#notallmenwhosurf OR This is not an International Women’s Day essay

This week was International Women’s Day. Much to the seeming surprise of many people, it happens on 8th March, every year. 

There is growing critique about International Women’s Day (IWD) day; what it represents, who it represents, and how we should recognise it. Key critiques are of the corporate back-slapping and self-congratulations that it enables, as businesses and organisations host morning teas at which they point out the ways they’ve been less sexist that year, while serving cupcakes to women and taking photos to share in their promotional material. I absolutely agree with these critiques.

The history of IWD is one based in the protest and anger of working women about the conditions of their lives in their workplaces, their communities, and their homes. If you want to research the specific origins of this day, then go ahead, but keep in mind that there were similar movements and protests like this around the world, which are also part of this story. 

So what did I do this IWD? Not much, to be honest. I had spent the week watching various stories of women’s abuse and murder play out in the news, in particular stories about sexual assault by men in politics, and in government spaces. 

As I watched all this, some friends reminded me of a video by surfer Ellie-Jean Coffey, from 2020 in which she described the sexual abuse she experienced during her time in professional surfing. 

At the time it came out, I'd heard folk note how her video appeared alongside the launch of her pay-to-view adult content website, and I think that Coffey’s comfort with and money-making from her sexuality, meant many people didn’t take her claims very seriously, or found them diminished. It might be that there are associations to make between the two things, but I’m not here to assess that. I’m also not here to judge or moralise Coffey’s sex work, which is a really common and valid form of making money, and which seems to be financially profitable for Coffey.  

What I’m here to talk about is how there was no reaction to Coffey’s public discussion of her abuse at the time, and to highlight how her stories and the silence that surrounded them are the same as the stories surfacing in Australian politics in these last weeks. 

I want to recognise straight away that I was also silent at the time. I watched and waited for surf media to pick it up and talk about it, and when they didn’t I felt sad and tired. But I’ve not stopped thinking about it since then. This post has been more than two weeks of thinking and processing and deciding to even write it. 

Coffey’s stories were told in the era of #metoo, after all the discussions we’ve had about Harvey Weinstein and Hollywood culture, after years and years of critique of the treatment of women by players in various men’s football codes. It also comes after many, many years of stories circulating about cultures of sexual abuse of women athletes in various versions of competitive and professional surfing at all levels. I’ve certainly been told many of these stories over the years, mostly by women who had by then left competitive surfing. As someone very much outside the world of competitive and professional surfing, if I’ve been told these stories then everyone in surf media has certainly heard about them, or seen them happen, as well. 

Everything that follows from here on in is in response to the silence that surrounds Ellie-Jean Coffey’s video, the stories I know of women in surfing (competitive and recreational), as well as broader silence in relation to women’s safety and health. 

Everything that goes on from here is asking that surf media, industries, and cultures start to reckon with their own histories of sexual assault and abuse of girls and women. 

Because men in surf media have begun being much more activist in the last year or so, and maybe years, especially about the environment and sustainability. Men are yelling loudly and constantly about the treatment of the surfing and coastal places they love, and it’s been nice to see. But the men in surfing who are speaking up and being activist about protecting the environment are largely staying silent about violence about women, acting as the treatment of the environment and the treatment of women are separate. They’re not. 

Nor are these two things separate to homophobia, transphobia, white supremacy, ableism, and the much greater levels of marginalisation and violence experienced by trans women, Black, Indigenous and First Nations women, women of colour, and dis/abled women. If you’re going to talk about the rights of nature, then you’re sure as hell also talking about human rights too, even if you don’t know it. We’re part of ecologies that include human histories, societies and cultures. The acceptance of conscious violence and abuse by people in one area of an ecology – e.g. extractive practices – is an acceptance of violence and abuse in others – e.g. colonisation and rape. 

Maybe you think this is a long bow, and maybe it’s a tough link to make if you’ve not thought of it this way before, but years of scholarship, activism and writing by Indigenous and First Nations women, Black women and women of colour, as well as ecofeminists, have been making these connections clearly.

But what about men? What about men’s rights? 

