tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-294371722024-03-15T04:48:57.476+10:00Making Friends With The NeighboursRebecca Olivehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09428676558153909572noreply@blogger.comBlogger659125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29437172.post-71129926697734825512024-03-08T08:00:00.000+10:002024-03-10T00:15:13.026+10:00IWD 2024: Navigating apathy and guilt<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-5Tt38_CUErPT9av8NCaRv9aKagoBhOgP66hpnGfpyxW-t72w0Yng9kE-6mPf_SlfSdxAkkx4UJYLDbXzlpRajLj6pNsshYTCYWFM97lZ1-tFNdP9REvSTFsWgcoHmKO9f3RxN6-PVhun3vLzNF6UXkM-AAB1wpbeNsXweZZnAZJDw6RNBw5k/s4000/Home.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3000" data-original-width="4000" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-5Tt38_CUErPT9av8NCaRv9aKagoBhOgP66hpnGfpyxW-t72w0Yng9kE-6mPf_SlfSdxAkkx4UJYLDbXzlpRajLj6pNsshYTCYWFM97lZ1-tFNdP9REvSTFsWgcoHmKO9f3RxN6-PVhun3vLzNF6UXkM-AAB1wpbeNsXweZZnAZJDw6RNBw5k/s320/Home.JPG" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p>I’ve been thinking a lot about International Women’s Day over the last week, mostly because I’m not participating in any events or actions or anything at all this year. I always know it is coming up (as I tell people who seem surprised it’s arrived, "it’s the same date every year") so I can only surmise that my apathy is intentional. By now, we know the critiques of IWD that emerge in Australia – that it is commercialised, corporatized, neoliberal, and focused on White women, middle class women, women with the most privilege – so my apathy isn't so hard to understand. </p><p>What has been surprising is that along with my apathy has come guilt. </p><p>I know that it’s not my personal responsibility to do something every year. Nor is there a need for my thoughts or ideas to be part of every IWD conversation or action. But I still feel guilty that I'm not participating in a formal way. </p><p>Recognising that this year I'm not organising or supporting events or actions, I’ve made time to think about what the value of IWD is if you’re not doing anything meaningful to contribute to it. As I think, I’ve been watching and listening to the discussions and debates online and around me. Many of them are common IWD fare – objections to the theme; irritation at the misleading, non-official website; pointing out that the events are all largely organised by women. Other people, many people, are highlighting the recent release of gender-based pay gap reporting in Australia (spoiler: it’s still really bad). There are also strong intersectional threads, reminding us of the many inequities among women, and that there is no universal experience of being a woman. This last point seems to intersect with the critiques of the UN theme for 2024, ‘Invest in Women: Accelerate Progress’. We can criticise the idea of "progress" all we like (and we absolutely, definitely, most certainly should) but economic, educational, and quality of life progress would be welcome for many women in many places.</p><p>And so I land on the conclusion that this kind of thinking and reflecting can be enough. That making time over the last week to think and read and listen and reflect and critique, even if just in my own head, is enough. That taking stock and shutting up and being willing to let my understandings and beliefs shift and expand with new knowledge and ideas that emerge from the work of many people who engage in all kinds of conversations is not the only thing we should do, but it is something I’m proud to have contributed this year.</p><p>International Women’s Day remains a really valuable day to connect with. Not only for celebration or making accusations but for taking time to reflect on the state of things and to think deeply and regularly across the years on a set of issues and experiences, and to imagine what possible actions could be taken to make things better for everyone by making things better for women. </p><p>In my case, as ever, the thinking is strongly informed by feminism, which is a “broad church” but one that I continue to be inspired and challenged by. Feminism isn’t static or staid. It morphs and changes to accommodate critique and diversity. Or it should anyway. Feminism has offered me frameworks to think with, a range of methods to learn about the world with, sets of ethics to shape my decisions and actions, access to critiques that show me where my own practices could be more inclusive, and a politics of action and activation that means you can never stay still for long. </p><p>And so we locate the source of the guilt in my apathy; the political imperative of feminism that has long reminded me of the need to contribute, to act, to be involved.</p><p>There is no need to for me to participate in my employer’s feel good IWD events today and there is no need at all for me to post anything to social media. But I couldn’t answer to my own politics and beliefs if I didn’t think about what and why that apathy had infiltrated my willingness to participate. A willingness to act, to think, and to be part of the kinds of changes we all hope to see requires more than yelling and pressing share, and it absolutely requires more than standing on one piece of ground and never moving. </p><p>Sometimes, as I’ve learned this year, a willingness to act can be found in taking time to shake off the cynicism and remember what the point was from the start...</p><p>Collective and sustained action. With all the forms of contribution and conversation that are possible and necessary. </p><p><br /></p>Rebecca Olivehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09428676558153909572noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29437172.post-51040056752784897702023-11-13T11:12:00.006+10:002023-11-13T11:16:44.770+10:00The immortality of sexism in surfing<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">This morning, I listened to the key, daily current affairs radio program on ABC National Radio, our national broadcaster. They usually close the show with a lighter story related to the arts, sport, or popular culture and this morning was no different as <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/radionational-breakfast/phil-jarratt-names-the-immortals-of-australian-surfing/103093128" target="_blank">they interviewed Phil Jarratt </a>about his new book, <i><a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com.au/books/Immortals-of-Australian-Surfing/Phil-Jarratt/9780645207095" target="_blank">The Immortals of Australian Surfing</a></i>. I’d not heard about this book, and it’s not a book I’d take interest in, but according to the promotion material: </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"></div><blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">The Immortals of Australian Surfing celebrates our greatest ever board-riders. It takes the Immortals concept used elsewhere in sport and applies it to the surfing, choosing the best of the best from over 50 years of the local scene and the world tour.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Renowned surfing writer Phil Jarratt selects his top 12 riders then delves into the careers of the true greats. Legendary riders selected and profiled include pioneers Midget Farrelly, Nat Young and Layne Beachley; the world champs of the seventies and eighties such as Mark Richards; Tom Carroll and Pam Burridge; to modern era greats Mick Fanning and Stephanie Gilmore.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">The book tells the remarkable stories behind each Immortal's rise to the top and the adversity faced through their careers.</div></blockquote></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">I don’t know the full list of folk included, so I can’t comment on the other four not named in this blurb. But I do recall him talking about including Simon Anderson and Wayne Lynch, who, although they did not win numerous world titles have certainly made important contributions to how people surf. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">When asked about how he selected the 12 immortals, Jarratt discussed how much more difficult it was to choose 12 than 100, that he knew there would be much disagreement and potential insult about who was in and who was left out, and was careful to recognise that the terms immortal is not his (it is linked to a bigger project by the company stemming from a list of rugby league players) and that there can be no true definitive list because the criteria for what we might consider ‘immortal’ in surfing are so subjective and variable. