Girls Can't Surf is a documentary about how a few women transformed what I will call the briefly male-dominated sport of surfing and made it more equitable and inclusive, paving the way for women like me to surf. Along with documentaries like Mercury 13 and Let Them Wear Towels, Girls Can’t Surf is ultimately inspiring, but mostly just infuriating and exhausting. I’ve been so focused on the doing of the sport, the logistics, skills, stuff, and local, present-day culture of Blackies, that I was surprised that this film thrummed my 50 years of social conditioning around sexism so forcefully. I cried hard.
Despite having taught a class on diversity for years, for some reason, sexism in surfing is just killing me. Surfing is something so outside of my normal experience, something I have found to be so beautiful, I guess I harbored a secret hope that it would be beyond the oppression we deal with in everyday life. But of course not. Surfing is life, so of course it’s not going to be exempt.
I'll address other equally important issues of diversity in future blogs, but this one is about sexism mashed up with this week’s catch from meditation class: deep dive into awareness of thoughts and dealing with pain. This awareness of thoughts – a loving awareness -- exists on three basic levels, according to Jack Kornfield, mentor extraordinaire. I see myself and surfing bobbing between the three levels of content, process, and awareness itself this week, as the lens of my own awareness of the sport widens and I process this bit of surfing history and culture.
Content
At first, in the silent, distraction-free room of sitting meditation, we become aware that there is a narrative constantly playing in the background of our mind. We are usually entirely identified with this narrative and don’t even notice. It is the ego; we are one. Often, this narrative is judgmental, harsh, and self-defeating. I bully myself with thoughts that don’t serve me. A meme I saw on Instagram said, “You can’t hurt me. You’re not my inner critic.” Taylor Swift wrote a whole song about the inner critic called Anti-Hero, “I’m the problem. It’s me.” When we get still enough to observe our minds, we see the chaos inside. The silence is a mirror; it disrupts ego identification and attachment. Meditation is not about clearing your mind, but about becoming aware of your mind.
The deep history of surfing, according to Mindy Pennybacker in her brilliant book, Surfing Sisterhood Hawai'i: Wahine Reclaiming the Waves, is one of gender equality: indigenous Hawaiian men and women surfed together for hundreds of years. In the book, you’ll find a picture of an engraving from Captain Cook's observations of the Sandwich Islands in the 1800s: women surfing alongside men, everybody hanging loose in the lineup.
Mindy describes the pure joy of surfing, the peace and freedom it provides, the appreciation and love of nature – everything I’m in it for. I want to feel strong and calm, at one with the sea; I want to bump into a dolphin while I’m sitting on my board some day; I want to have a lot of fun and be in the sun. Why on earth wouldn’t I want these things because I’m a woman? What exactly is it I’m supposed to want instead that would be better than this? Why was (is?) it so hard for men to imagine that women would want to be a part of this? And when they realized it, why didn’t (don’t) they let us in?
It's so obviously absurd that I don’t get how the men didn’t get it. (Hello, ego attachment.) I can kind of wrap my brain around how men would think I wouldn’t want to play baseball – spitting chewing tobacco, the dust and dirt, some amount of physical strength is a clear advantage, nothing stereotypically girly about it -- but surfing? It seems so obviously egalitarian – just you and the board and the waves, kiddo – no advantages given by gender. Super strength isn’t going to help you necessarily. I grew up landlocked, so what am I missing?
One of the sportswriters in the movie, Nick Carroll, said, “The girls who got into pro-surfing in the early 1980s were pretty much exactly the same as the boys. They had the same dreams, the same visions but they didn’t have the permission of the surf culture.” As the little tomboy who always wanted to play baseball, this is hitting some deep wounds for me. Content is pushing me under. Total face plant.