Well, of course all of this is about the lack of opportunities of White, Western men too. People seem to worry that improving women's lives means diminishing men's, but we know that it means the opposite. Improving the living conditions for any group of people always improves our collective safety. It might mean that some people lose some of their social privilege (e.g. access to resources), or it might mean that social institutions change (e.g. how legal cases run), but this is not a loss for, in this case, men. It's addressing social inequalities that are weighted in favour of one group. The changes for men though, will help address the lack of opportunities many men face such as developing meaningful relationships to themselves, their communities, and the world they live in, or expressing themselves in ways currently deemed socially unacceptable. The changes can also be about violence experienced by men, which is violence of the same making as the many, many women and gender diverse authors have described over and over. It’s a violence perpetuated by cultures of masculinity, sexism, and misogyny. 

Cultures of ‘the boys’, the 'lads' and 'bros before hoes'.

For me, the key current perpetrator of the worst of lad culture in surfing is online website, Beach Grit, a less corporatised, more scummy version of Stab, led by a never-ending stream of self-aggrandising, whining provocation. It's possible to maintain irreverence for the industry without putting women down or allowing others to do so, and hopefully they figure out how. But there are other, less obviously (at best) sexist surf media sites and writers who have historically contributed to where we are today. Editors, journalists and photographers taking, making, writing, and publishing years, decades, of sexist representations of women and enabling cultures of abuse and belittlement of not only women’s surfing, not only women’s place in surfing culture, but women. 

Some of these writers are now up in horrified arms about the recent 'revelations' about incidents and cultures of men's entitlement, sexual assault and rape in Australian politics including across all political parties and in Parliament House itself. And well they should be, but I used quote marks because none of these were revelations to me or thousands of other women who were saddened, but unsurprised. 

Many of these men now have daughters, through whom they claim a form of understanding of and empathy with the effects of all this on women: “imagine if it was one of your girls”. But really, all it often amounts to is a Feminist Dad position by which what they care about is ensured safety, opportunities and respect for their daughters. I hope their daughters receive that too, but if a man's care about women's safety begins and ends with being a father to their daughters then it’s of limited value. I mean, caring about your mother, partner or daughters should be assumed, not wielded as a form of evidence that you care about women. 

I implore the men of surf media, and of surfing culture, to continue with your activism; it is welcome. But I implore you even harder to recognise that you have been told all of this for a very, very, very long time by many, many, many women. 

None of what you’re saying is new; women have been telling you for decades. 

Maybe you used to ignore it? Maybe you ridiculed women's concerns or experiences in private, or even in a publication? Maybe you still think, in your heart, #notallmen. Likely, you don’t want to have any of these options be part of your history, record or identity, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are. If you published a story about 'How to go from date to consensual rape', then you have contributed to the problem. If you published a magazine cover punning a link between red tides and women's menstrual cycles, then you have contributed to the problem. If you published advertisements featuring headless images of women wrapped in surf leashes in the magazine you were editing, then you have contributed to the problem. If you have cut these images out and stuck them on your bedroom walls, then you have contributed to the problem. If you publish articles about sexism in surfing and also post voyeuristic videos of women twerking because “It’s all part of the mystic balance of a publishing continuum”, then you have contributed to the problem, even as you recognise it. If you have never attended an International Women’s Day event, never watched a documentary about women’s surfing, or never marched in a protest for women's safety and rights, then you are part of the problem. If in your memoir you wrote about group sex that is, or at the very least borders on, rape, then you have, at best, contributed to the problem. If you wrote or published multiple articles deriding Tyler Wright about her story of sexualisation, pain, discrimination, and her fear of homophobia in surfing, then you’re absolutely sexist and are still contributing to the problem. (The articles are mostly upset that women spoke without allowing space for men to reply, so I look forward to the authors' own revisionist outrage on the decades of women's perspectives being left out.)

I'm not going to link to any of these examples. I don't want to give them the air-time. If you read surf media, then you've likely seen them anyway and know exactly who and what I'm talking about, and if not, then you're just going to have to believe me that they exist. 

The problem isn’t that women have been or are silent. The problem is that women aren’t listened to or believed. And if you don’t listen to or believe women, then even if you’re not personally sexually assaulting women, making them feel unsafe, dismissing them, putting them down, ignoring their discomfort, or not speaking up when other men are doing these things, then you’re the problem. 

We need men to speak up, but not if that is speaking over women. We need men to make changes, but not if they’re trying to turn women’s safety into men’s self-development. We need men to change, but not if that is about #notallmen.