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Jarratt is not an unexpected choice for this kind of writing gig as he's had a really successful career in surf industry journalism and marketing. For these reasons, it is also no surprise that Jarratt appears to have focused his criteria for his choice of immortals on contributions to surfing performance, rather than the broader culture. I’m not critiquing that choice – it’s a legitimate one nad aligns with the series it's part of which is focused on sport – but I’m just reminding us that given the choice we would all likely set different criteria. Jarratt understands this and, rightly, doesn’t apologise for it.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">There was nothing really new in the interview, which was light and focused on promoting the book and discussing the significance of surfing in Australia life and culture, but I knew there would have to be a point at which the question of the inclusion of women in the book came up. The usual names had been mentioned, Beachley and Burridge and Gilmore, and it was fantastic to hear their names included without it being a notable thing. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Except for when Jarratt explained the publisher’s commitment to their being gender (binary) equity in the numbers of women and men included. That is, there were meant to be six women and six men. As I mentioned, this book is part of a series and there definitely doesn't seem to be the same commitment in the immortals lists for other sports such as rugby league, horse racing, and motor sports. It's really interesting that they made this request for surfing, but this is not how the list worked out. Instead, Jarratt negotiated that there would be four women and eight men, because, as Jarratt told the national audience of listeners, he explained to the publishers that “gender equity is a new concept in surfing”, so it wouldn’t be easy to include six women. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">[Pause for nostril flaring]</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Gender equity is not a new concept in surfing. I accept that it’s new in terms of how it is being implemented across surf competitions, media representations, funding, sponsorship, etc, but conceptually it’s not new at all. There is so much evidence of how generations of women in Australia have been arguing for greater equity, inclusion and recognition in professional surfing, surf media and everyday lineups. Generations! I mean, Jarratt himself has written a fiction book that included a focus on Isabel Letham, an early White woman surfer who was riding waves in Australia the early 1900s. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">I accept that surfing is going through change, but gender equity isn’t a new concept in surfing, except perhaps to the cultural and industry gatekeepers who maintain their ignorance to women’s boardriding contributions in the waves and the culture. But moves to equity there have long been. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">In a subjective list like this one, and in a sport like surfing, there is no excuse for not including equal numbers of women and men, just as the publisher requested. The criteria used is entirely made up, is based on one man’s choices, and offers no prize money or benefits for the surfers named beyond a sense of recognition. There would have been no harm at all at creating a criteria for boardriding that enabled Jarratt to include six women. None. There would have only been benefits in expanding the ways that women’s contributions to surfing are increasingly recognised and included.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">I genuinely appreciate Jarratt publicly recognising that change related to women’s inclusion and representation has been slow in surfing. He’s entirely right and it’s great to hear him say that on air. But it is equally disappointing to hear that the outcome of this recognition was him continuing to keep the bar so low for what women can expect when so many others have lifted the bar so high. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">In surf media, men still dominate senior editorial roles but they have been bringing in more and more women to contribute, to gain experience, to create and drive projects, and to set a path for a change in leadership in surf media. This shift is reflected in the much greater representation and celebration of women surfers (and writers and photographers and filmmakers) in surf media, which in turn paves the way for more sponsorship money and opportunities for women. And, slowly, surf competitions have been under increasing pressure to provide equal prize money – something you think should just be a legal obligation, but instead seems a sticking point truly difficult to undo. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Where Jarratt sees a slow move to thinking about gender equity, I see action to an increasingly cumulative effect. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">These points about the list of immortals are sort of moot because, as Jarratt knows, this book won’t be a national bestseller, nor will it make any real noise across surfing beyond some possible initial reactions on online discussion forums or on click-bait surf websites. But in world where there has been so much momentum in gender (binary) equity in surfing, Jarratt’s decision to argue to include fewer women when he could have followed the publisher’s lead to have equal numbers really stand out as old, tired, and from another time. </div><div><br /></div></div><p></p>Rebecca Olivehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09428676558153909572noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29437172.post-62237176425687083902022-10-24T09:53:00.005+10:002022-10-24T10:00:17.618+10:00'Surf Life' and stories of women's surfing<p>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 <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Crush" target="_blank">Blue Crush</a></i> (2002) and <i><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/aug/17/girls-cant-surf-review-hugely-enjoyable-doc-about-women-who-rule-the-waves">Girls Can’t Surf</a></i> (2022) played to packed cinemas, Magazines like <i><a href="https://seatogether.com/">Sea.Together</a></i> have endured and connected international surfing communities, <a href="https://tracksmag.com.au/tracks-recognised-in-mid-year-walkley-award-nomination" target="_blank">reporting in <i>Tracks</i> by Kate Allman, Lucy Small and Selina Steele</a> 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, <i><a href="https://whitehorses.com.au/product/issue-34-current-issue/" target="_blank">White Horses</a></i>, went into reprint. So clearly, women’s surfing is popular and women are creating all kinds of content across both mainstream and surf media. If you don't see this work then it's time to consider that the issue isn't women, the issue is you!</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyIOVK5r3MoXE0e5brqDSmXKKthXmScL7yjzL9LBwxb4LGBfcJhq4To-uhAV2scmaV4rxwAg68dvwuyLJAkcEJVSTg2wrTfnLQd7OxVQnOz-16kpu8zqHAhQ7pusGnKkomD64p-mq0wnoDS27yRQdGO_nVNr-aTVka6wt_uO6fr-ucy44hGA/s1142/Surf%20Life.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1142" data-original-width="900" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyIOVK5r3MoXE0e5brqDSmXKKthXmScL7yjzL9LBwxb4LGBfcJhq4To-uhAV2scmaV4rxwAg68dvwuyLJAkcEJVSTg2wrTfnLQd7OxVQnOz-16kpu8zqHAhQ7pusGnKkomD64p-mq0wnoDS27yRQdGO_nVNr-aTVka6wt_uO6fr-ucy44hGA/w252-h320/Surf%20Life.jpeg" width="252" /></a></div>And now there is another book to add to my ever-growing list of evidence of the interest in women’s surfing. <i><a href="https://thamesandhudson.com.au/product/surf-life-women-who-live-to-surf-and-create/" target="_blank">Surf Life</a></i>, by writer, <a href="https://www.instagram.com/babes_on_waves/" target="_blank">Gill Hutchinson</a>, and photographer, <a href="https://willem-dirk.com/" target="_blank">Willem-Dirk du Toit</a>, profiles a range of women surfers and explores how surfing shapes their lives out of the water. This book was launched to a huge crowd of people at the Patagonia store in Torquay (Australia), where there was a range of folk all stoked to cheer this book and the women in it. The huge turnout by her local community is also a real reflection of the kinds of person Gill is – inclusive, supportive and enthusiastic about everyone’s work and endeavours, she’s the kind of person who lifts folk up with no expectations they bring her with them. Her book is another example of this spirit.<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijOeRh_ZbjBC4_AU7AfTyKjEyGUHc979z1zJKFpRLZHTUiY3XJIIiqQ5laE4XnB5q5dbR5LAkG6_B0whuYvOlFiwKeYDcwf02xgxPiaod8uo2LLmqBHQAv9il90bclhjME4BKCDNw4UuqDlNeokpc5lJNrm8YxjdyzFzAA5Lxwyiyh2es_wA/s1020/Surf%20Life%20intro.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="638" data-original-width="1020" height="250" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijOeRh_ZbjBC4_AU7AfTyKjEyGUHc979z1zJKFpRLZHTUiY3XJIIiqQ5laE4XnB5q5dbR5LAkG6_B0whuYvOlFiwKeYDcwf02xgxPiaod8uo2LLmqBHQAv9il90bclhjME4BKCDNw4UuqDlNeokpc5lJNrm8YxjdyzFzAA5Lxwyiyh2es_wA/w400-h250/Surf%20Life%20intro.