Process
As we see the endless sets of thoughts coming in to view in the background, we get better at identifying them in the moment and consciously allowing them to pass. Waves and waves of thoughts rise and fall away, and we don’t have to catch them. As we name our thoughts, they tend to disappear, slipping under you into the shore. They are slippery, translucent, misty, like the marine layer coming and going all of the time. Predictable when you pay attention. Real but not necessarily true, thoughts can be rewritten.
Girls Can't Surf describes how women were not allowed in the sport from the earliest inception of professional surfing. Bikini contests were more important than surfing contests according to the male Powers That Be who started professional surfing in the 1960s. There were a couple of female surfers who were good surfers and pretty enough and had the “right” personalities to get some media attention and sponsorships, but for female athletes who did not appeal to the male gaze, surfing was not a way you could make a living. (See also Branded, another documentary.)
Apart from thinking women were only placed on the planet to grace the beach with their delicate femininity, the men thought women just weren’t as good as they were, so didn’t deserve to be in the competition. Men actually believed that the money was inherently theirs; women would only be diminishing their winnings. I almost have to admire the astonishing arrogance of this position – it actually won the day in Huntington Beach in 1989. The Op Pro surfing competition – described as the Wimbledon of surfing -- dropped the women’s event so the men’s purse would be bigger. Adding insult to economic injury, they did keep the bikini contest.
But two women rewrote that narrative. Two local female surfers, the Smith Twins, organized a letter writing campaign to protest creating a great deal of bad press, and Op reinstated the women’s competition. They disrupted the wholly dismissive attitude toward competitive women, but still most young women on local beaches didn’t see themselves as surfers. In the 1990s, one of my current surf instructors was the only girl in the surf camp she now runs.
The movie describes a seminal moment in 1993 when surf company execs realized “boys’ size 28 boardshorts” were selling out all over Hawai’i. They had no idea why -- utterly clueless that GIRLS WERE BUYING MERCH because they wanted people to think they were surfers. Just like the boys, they thought surfing was cool. Quicksilver spun off Roxy, a women’s clothing division, and woke up to the economic reality that including 50% of the population helps sales. Execs still “didn’t understand it,” but at least they went with it. Nothing like money to fund awareness, and greed to facilitate narrative revision.
Such confirmation from the establishment created an explosion in women’s surfing. Women were photographed surfing serious waves for the magazines – in both ads and stories. Women surfers could now ride waves in comfort without worry. They wanted to wear appropriate clothing for surfing for the same reason men don’t wear tiny banana hammocks to surf: waves rip off flimsy clothing. So now women could more comfortably surf “for real” on a larger scale, were seen as surfers, so thought of themselves as surfers.
Though I am grateful to Roxy and its executives for having a huge role in catalyzing women’s surfing, the male gaze still prevails to this day in their merchandise. Men’s wetsuit lines don’t have “cheeky wetsuits” available for purchase in the spring. The wetsuit sizes only go up to 14, which is more like a dress size 10. So, we still have much work to do in becoming aware of how insidious the male gaze is. We are both, men and women, infected with it; like sand after a day at the beach, it is surprising where it gets into. Internalized oppression is a thing.
When women were allowed in to the events, not only was the prize money far lower but they were even pushed into riding crappy waves for the competition. If the good surf disappeared on a men’s event day, the officials would send the women out into the foamy mush. It wasn’t until 1999 at a competition in South Africa when women refused – at great professional risk -- to paddle out in such conditions that the narrative began to change again.
However, the existence of women in competitions came up again as recently in 2019 in Orange County. A surf shop was hosting a World Surf League event. Only men were invited. So, the state has considered adding anti-discrimination language to permits for such events held on state property. “Constant vigilance!” Mad Eye Moody said. Well, constant vigilance is exhausting. The process of rewriting the script for ourselves requires a massive effort. It’s hard to surf competitively when half your time is spent convincing others that you belong there.
