Making Friends With The Neighbours

Although it happens less and less, there are still days when people will explain the continued absence of women in surf media as a reflection of a lack of interest in women’s surfing, or due to a lack of content created by women surfers themselves. These explanations are as frustrating as they are disappointing (and fury-inducing) because neither of these things are true. The high profile of women surfers like Stephanie Gilmore, Carissa Moore and Layne Beachley are simple evidence, but even more is the success of various media about women’s surfing. Films like Blue Crush  (2002) and Girls Can’t Surf  (2022) played to packed cinemas, Magazines like Sea.Together have endured and connected international surfing communities, reporting in Tracks by Kate Allman, Lucy Small and Selina Steele on sexism in women’s competitive sport was nominated for a Walkely award for Women’s Leadership in Media, and the 2020 all-women issue of Australian surf magazine, White Horses , went into reprint. So

(Side note: Has it really been a whole year since I last posted?!) I’ve been trying to think about how to write about International Women’s Day (IWD) for 2022.  The theme, Changing Climates: Equality today for a sustainable tomorrow , gives lots of scope to this about how intersectional politics of sex/gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, colonisation, ageism, and ableism, link with ecological issues that I’m interested in, as well as the wars, natural disasters, and the pandemic that are dominating my news feed. As it happens, in my region we’ve been living in catastrophic weather events. I’ve found them deeply distressing and I’ve one of the folk who has been safe and dry, so I can’t imagine what these events have been like for those who will continue to feel the traumatic impacts for many years to come.  For me, IWD is about more than women, because fighting for greater equity for women necessarily includes equity for non-binary and trans people too. Certainly, I’m not here to write