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><p>While high-profile, sponsored surfers, Belinda Baggs and Lauren Hill, are both amongst the pages, most of the profiles are about women for who surfing is a central, but simpler part of their life. Collectively, their stories of surfing challenge the idea that only those who are best at it – most skilled, most dedicated, most well-known – get to define how surfing is done and what it can mean. These stories show how surfing can weave in and out of our lives, how it can take a back seat when children, jobs or health need our time and attention, and how to continue surfing across a lifespan.</p><p>The focus of Gill’s words and Willem’s images is not on those who do it best or have done it longest. There is no judgement on levels skill or commitment. Instead, there is radical inclusion of women who are new to surfing, who live away from the coast, or who admit they just don’t surf that well.</p><p>It’s always a joy to celebrate the launch of awesome projects about women’s surfing. But in this case it’s even more of a joy, because the author is my friend. Gill and I met over 10 years ago through our respective blogs – another case of how writing and sharing work on Making Friends With the Neighbours has brought so joy much to my life, and why I’ll always owe blogging a huge debt.</p><p>Mega, major congratulations to Gill and Willem on this beautiful, thoughtful, uplifting book. </p><div><br /></div>Rebecca Olivehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09428676558153909572noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29437172.post-37249718953114072592022-03-08T04:00:00.036+10:002023-04-18T21:01:28.886+10:00IWD 2022<p style="text-align: left;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><p></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg-WuNc_jkasN62AuRE9aEuiHYyn3grSMVl7HBmMrguXGsoDiiWhmBN0Rwq75pn9pwkpDIWV6akKZ6CM1PBHPg-PR8cBgEPUlSbaEnxqxrLP_AhQ53srJBHCP13q4wWOaXq_QIE0-94FXY2Fl2HFCRljzl1WLGkhKZSU0thZIMVUHrq1DpqjA=s1800" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1800" data-original-width="1440" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg-WuNc_jkasN62AuRE9aEuiHYyn3grSMVl7HBmMrguXGsoDiiWhmBN0Rwq75pn9pwkpDIWV6akKZ6CM1PBHPg-PR8cBgEPUlSbaEnxqxrLP_AhQ53srJBHCP13q4wWOaXq_QIE0-94FXY2Fl2HFCRljzl1WLGkhKZSU0thZIMVUHrq1DpqjA=s320" width="256" /></a></div><p style="text-align: left;">(Side note: Has it really been a whole year since I last posted?!)</p>I’ve been trying to think about how to write about International Women’s Day (IWD) for 2022. <p></p><p>The theme, <i><a href="https://unwomen.org.au/get-involved/international-womens-day/" target="_blank">Changing Climates: Equality today for a sustainable tomorrow</a></i>, 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.</p><p>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. </p><p>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 a celebratory post that congratulates everyone on the improvements in women’s, non-binary and trans peoples’ lives. Instead, I’m going to reflect on a couple of issues that align with the IWD 2022 theme, Changing Climates: Equality today for a sustainable tomorrow.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><b><i>Equity, not equality</i></b></h3><p>Each year, the work of IWD falls largely to women, but like men, we’re tired. I mean, given what is going on in the world, at the very least, we’re tired. But IWD should not be ‘women’s work’, because a more inclusive world for women means a more inclusive world for everyone.</p><p>Or it should.</p><p>As a feminist, I believe we need to pay close attention to the critiques of both IWD and feminism by Indigenous, First Nations, Black and diverse women of colour, as well as non-binary and trans people of colour. We need to pay attention, and we need to attend to the critiques they make, and the limitations they show us. </p><p>And so I come to the argument that feminism – all activism, in fact – should be about equity not equality. Equality is about buying into the status quo, when really, we’re about changing it. I don’t want to live in a world that has been created to privilege men; just as Indigenous and First Nations people don’t want to fit into the settler-colonial models of society and governance that have displaced them from their lands and waterways; just as LGBTIQ+ people don’t want to fit into heteronormative models of love and family. We all want to world to change to accommodate more diverse ways of being and living, to account for forms of justice and repatriation. </p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><b><i>Value women’s work managing climate events</i></b></h3><p>I live in Brisbane and grew up on the north coast of New South Wales, regions which have been experiencing a catastrophic weather event. I want to immediately recognise that I have been safe during this time and my home remains un-flooded, so the material effects on me are very limited. I found the events very distressing and stressful, but I have not suffered the loss of my home. However, the effects on my friends and loved ones in these communities I care deeply about are severe.</p><p>Almost all of the work rescuing people, cleaning their homes and coordinating donation and evacuation centres has been led by the communities themselves. And this is amazing. What I’ve noticed is, that the recognition so far has largely gone to men. The efforts of surfers and celebrities with resources, and blokes with fishing boats on the dangerous waters are heroic and to be recognised. But the people doing the less photogenic work looking after the evacuation and donation centres are often women. While it’s great that fit, attractive, male celebrities and athletes get gratitude for their work, they’re also highly resourced people who have often enjoyed years of community support. The women volunteering in the donation centres are dealing with the less dramatic aspects of disaster, but their work is as essential as the daring rescues on the water. If anyone, my thoughts this IWD go to those women, across the world, who are doing this kind of care work at the places of the greatest impacts of climate change. In this, I include their care for the creatures they look after –wildlife, pets and other animals. </p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><b><i>The pressure on women to reduce global waste </i></b></h3><p>Quite rightly, there is a lot of focus on reducing waste, and our consumption of products such as single use plastics and fast fashion. These pressures should fall most heavily on nations that have been long industrialised, which have most benefited from resource extraction, and those which rely on the labour – often indentured or unpaid – of vulnerable people in less wealthy nations. That is, they should fall on nations like Australia. </p><p>And yet, the pressure to make change often falls on individuals to not drive, to not fly, to not eat meat. Even more, there are pressures to change our consumption habits at a more domestic level; changes which are reasonable to promote, but which create huge levels of pressure on women. The argument to make switches from single use to reusable products is really fair, but since women still manage most domestic labour, then issues that relate to shopping, recycling, and composting fall most heavily on them. Time and labour saving menstrual products, disposable nappies, and cleaning products are still largely the responsibility of women, so the labour of the transition to reusables is on them. Scrubbing the labels from glass jars, cleaning tins, crushing cans, sorting what can be recycled and what can’t is time consuming and laborious. Companies, not individuals, should be responsible for making recycling and reusing easier. </p><p>At the same time, while women have long faced pressures about their bodies and looks – and these pressures differ across cultures – we are now under pressure to give up the very beauty products we’ve been encouraged to use. Plastic packaging, micro-beads, and polluting chemicals are some of the effects of beauty product industries, and while I’m not advocating for makeup and so on, and we need to recognise how the pressures around these product changes often fall to women to shoulder. Also, these products are sometimes personal joys in difficult times. </p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><b><i>And so…</i></b></h3><p>Overall, I suppose, this post does not do much to celebrate women in the ways IWD has come to represent. But I hope that in talking about some of the issues that continue to shape women’s everyday lives, this is a post that is love-filled and celebratory.