never before in recovering and promoting the history of women’s surfing. Women’s history sells” (39). Comer returns to this idea of the contemporary appeal of women’s surfing lying partially in its own history when she threads in the storytelling aspect of the sport, mentioned elsewhere in this project. Comer points to written biography in particular. “When girls read biographical profiles, they reposition their own practices of storytelling vis-à-vis the emerging public story of ‘women’s surfing today.’ As has so often been the case in women’s history recovery projects, biography in surf culture functions as a ‘first wave’ genre that documents the fact of women’s presence in what otherwise are regarded as masculine cultural geographies” (94).

All the books also invariably mention another pivotal surfer girl film, Blue Crush, which came out in 2002, was loosely based on a Susan Orlean magazine article, and speaks to the long-tail potential of telling these stories. The celluloid version presented a physically strong, financially strapped girl with the potential to turn pro if she can just get her sister (whom she is largely raising on her own) off to school on time, scrap together enough gas money, overcome her fears related to a past near-drowning, and train for the upcoming world-class surf contest. Confession: I loved the movie when it came out, and it’s nice to know it wasn’t from guilty pleasure as much from the energizing novelty of the premise. Its “cinema of girl power” (Comer 99) spoke to an image now in the culture: that of the female professional athlete across sports. “The need for a defiant girl attitude, indeed, why girl power has proven so useful to young women since the early 1990s” (100) is depicted throughout the film; nothing “–idgit” going on here.

Moore adds to this conversation, saying the film has “possibly done more around the world to encourage girls to surf than any single professional women” (187). He spoke to one woman in Japan who credits the film as the reason why her country boasts a higher female surfer head-count proportionally than any other in the world (303). Interesting, Japan also sports “slightly insane-seeming surf magazines,” packed with fashion, gear, tutorials, etc. Comer notes a similar rise, but sharp fall, in girl-themed surf publications in the States. The seemingly positive upsurge created by Blue Crush and its focus on healthy body image and competitive camaraderie, didn’t last. In recent years, “images of girls have gotten younger, more sexualized, and less sporty. And the string of U.S women’s surf magazine that came to the fore to produce alternative surf stories and visual cultures have, one by one, been forced out of business” (190) thanks to bigger business. (Nevermind that the economy was due to crash.)

But it’s not just the girls who feel a void in the media when it comes to alternative options. As Warshaw told me, “Very little of what’s in the magazine seems to have much to do with surfing as I do it these days. But it sure meant a lot to me when I was young. Surf stars, contests, the latest moves, even the ads, I just soaked it all in. I’m 50 years old. Surf magazines, most of them, are for teens and guys in their 20s.”

As I think about audience, not only for this blog but as a beginning surfer myself looking for inspiration, I admit most of what I’ve referenced have been male-centric, sponsored enterprises (ie. Surfline.com, Surfermag.com, etc.) Three of the four books I’ve read have been written by men. Three of them came out just this year, two by male surfer/historians, the third by a female (non-surfing) academic. Is there room for beginning surfers in this recovery project? For the 50-and-over crowd? For all races? Of course, there is. I would be remiss to discuss gender disparities without addressing issues related to racial binaries. “While it is true that surfing today as a world phenomenon is associated with privileged forms of whiteness, it is also true that the subculture’s sympathy for nonwhite spatialities grew from its disaffection from and critique of mid-century U.S. racial formations and from its openness to alternative lifeways. White surfers have usually been in search of much more than perfect waves; they’ve been in pursuit of fundamentally better ways of everyday living, including living more interracial and flexibly gendered lives and with relative compatibility with the nonhuman natural world” (21).

A third film, The Endless Summer, is arguably the most influential surf movie ever made. When it hit the big screen in 1966, it sold out theaters in Kansas just as quickly as it did those on the country’s coasts; the appeal seemed universal. The surfing historians I’ve read have done their due diligence, holding the film accountable for its racist overtones. In part to reset the trends that films like Gidget established in the late ‘50s to mid ‘60s and crowded what had been a semi-rebellious, countercultural, freewheeling lifestyle set by young white men, the narrated film follows two fresh-faced young white men on their global quest for the perfect wave across one, well, endless summer. Credited with paving the way for the incredible expansion of the sport over the 25 years following its release, the film produced “both the initial economy and the foundational structures of feeling that today underwrite surfing as an international public culture of some 6 million participants” (23).