Individual men perpetuate violence against women (and against many other people), but systems and cultures of sexism and misogyny are what enables this, and are what protects so many of the men who are accused of sexual and physical assault.

If you’re in surf media and you’re not publishing content by and/or about women, then you’re part of the problem. If you have the chance to tell other men to believe women but don’t, then you’re part of the problem. 

There's a film, Girls Can't Surf, that links with all this that was launched recently. Watch Girls Can’t Surf, and then go out and read and look at and take seriously the volumes of content by thousands of women about sexism in professional surfing, in recreational surfing, in surf media, in the surf industry, across all of surfing culture. 

If you’re feeling terrible about all of this and don’t know what to do, then please know that I feel the same. But feeling terrible and being immobilised by that doesn’t fix anything. Feminist writers tell us how it is important to sit in our discomfort by staying with the trouble and doing something about the trouble at the same time. There are all kinds of big and small things you can do, but none of them can be a one off. If we want to change things, then we need to change how things are done, and that will take all of us, all the time.

I know that it can be frustrating to be left wondering what exactly are things that you can do, so I’ll end this with a non-exhaustive list of suggestions:

• Read and watch everything you can by women and about women’s surfing stories. Even if you don’t agree with it or it makes you feel upset. Sit in the awful discomfort and shame you feel about it all, most especially about any role you might have had in it. Discomfort indicates something, so take time to think about it, and wonder at why you’re feeling so bad. 
• Read and watch anti-white supremacist, anti-colonial, and anti-transphobic and homophobic content. Women's issues are intersectional issues, and different women experience them with varying levels of intensity. 
• Believe what you read. Believe it as a default. 
• Share this content with others. Not only online, but in conversations.
• March at the marches, protest at the protests - be a visible ally and activist for girls and women, including trans women and non-binary people. March, and listen some more. 
• Don’t ask the women you know to share their stories of pain or trauma with you so you can better understand, or ask them to validate other women’s stories as true. You’ll have been able to see enough of that in your reading and watching. Don’t talk to women with the aim of getting rid of some of your guilt, and to make you feel like you’re a good guy. Talk to other men about these feelings. Talk to other men about your worries and pain. I just spent an hour reading some past discussions between men on a male-dominated surf forum about violence towards women in the surf. Some of these men were making outrageous claims, but they were being pulled up by each other along the way, and in a language and form of engagement they were familiar with. Would it have been helpful for me to contribute? Not if I wanted to keep my own mental health in check.  
• Give up your platform to women if it is dominated by men. Invited to speak on a panel? Ask if any women are included and if they aren’t ask why and suggest someone in your place. Invited to write about something you’re not very well versed in? Suggest a woman with more expertise. 
• Don’t commission women only to talk about women. Women can talk about all kinds of things other than ‘women’. Ask them about surf comps, board design, environmentalism, cars, weather reporting, and more - all the things you’d ask a guy to write about or photograph. 
• Donate to organisations working to support women’s safety and health. Donate especially to organisations that work with Black, Indigenous and First Nations women, and women of colour. Research who is running and funding these organisations, as well as who is benefitting from their work. Make regular donations. Make as big a donation as you can. This last week I have donated to Sisters Inside, Seed Mob, and Minorities in Shark Science (MISS). 
• Give women physical space when you’re around them in public. If they’re acting edgy, then it's likely they feel uncomfortable, which might not be about you exactly, but about the multiple examples of discomfort or assault they’ve experienced through their lives. Don’t walk too closely behind women on the street, don’t keep pace with them at night. Try to be in women’s eyesight, and don’t call out to them or try to chat if they’re on their own. Don’t take up more space than you need in shared spaces: don’t sit with your legs spread wide, don’t stare at women as they’re walking towards your group, don’t call out to them for attention, don’t bump into them or stand over them, don't do these things even accidentally just because you’ve allowed them to be invisible to you in a space.
• Speak up! Speak up when your friends are being shitty, whether they’re meaning to or not. Don’t call people a ‘pussy’, don’t laugh at sexist jokes, don’t let your mates joke about rape, don’t let them creep on or badger women.  
• Don’t click on sexist or misogynist links. Don’t read the articles, don’t even hate read them. Don’t give them that currency. Content these days is so often driven by clicks. (Note: that clicking on self-sexualising content by women is an associated but different issue).