</p><p>For IWD 2022, I will take time to read some of the many thousands of words that have been written by women, and to listen to the stories they are telling. I will take the time to reflect on their optimism and fears, their anger and frustrations, and their complaints. I will respect their words and work, and their contributions to the ongoing fight for equity. </p><p><br /></p>Rebecca Olivehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09428676558153909572noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29437172.post-83984881567522505442021-03-13T11:47:00.045+10:002023-03-23T09:59:33.211+10:00#notallmenwhosurf OR This is not an International Women’s Day essay<div>This week was International Women’s Day. Much to the seeming surprise of many people, it happens on 8th March, every year. </div><div><br /></div><div>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.</div><div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>As I watched all this, some friends reminded me of a video by <a href="https://www.instagram.com/tv/CFyQ3QGnEOT/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link" target="_blank">surfer Ellie-Jean Coffey, from 2020 in which she described the sexual abuse she experienced during her time in professional surfing</a>. </div><div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>Everything that goes on from here is asking that <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-019-0250-9" target="_blank">surf media, industries, and cultures start to reckon with their own histories of sexual assault and abuse of girls and women</a>. </div><div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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 <a href="http://www7.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/IndigLawB/2005/27.html" target="_blank">Indigenous and First Nations women</a>, B<a href="https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/a-billion-black-anthropocenes-or-none" target="_blank">lack women and women of colour</a>, as well as <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Feminism-and-the-Mastery-of-Nature/Plumwood/p/book/9780415068109" target="_blank">ecofeminists</a>, have been making these connections clearly.</div><div><br /></div><div>But what about men? What about men’s rights? </div><div><br /></div><div>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 <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=uxOkq30AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=sra" target="_blank">cultures of masculinity, sexism, and misogyny</a>. </div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://www.mup.com.au/books/notes-for-a-young-surfer-paperback-softback">Cultures of ‘the boys’</a>, the 'lads' and 'bros before hoes'.</div><div><br /></div><div>For me, the key current perpetrator of the worst of lad culture in surfing is online website, <i>Beach Grit</i>, a less corporatised, more scummy version of <i>Stab</i>, 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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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: “<a href="https://junkee.com/scott-morrison-higgins-allegation/288094" target="_blank">imagine if it was one of your girls</a>”. But really, all it often amounts to is a <a href="https://newswithnipples.wordpress.com/feminist-dad/" target="_blank">Feminist Dad</a> 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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>None of what you’re saying is new; women have been telling you for decades. </div><div><br /></div><div>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 <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14443059909387501?casa_token=lJje3tAbm-AAAAAA:nn5rBrEpGTv2VzvWvjpO6HbMvc21JkfyWUMp6lt--7W8wn6eNF_RjkdF-STMeZPHP8y4VctWn6VRSds" target="_blank">headless images of women wrapped in surf leashes</a> 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 <a href="https://www.espn.com/espnw/story/_/id/31010434/how-world-champion-tyler-wright-came-back-crippling-virus-change-surfing-forever" target="_blank">Tyler Wright about her story </a>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.)</div><div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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.</div><div><br /></div><div>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.</div><div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>There's a film, <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBjcbZla2cA" target="_blank">Girls Can't Surf</a></i>, that links with all this that was launched recently. Watch <i>Girls Can’t Surf</i>, 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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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 <a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/staying-with-the-trouble" target="_blank">staying with the trouble</a> 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.</div><div><br /></div><div>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:</div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>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. </li><li>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. </li><li>Believe what you read. Believe it as a default. </li><li>Share this content with others. Not only online, but in conversations.</li><li>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. </li><li>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 <a href="https://www.surfline.com/surf-news/the-feeling-of-threat/99891" target="_blank">violence towards women in the surf</a>. 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. </li><li>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. </li><li>Don’t commission women <i>only</i> 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. </li><li>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 <i><a href="https://www.sistersinside.com.au/" target="_blank">Sisters Inside</a></i>, <i><a href="https://www.seedmob.org.au/" target="_blank">Seed Mob</a></i>, and <i><a href="http://www.misselasmo.org/" target="_blank">Minorities in Shark Science (MISS)</a></i>. </li><li>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 <a href="http://makingfriendswiththeneighbours.blogspot.com/2016/05/a-woman-alone.html" target="_blank">about the multiple examples of discomfort or assault they’ve experienced through their lives</a>. 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.</li><li>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. </li><li>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 <a href="http://makingfriendswiththeneighbours.blogspot.com/2018/08/laura-crane-has-skin-in-game-surf-story.html" target="_blank">clicking on self-sexualising content by women is an associated but different issue</a>).</li></ul><div><br /></div></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCgq-V-17h-hB19P1eiiNYPVQPFNMkEen1b94q_EDxkk2r_dtUhb6ADkv1CZfcx5D2xk-aDnd3YVF5gPoKPaywJYVifq4sFVjW6DEt3_8aN4zGXdKSa1cWhvkm2zZ0XnQqGGHq/s1880/Jellyfish+-+Cata%25CC%2583o.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1253" data-original-width="1880" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCgq-V-17h-hB19P1eiiNYPVQPFNMkEen1b94q_EDxkk2r_dtUhb6ADkv1CZfcx5D2xk-aDnd3YVF5gPoKPaywJYVifq4sFVjW6DEt3_8aN4zGXdKSa1cWhvkm2zZ0XnQqGGHq/w400-h266/Jellyfish+-+Cata%25CC%2583o.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div><br /></div>Rebecca Olivehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09428676558153909572noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29437172.post-54597002231817202882020-01-07T13:39:00.001+10:002020-01-07T13:55:54.879+10:00the sea is all about us<br />
From <i><b>The Dry Salvages</b> </i><br />
by T.S. Eliot (published in 1941)<br />
<br />
The river is within us, the sea is all about us;<br />
The sea is the land's edge also, the granite<br />
Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses<br />
Its hints of earlier and other creation:<br />
The starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale's backbone;<br />
The pools where it offers to our curiosity<br />
The more delicate algae and the sea anemone.<br />
It tosses up our losses, the torn seine,<br />
The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar<br />
And the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices,<br />
Many gods and many voices.<br />
<br />
----------------<br />
<br />
I just read this at the beginning of the Afterword by Jeffrey S. Levinton in the 1989 edition of Rachel Carson's, <i>The Sea Around Us. </i>It is a section of a much longer poem, that itself is part of a set, <i>Four Quartets</i>, that were largely written during World War II. <i>The Dry Salvages</i> was written during the air-raids in Britain, and it is very sad.<br />
<br />