While the film is refreshing in its stress-free humor, lack of violence, and deceptively wholesome depiction of the sport, Daniel Duane calls it like it is when he writes: “the film’s 1960s colonial stupidity is embarrassing: two healthy wealthy Western boys on an unparalleled journey of cultural imperialism—the whole world as their amusing theme park” (Caught Inside 180). Their naïveté is nowhere more pronounced than on their stops in Africa, where their loaded language (“primitive,” “taboo,” “jungle”) invades zones with unabashed dominance. But the novelty of two men approaching a beach in a local fishing village and giving impromptu surf lessons to Senegalese children points a lens to a time before the modern expansion of the sport, when the foreign part of the equation was unequivocally the wooden boards and their white riders.

To echo a question Comer poses, the surfing pool offers diverse potential for storytelling: “Who are these several million travelers? They are most likely to come from places with very developed water cultures: 2 million each from the United States (especially California) and Australia, 1 million from Brazil, 750,000 from Japan, and sizeable groups from New Zealand (100,000), France (80,000), South Africa (50,000), the United Kingdom and Mexico (30,000) each. The surf spots they seek are often elsewhere—Bali, for example, has tens of thousands of annual surf visitors but only about 1,000 native surfers” (24).

My attempt as a beginner, as a female, is to carve out a little of this potential space. After all, it’s 2010. Warshaw says to my inquiry if he has any varying advice for girls vs. boys entering the sport: “I don’t think there’s really any difference between being a boy beginner vs. a girl beginner. Ten or 20 years ago, yes; girls had a harder time because there were so few in the water. No longer.” But when I start talking to the girl surfers I know, the perspective differs.

As Shay Belisle, who grew up on Maui, puts it, “I would say that the number of girls in the water is pretty minimal. Some days when the waves are overhead I’m often the only female in the water. The hard part about being a girl is that there are so many amazing surfers and if you’re not aggressive, it can be really hard to catch waves. The good thing about being a girl is that you can get away with a lot more. I’ve been yelled at for dropping in on someone or not getting out of the way but I’ve seen guys beat each other up and I’m pretty sure they would never do that to a girl.” So, like any discrepancy, I suppose it can work both ways.

One woman dedicated to creating and instilling a positive experience for girls coming into the sport is Dustin Ashley Tester, founder of Maui Surfer Girls (MSG), a camp designed specifically to teach adolescent girls how to surf with a go-girl attitude. “To accomplish that, I feel that you have to create a safe container for them to shine,” Tester says of the camp’s mission to empower young girls. “An all female setting can be nurturing and encouraging when they’re facing their fears and insecurities in the ocean.” Growing up on Maui, Tester had to build her confidence as one of the only girls in the water. A competitive skim boarder, a sport she calls “totally dominated by guys,” she was often the only girl in the heats well into the ‘90s, both in Hawaii and in Santa Cruz, where she was sponsored at the time.

But times are changing. “I have seen such an emergence of female surfers in the last decade. MSG hopefully played a part in that as well as Blue Crush).” (There it is again.) “When I teach daily on Maui’s Westside, I see almost a 50/50 men-to-women ratio in the beginner line-ups.” She does quality that when the swells get big, she and a girlfriend are often the only girls out there. “We still have a ways to go in bigger surf.” As one of the few women to surf Maui’s infamous Jaws big-wave surf break, Tester is a true pioneer. She calls the sensation of reaching such a personal and professional level, “exciting, intimidating, humbling, a mixture of so many emotions that I try to keep at bay when I’m out there.” Understandably conscientious of what the guys would think, she felt she had to prove herself even more than the guys in the lineup. “Jaws is a whole other proving ground.”

With any number of surfing stories to share, Tester is drafting her own written biography, a memoir-in-progress that answers Comer’s call for additional commentary by women. “I’d like to distill my life lessons that I’ve learned through surfing. I think writing is similar to riding a wave, just like life…it involves commitment, perseverance, patience, and a connection to self.”

I think Matt Warshaw would agree. I certainly know I would.