It still makes me so angry. Here’s a goofy idea for competitions: why not eliminate gender categories altogether? Like the Oscars are considering for acting, eliminating gender-based categories may or may not increase representation and equity. It’s tricky. Might be too early yet. It seems to me that surfing is a place where it may work, because (to my newbie assessment) surfing ability HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH GENDER. Women rock the swells as well as men do. Local high schools have surf teams, so opportunity is there for all from a young age. Surf camps are packed with girls and boys, often more girls than boys these days according to my surf instructor. Around here in SoCal, seems like opportunities are even, so why divide the competition? Seems like this is a coming shift in the narrative that will further break down the societal boundaries, barriers, and boxes that started the mess.
Loving Awareness Itself
The third level of loving awareness, according to Kornfield, is understanding that I am awareness itself. I am consciousness inhabiting a physical body. That body can be a boundary, a barrier, but I can transcend that barrier and identify with consciousness itself. “And you shift from the content to seeing the process to becoming the clear space of awareness that is witness to it all,” said Jack in this past lesson. I’m just barely figuring out what that means – maybe doing this blog is what that means? I can see the content, notice that I’m caught up in it, write my own narrative around it and bear witness. That’s what a blog is, right? Maybe. Moving from being a sobbing mess immediately after the movie to writing this blog is some kind of progress.
In analyzing “firsts” as part of a class I taught on diversity, I thought about how all firsts in anything – first female marathon runner, first female Supreme Court justices, first Black president, first professional female surfers – have three things in common.
Firsts just wanted to do the thing. Katherine Switzer just loved to run and wanted to try running a marathon, just like tens of thousands of men did. The Smith Twins just wanted to surf in their own backyard, Huntington Beach.
Firsts had help from someone in a position of privilege. Generally, LOTS of political pressure also forced doors open, but very personally, there was one privileged human who extended the support and protection that allowed the person to become the first. Katherine Switzer’s boyfriend/coach was there to run the Boston Marathon alongside of her. In the movie, several of the women credited fathers and brothers with getting them started in the water.
Firsts had an awareness of what it meant to be a first. After the incident mid-race with the male Boston Marathon official, Switzer knew she had to finish the race no matter what. She knew it in that second. Opportunities for more women to run Boston depended on her finishing that race on that day. The Twins knew opportunities would continually be eroded if they let the Op Pro go. Several of the other women in the film said similar things when it came to their seminal moments.
They all became loving awareness itself.
Both Girls Can’t Surf and Surfing Sisterhood Hawai’i show us how these levels of awareness progressed for the women who brought back surfing for women. Say their names: Joey Hamasaki, Jolene and Jorja Smith, Jodie Cooper, Frieda Zamba, Pam Burridge, Wendy Botha, Lisa Andersen, Rochelle Ballard, among MANY others. The fear, pressure, self-doubt, and attacks (physical and social) that these women endured to create women’s competitive surfing -- I am continually astounded, grateful, awed, and saddened by the enormity of my mothers’ and grandmothers’ strength and sacrifice to simply do what they wanted to do, not just for themselves, but for their daughters.
As I’ve said repeatedly, I have yet to experience anything but lovely support in surfing as a beginner, as an older beginner, and as an overweight person. I haven’t been made aware of my femaleness at all. It is because these Wahine Firsts fought those battles that I am able to surf free of harassment. I am still flummoxed by anyone who wonders why a woman wouldn’t want to do this or any sport.
The lack of awareness and curiosity, as well as the limited imagination and inability to take another’s perspective in the heads of those in power limits all of us in so many ways. The reluctance of the powerful to understand the economic reality that when everyone does better, EVERYONE does better, limits their own and everyone else’s opportunities and bottom line.
Eckhart Tolle said, “Awareness is the greatest agent for change.” Meditation is a tool that supports the practice of becoming aware of my thoughts. In the stillness, I see the social conditioning of my upbringing clearly and work to transform the negative messaging, slowly dropping the barriers between me and others, becoming loving awareness itself. I hope teaching meditation, in person and in this blog, helps everyone do the same. Kornfield highlighted a Yeats quote this week, “We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather around us that they may see their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even a fiercer life because of our quiet.”
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