I'm not vouching for the whole thing, but this section really resonated with the work I'm doing today, and how I'm feeling as the fires continue to burn here in Australia. With how we can make sense of the questions and possibilities we're left with. A dead, white guy's poem is not the place I thought to find that feeling, but there you go - perhaps it's something about making sense of the scale of human-wrought destruction, such as war, and raging fires, on the world and the forms of life, the ecosystems and cultures, that it hosts.<br />
<br />
For what it's worth, here is Alec Guinness reading the Four Quartets, with The Dry Salvages starting at 24.20 (His rolling rrrs are worth it alone):<br />
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<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ccupYGfiDEw" width="560"></iframe><br />
<br />
The poem is named after a rock formation of the coast of Massachusetts in the USA.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://kmcpoetry.blog/2018/11/24/personal-pronouns-and-audience-in-the-four-quartets-3/" target="_blank"><img alt="the dry salvages" src="https://kmcpoetry.files.wordpress.com/2018/11/the-dry-salvages.jpg?w=840" /></a><br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2012/10/a-visit-to-the-dry-salvages-of-eliots-four-quartets" target="_blank"><img src="http://static.poetryfoundation.org/o/harriet/2012/10/10-15-12_Salvages.jpg" /></a>Rebecca Olivehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09428676558153909572noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29437172.post-10133891966667904612019-10-03T09:03:00.001+10:002019-10-10T15:40:41.807+10:00The eugenics of surfingSurfing is one of the great joys of my life.* Being outside, at the beach, riding waves, spending time alone or with friends, encountering all kinds of animals, being away from my computer and phone - it's a feeling of freedom and joy that I find in precious few other activities. The very thought of being in the water and riding waves makes me feel good.<br />
<br />
But while the joy of surfing is the biggest part of it, darkness, discrimination and exclusion are a large part of going surfing too. These cultural aspects - human wrought - are by far the worst of surfing; worse than the fear of sharks, of wipeouts, of fin cuts.<br />
<br />
The violence and anger, the sense of entitlement, the commitment to exclusivity that some surfers layer over the pleasures they find in riding waves is the worst of surfing. We've all seen, experienced or practised this to varying degrees, and we've all likely turned our heads at times as well, hoping it will go away, hoping the victim will go away. It's not always so blatant as physical violence. Sometimes it's as simple as making it clear that we don't want you here, and we've decided you don't belong. It might be justified in terms of safety, or looking after a place, but really, it's just about claiming authority over a beach; a patch of ocean and it's waves.<br />
<br />
These days we talk about this kind of behaviour in terms of localism, which is a soft word for a highly exclusionary practice. A practice linked to colonisation and racist politics. And yet, for so long, surfing has celebrated these kinds of practices as integral to what we do, to our own sense of belonging. Nowhere is this more evident in the glorifying of Dora, which requires playing down or even ignoring his racism and commitment to white supremacist politics and actions. Can I admire Dora for his surfing and rat-baggery seperate from his racism and violence? No. And I've long been confused by our cultural willingness to do so.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/28/opinion/sunday/surf-racism.html" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="_blank"><img border="0" data-original-height="1165" data-original-width="1600" height="233" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSBslZ907GX-oV_td7iQcdMZq-r04gqaJ8iWZN37KHr3PQDSMfQXqITRssEtRgl1f0Iu6-FMsfPKa_bPXI0zgwPk3HqRTE-xLFtoTxf6bqTJbaMOaa5i1trmfjr-LLQ6YRJSpm/s320/29Duane1-superJumbo.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">White youths heading to the beach in California to surf, in 1961. CreditAllan Grant/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty Images. Image and caption via NYT. </span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
All of this is the topic of a recent New York Times articles, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/28/opinion/sunday/surf-racism.html" target="_blank">The Long, Strange Tale of California's Surf Nazis</a> by Daniel Duane. In this article, Duane explores his own relationship to moving to California in the late 1980s, where he hoped to find a life of 'freedom in the Pacific, daily contact with infinity'. Instead he was confronted with a swastika painted next to the warning, 'Kooks go home'.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In “The History of Surfing” by Matt Warshaw, Noll, legendary big-wave rider and filmmaker behind the “Search for Surf” films, shrugged off accusations of latent Nazi sympathy by saying, “We’d paint a swastika on something for no other reason than to piss people off. Which it did. So next time we’d paint two swastikas, just to piss ’em off more.”</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Putting a swastika on something to anger people means you know that it angers them and very likely why. Allied troops liberated Auschwitz 14 years before Noll made his film. Southern California was full of veterans who’d seen death camps with their own eyes, as well as Jewish families who’d lost relatives and families of all kinds whose sons died in the fight. Angering those people for kicks meant that the slaughter of six million Jews didn’t strike you as a big deal.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
... </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
As for Dora and the Malibu crew, according to Matt Warshaw, they eventually figured out that Kathy Kohner, the real-life inspiration for the character Gidget, was Jewish. Her father, Frederick Kohner, fled Nazi Germany for California and, when his daughter took up surfing, wrote the novel that became the film. A member of the Malibu crew responded to the news about the Kohners’ ethnicity by planting a burning cross in their driveway.</blockquote>
This is extreme behaviour, and perhaps we like to think it's gone from surfing but it hums along in our culture in the localism and hostility to newcomers that so many surfers so consistently practice. And the effects are still with us in other ways too. As Duane points out, surfing has a global image of whiteness, blondness, and heteronormative maleness that continues to pervade mainstream surf industries and culture. Like women and gay surfers who have long been told to keep feminist and queer politics out of surfing, for indigenous surfers, black surfers, and surfers of colour, highlighting the politics of colonisation, race, ethnicity and culture that characterise surfing has been discouraged.<br />
<br />
Solving this in surfing is a problem of whiteness and white politics. It's a problem for white, settler allies, like me. It's a problem of recognising and engaging with and thinking about the ongoing regional and global effects of colonisation, slavery and sexism. These things can't be separated from how we make sense of surfing's contemporary politics and culture: Why are mainstream surf magazine editors all basically the same person? Why was <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/12/magazine-sorry-for-racially-offensive-description-of-indigenous-surfer" target="_blank">racist language so casually used to describe Otis Carey</a> in surf media? Why do the dark histories of surf spots remain so silent? <a href="https://www.swellnet.com/news/surfpolitik/2010/02/23/where-blackfellas-met-their-waterloo" target="_blank">Stu Nettle wrote about a spot called 'Blackfellas'</a> in 2010:<br />
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The name Blackfellas comes from a massacre that occurred in 1849 during the frontier wars when white settlers wanted to occupy and farm the land around Elliston. The exact details are subject to speculation though general consensus is that in an act of retribution white settlers drove approximately 250 Aborigines off the cliffs adjacent to the wave. Those that didn’t jump were speared or shot. </blockquote>
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Waterloo Bay – just to the south of Blackfellas – derives its name from the same event. A dark humoured local announced that, during the massacre, the local mob ‘met their Waterloo’, and the name stuck. Thus the two geographical features for which Elliston owes its existence and ongoing popularity refer to a massacre of the Aboriginal population. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
But don’t look for the massacre on the record-breaking mural – it ain’t there. I’ve walked around the town hall and seen all the events deemed worthy of recording, but the massacre – a defining event in the town’s history – isn’t among them. In fact no blackfellas appear in the mural at all.</blockquote>
In 2016, <a href="https://stabmag.com/style/the-bloody-history-of-australias-best-waves/" target="_blank">Jed Smith wrote about the same break, and the same history in Stab</a>:<br />
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The Wirangu people want the massacre recognised with a special monument at the site with the word “massacre” inscribed on it, but certain sections of the Elliston community are objecting. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“The previous councils have denied whether (the massacre) ever even happened… As much as white history doesn’t say it happened…it definitely happened,” Wirangu elder, Jack Johncock, tells Stab. “Ninety-nine percent of people are in favour of the monuments. It’s the word “massacre” (which the Wirangu want written on the monument) that is causing the conflict. But mate, it wasn’t a picnic you know.” </blockquote>
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It’s not just Ellison. You will find stories of undocumented massacres at surf towns all over Australia. Many of the best stretches of surfable coast are created by rivers and creeks, which mould reefs, divvy up sand banks, and groom point breaks. The fertile land around these creeks and rivers has always made for some of the most desirable livable conditions on this arid continent of ours; European settlers recognised this and killed nearly every Aboriginal in sight to secure their claims.</blockquote>
Like solutions to sexism, this is not about indigenous surfers and surfers of colour being louder or making more efforts to fight - they already are. Successful projects like Brown Girl Surf, Black Girl Surf, and Inkwell in the USA and the annual Australian Indigenous Surfing Titles, are all effective in creating solidarity and visibility for diversity in surfing. The problem is whether and how white surfers are listening and looking. As Duane writes,<br />
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I’d like to say that everything has changed and that my mind is now pure. Unfortunately, it wasn’t until last year that I began to wonder why so few African-American men surf my local break. That thought came up only because I heard about a nonprofit called Brown Girl Surf and realized I’d met exactly one African-American female surfer ever — in Australia, of all places, where we’d both gone for a literary conference.</blockquote>
Fuck Dora and fuck Noll, and fuck their legacies of exclusion that we carry on today. Fuck their white supremacist actions, even those that they did for the shock value only. Those things are brutal and violent.<br />
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Of course, it's not just surfing. In America, there is a movement about black people outdoors, which responds to the dominance of white people in outdoor and nature-based sports and activities. A few years ago, The Guardian ran a story <i><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/13/hiking-african-american-racism-nature" target="_blank">'Bad things happen in the woods': the anxiety of hiking while black</a>. </i>The stories shared by the three people in the article were eye-opening:<br />
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<u>Aaron Jones, 32</u>: few years ago, a white friend suggested we go on a hike. All the fears I had about being in nature hit me in the face. It’s a very real fear for black people, especially those from urban communities, that bad things happen to black people in the woods, like lynching. It’s something that you see again and again when you look at the history of the civil rights movement and slavery: black people going into the woods and not coming back.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I always knew about hiking and camping from commercials and magazines. But the people doing it didn’t look like me. They were white, athletic and attractive. I’d never, ever seen anybody of color doing it, let alone a black male; I associated the outdoors with whiteness. Nobody around me even thought about it. My mother grew up in the backwoods down south, but she never encouraged us to have a connection with nature.</blockquote>
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<u>Marjorie Leach-Parker, 68</u>: grew up in a small town in North Carolina where most of the white people were farm owners and the black people were hired hands. My family farmed and as a child, I spent a lot of time topping tobacco and picking cucumbers, peppers and squash. We’d go out fishing and hang out on the rivers as a family but we were never encouraged to go far from the house. The feeling was that if you went out into the woods by yourself – and you’re black – if no one’s around, you might not end up coming back.</blockquote>
I'm a white woman, brought up to be afraid of the threats of the night, so the fear of being alone outside is one that I recognise. But the fear of violence such as this - of a violence so cultural and collective based on the colour of my skin - this is something I never consider.<br />
<br />
I love surfing. I love riding waves and being outside and in the water and under trees. I love the freedom to move my body how I like in the water. These freedoms aren't real though; they're imagined, partial, incomplete. This is made clear to me when I see 'Locals Only' graffiti, when I'm told to fuck off because I got a wave someone else wanted, when I see others being excluded or treated badly. This is clear when wannabe-radical online surf magazines publish click-bait defences of people like Dora. (And no, I'm not linking to it.) This is clear to me in my own choices about what I put up with and how I behave.<br />
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Wave by wave, break by break, beach by beach, magazine by magazine, surfer by surfer - we can change. It means we might get fewer waves, but we can make surfing more welcoming and inclusive.<br />
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*Well, it used to be. I rarely get to the beach these days, let alone to go surfing. But I'm committed to finding my way back...Rebecca Olivehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09428676558153909572noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29437172.post-61370257151074374022018-09-11T20:10:00.002+10:002018-09-12T15:51:31.252+10:00'A Lunar Cycle': Easkey Britton in the oceanI remember a time when I rolled my eyes at the idea of new surf films as they arrived on the scene. For so long, surf films told the same story over and over and over and over, and over and over and over. I stopped watching them.<br />
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But that changed, and I had to start to eat my cynicism. Surf films got diverse. They got interesting.<br />
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Part of this is the acceptance of new people as surfing's storytellers; letting surfing be more than men, more than sunshine, more than grunting descriptions of getting barrelled and feeling stoked, more than roadtrips, more than power turns, late drop ins and airs. New stories about surfing that suggested surfing was more than the worst of it.<br />
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Well hello there, <i>A Lunar Cycle</i>.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNpKwY-73RdQZUPuybgqRUU6hbJ4rgUJfrpznMOf5dO4NQdMS7caN6rc0a_M6YUM6x-WY87_CC_mvUwxH0xNWkTES6Hd5KsujiQqzv6o2ABu4ZwKmJ2tYcgx0l5tCpMEz8-tiE/s1600/Screen+Shot+2018-09-11+at+8.04.39+pm.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1560" data-original-width="1106" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNpKwY-73RdQZUPuybgqRUU6hbJ4rgUJfrpznMOf5dO4NQdMS7caN6rc0a_M6YUM6x-WY87_CC_mvUwxH0xNWkTES6Hd5KsujiQqzv6o2ABu4ZwKmJ2tYcgx0l5tCpMEz8-tiE/s320/Screen+Shot+2018-09-11+at+8.04.39+pm.png" width="226" /></a></div>
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You might have heard about the latest offering in this new world of surf films, that was directed by Andrew Kaineder, and written by and featuring Irish surfer, <a href="http://easkeybritton.com/" target="_blank">Easkey Britton</a>. If you haven't heard of Easkey, then you haven't been paying much attention to surfing culture in the recent past. Easkey is a powerhouse of surfing for social good, highlighting the development of women's surfing in Iran, focusing on the role of living a life like liquid, of thinking and being like the sea. She is a daughter of Éire, a lover of big waves, cold waves and of surfing in the ocean in whatever way she can. She is a tiny force of nature who doesn't listen to the idea that things can't be done. She is a surfer, writer, researcher, and she has made a short surf film that has already been winning awards, <i>A Lunar Cycle</i>.<br />
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<img alt="Easkey_Suspended_BW.jpg" height="268" src="https://uc9a3d11547eb67bfb3bf8a79b98.previews.dropboxusercontent.com/p/thumb/AAKY8e-vMjjWuaEYfBWutLUnWLPSB7Bvk0TokLhoOt-d9fq_zOdWyHDQ2enPIbrcpWBQZQ-kZcn-53wadGTY5iiMe9tbiIUNtwfVF0gIMPj-iVsJOseWR9KOyrGZzi3jNprH0x6KquZhpxMTlICqtwMMIEU385nGYkLpK_QXQ5o-Dc7bKoTkDrrklkNqbHPqt_gJbZ2djYLWs7NujWOweNDqyD0wPPVEqotwbxOgf7JxHfkCHFdaSC6cTUf4_vvbvwe7Gxc8h2N9HJ6sjqlk4pxdNrvZJvrftiFi2hOGU_7VUg/p.jpeg?size=800x600&size_mode=3" width="640" /></div>
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<i>A Lunar Cycle</i> is a surf film about women, about women's bodies. <i>A Lunar Cycle</i> is about the moon and sea, about being immersed, about giving in and being taken away by a force that is physical, emotional and messy. It is about the linking of oceans and the life within them. It is about ebbs and flows, tides and seasons and cycles. It is a poem, a story, a journey into the sea. It is a film like liquid.<br />
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In academic terms, it is affective.<br />
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<img alt="Easkey_Dance_Blue.jpg" height="270" src="https://uc1f84c98ad248f0926379da4251.previews.dropboxusercontent.com/p/thumb/AAJ8xhMFp-GDcOQxM2QE_XYwJzXgz3quhJuMjLJR2QEezCRsgXSj0VFU2RfNFnE0wVGxdGe5ZU7zMhHP6FNeX8gKW2qR619VbwNMK2xiZmdHd0FUtPS1Xxx0fOgAelMXxTYZPz-TzfFaYsqbR4F2icDm-ZA9HZVJnFPPDc9XpARN43jfRGF16Tof9fpKXLupq9WJUxWpavFAVX4BquzYsZc_CJdCLndmQ4SD8ic_ry-8yroaJvOoFJMRVS6hajmA5YOo-88sOZEo3kh2ztAon1Xsb5tjuFCe8LQbKXHMpqv_rA/p.jpeg?size=800x600&size_mode=3" width="640" /></div>
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I breathe into my belly, as the pain of the story fills the hollows and oceans of my own body; an odd ache pulsing in time with the music through my guts, breasts, blood and heart. My body immersed in the story cycle, in the sea. I am falling down a wave face, twisting my body with the water, spinning across the mirrored sand, the rhythm of the music wrapping through my chest. I am atop the seastack summit, the wind and salt spray in my hair, skin is prickling with cold, feet sharp with the rocks, standing firm in my fear, leaning into the void but not falling. And above it all, the moon.<br />
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Blue is my blood; red, the sea.</div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" mozallowfullscreen="" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/288338638?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="640"></iframe></div>
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<a href="https://vimeo.com/288338638">A Lunar Cycle - Easkey Britton</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/finisterreuk">Finisterre</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.</div>
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<br />Rebecca Olivehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09428676558153909572noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29437172.post-72250905406604421982018-08-22T17:32:00.003+10:002019-10-14T23:32:12.631+10:00Laura Crane has skin in the game: a surf story in five parts**The title of this essay is inspired by <a href="https://www.killyourdarlings.com.au/article/skin-in-the-game/" target="_blank">Kylie Maslen's recent article about women's sport, 'Skin in the Game</a>'. The essay itself is dedicated to my friends in the Institute of Women's Surfing (Europe), with my thanks for sharing your stories and friendship and resources.<br />
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<h3>
I. Oh hey, surf media!</h3>
Surf media is such an interesting world.<br />
<br />
I used to consume it voraciously, reading everything I could find - every book, magazine, website, and blog. I was trying to understand it, to understand the world it was describing, to see the patterns and themes as well as the points of difference and resistance. I wasn't out to create a typology or anything like that, but to get my head around what it is that we say to ourselves as writers, editors, photographers and readers. I wanted to know who was talking and who might be reading and to know what was missing from these stories; to find the gaps.<br />
<br />
It didn't take long for me to turn away from mainstream print magazines, in which I saw so little hope beyond repetitive versions of the 'boys and barrels and surf trips' fantasies that dominated. Yes, longboards came to be included, but not really in any interesting way, and women who were surfing remained a treat to find in the pages. The explosion of online media changed things a bit, offering different spins on things for a while. But not-paying-for-content and click-bait came to dominate, and there we find The Inertia... so that is that.<br />
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There is always excitement and hope in blogs, with the best surf writing I've ever read contained in little-noted, advertising-free websites that are a labour of love and originality. Stories of living in cities and trying to keep surfing in your life; of finding it in corner stores, the bough of a tree and cracks in the pavement. Stories of the past that don't fit with the established way of thinking about the shortboard revolution. Stories that found joy in simply catching waves, rather than being any good at it. Stories from places that weren't east coast Australia or California or Hawai'i. Stories that were cold, grey, sad, isolated and mundane. I love blogs and these stories still.<br />
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Most significantly, blogs were the spaces in which I first came to find stories by and about women that weren't cheesy fantasies that ended in some guy getting laid, or at least getting a good look at a semi-naked woman, and that weren't dependent on the support of advertising. Like the stories above, they told of surfing without an agenda, and without a sense of what couldn't be said. Because it could be said. These were stories by women, about women, for women. Men were welcome in these stories, but these stories weren't written in the over-saturated narrative arc of men's shortboard surfing. These weren't stories of babes in bikinis doing bottom turns. These weren't stories of women in distress needing rescuing. Well, sometimes they were, but they were honest and vulnerable. They were trying to make sense of their surfing lives and experiences, and to share them in a way that wasn't part of the world they knew they weren't welcome in - mainstream surf media. These sites created pockets and communities and safe spaces. They were often left untouched by the kinds of vile commenting that erupted elsewhere and which ruined so many blogs.<br />
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Mainstream surf media still carries the most credibility clout, but blogs are still the best.<br />
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But things have shifted since 2010, because now we have Instagram and it's associated world of likes and reposts and refocus on visual over written texts. Don't get me wrong, I use Instagram and find it really interesting and like it a lot. There is space for continued visibility for diverse kinds of women who surf, and certainly that has allowed me to discover images and stories of all kinds of diverse women as I scroll. I love it!<br />
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But these are not the stories that the algorithms pick up, nor are the women in these pictures the ones who get discussed in other media spaces.<br />
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The visual focus of Instagram has, so far as women and surfing are concerned, re-emphasised images of women's bodies as the key offering. This has also meant that we get a re-emphasis on particular kinds of women's bodies - hot bodies. Women might be doing a good job of showing themselves surfing, but so often, the most popular images are those of women in bikinis. And that is a key point; it's the women doing this themselves and emphasising their bodies. Poking out their butts, letting their boobs fall out the side of their bikini, sporting vulva-revealing swimmer bottoms.<br />
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Your body, your choice.<br />
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For many women, being able to make these choices is described as "empowering". The use of "empowerment" is linked to ideas of throwing off shackles of shame about females bodies and sexuality, and that's not nothing! Being rid of corsets and prohibitive volumes of fabric has been key to women's access to the workforce, to freedom of movement and participation in sports. In Australia, it has <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-07-24/which-states-allow-girls-to-wear-shorts-and-pants-at-school/10028572" target="_blank">only recently been mandated in some states that girls can wear shorts and trousers to many schools</a> instead of skirts or dresses only.<br />
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But, just because having the capacity to choose is feminist, it doesn't mean the choice itself is.<br />
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<h3>
II. The boys who watch the girls go by: The (heterosexual) male gaze</h3>
<a href="https://iview.abc.net.au/show/hannah-gadsbys-nakedy-nudes" target="_blank">The male gaze is an important way of understanding how women have been and often still are represented in images across all kinds of art and media</a>, and why you might feel uncomfortable, aroused or removed when you look at images of naked or near naked women. 'The male gaze' refers to hierarchies of who got to speak and be heard, of who received money, power and fame, of who was the artist and who was the model. That is, the idea of the male gaze takes into account how men's art and images have dominated and defined representations of women. The idea outlines that under the male gaze, women become objects to be consumed and enjoyed; they're naked; they can be looked upon but never touched; they lose their faces, eyes, and agency, their own gaze excluded from view. In art we see this in naked bodies with faces turned away, or reclining with legs open to the viewer. In surf magazines, this has been replicated in images of semi-clad women with no faces nor, often, even heads! Just young, slim, sexually available female bodies of the kind desired by men, and then with their faces removed.<br />
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Given the idea of headless women and the male gaze, you can see how and <a href="http://makingfriendswiththeneighbours.blogspot.com/2013/07/i-know-this-is-late-but-why-roxy-why.html" target="_blank">why Roxy's 2013 campaign for their Biarritz Pro came under such fire</a> (links to a range of responses are included via the hyperlink).<br />
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We've come some way from this - in art and in the media - but things remain imperfect. The developments we've had have been through various women's interventions and activism. Women criticised the system, took back their naked bodies, by representing themselves in new ways - looking back at the camera, staring down the male gaze. They empowered themselves and their images, by replacing men's desires with their own. Perhaps sometimes these different desires lined up, but not always.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.fridakahlo.org/self-portrait-with-thorn-necklace-and-hummingbird.jsp" target="_blank"><img alt="Image result for frida kahlo, self portrait" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/1e/Frida_Kahlo_%28self_portrait%29.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.fridakahlo.org/self-portrait-with-thorn-necklace-and-hummingbird.jsp" target="_blank">Frida Kahlo, 'Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird' (1940) </a></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/guerrilla-girls-do-women-have-to-be-naked-to-get-into-the-met-museum-p78793" target="_blank"><img border="0" data-original-height="606" data-original-width="1536" height="126" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8vyzj6AiNa1Ev1wFm-KObMMsN5w2mMHBWizrr2smq7DSkL1PzuN77ZfS7TB3wMyZnestpTPOoxExmyGambr88O8KYB77r9QqekJlnpa2usmXO4f18MVHZc1Voix3pzePGJXM5/s320/Guerrilla+Girls+-+MET.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/guerrilla-girls-do-women-have-to-be-naked-to-get-into-the-met-museum-p78793" target="_blank">'Do Women Have To Be Naked To Get Into the Met. Museum?' (1989) is one of thirty posters published in a portfolio entitled 'Guerrilla Girls Talk Back' by the group of anonymous American female artists who call themselves the Guerrilla Girls.</a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="https://vimeo.com/ondemand/heaven" target="_blank">Tracey Moffat, 'Heaven' (1997)</a></span></div>
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These changes have translated to surf media too. Like the stories I described myself reading in blogs throughout the 2010s, it is women who surf having the time, space and resources to tell their own stories that has changed things. Taking and posting their own images of their own and other women's surfing bodies and lives. By starting magazines, websites and businesses of their own, a growing number of women have even managed to cut out men from final editorial control over what gets published on pages, not only on social media. The broader effects of women's activism and other civil rights and social movements meant some changes such as women getting their head and faces reattached to their bodies in advertising, and even photos of women actually surfing in mens' surf magazines. This has been exciting! But it's also had limits, and conventional female beauty and sexiness still seem to rule.<br />
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That the male gaze still often shapes how women represent themselves today should not surprise you. 'Sex sells' they tell us - but whose sex, under whose definition? When it comes to women's access to sponsorships and mainstream surf publications, men remain key gatekeepers and so the power of the male gaze lingers.<br />
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So, the story's the same but the context in which we're telling it has changed. What I'm talking about here is less about "art", than "marketing" and "branding" - about turning women into commodified consumables. We see images of naked and semi-clad women used as evidence of "empowerment", but what that really means is no so easy to understand. It might mean they personally are empowered to do what they like, or to make money from their gym-honed body, and again, I will always stand by the idea that it's your body, your choice. But in what context are those decisions being made, and to what effect?<br />
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Like so much of the art world, surf media seems to be largely stuck in a loop.<br />
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<i>“We’re not seeing anything new,” <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/feb/19/hannah-gadsby-on-the-male-gaze-in-art-stop-watching-women-having-baths-go-away" target="_blank">[Hannah Gadsby] reiterates</a>. “The art world doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Being an object, being objectified, [creates] a toxic culture, because we don’t have the same cultural influence as men do. They’ve written the story, they have the power.</i><br />
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<i>“#MeToo should not be limited to art or TV. What’s happening in the world where there’s no glamour is worse. There are powerless people in the world who don’t have a voice, who are struggling in this toxic culture of silence."</i><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_-NXfMJqea9hF5UyXPrR2yAog4ap8wcnHPy6KRA5df9ZQGkwWqkPXa2OWApaPLcMSUknZHh5eMQrsbyUyZYqzCxzO5TdmYyy-54BgZ7C8ZjlMCBN39MfdT9Uib2DiU36u5Btc/s1600/Art+hearts+%2540artlove.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="749" data-original-width="750" height="319" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_-NXfMJqea9hF5UyXPrR2yAog4ap8wcnHPy6KRA5df9ZQGkwWqkPXa2OWApaPLcMSUknZHh5eMQrsbyUyZYqzCxzO5TdmYyy-54BgZ7C8ZjlMCBN39MfdT9Uib2DiU36u5Btc/s320/Art+hearts+%2540artlove.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Via @artlove on Instagram</td></tr>
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<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/feb/19/hannah-gadsby-on-the-male-gaze-in-art-stop-watching-women-having-baths-go-away" target="_blank">Gadsby's point that we should 'Stop watching women have baths</a>' - a recurring motif in art - has resonated with me. Over the last few years, I've noticed the increased series of images in surf media that I like to call 'women under water'. Women under water are naked or semi-clad, long and languorous, graceful, slim, usually white, and rarely looking at the camera. They might be diving under a wave, reaching out to a dolphin or shark, or letting a manta ray caress their naked body. [Which is a bit inter-species erotica for my taste, but then, this is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dream_of_the_Fisherman%27s_Wife" target="_blank">not the first time such images have been produced</a> so perhaps I'm a prude?] Sometimes these images are brave and interesting, but so often, they're not. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4rWKcAUQe8ZQPad69nQy8c2PeRACi754NB5Om_LZlqFUXmEkvhLCaAC8CF58cUr-_x5b3U8ySgFt-TDNUn-9b9dEAfnzAgzoRH72Lcia0LZwNFyB4KFUXa6hwPP7p7ztooUNc/s1600/Screen+Shot+2018-08-22+at+2.01.52+pm.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="878" data-original-width="878" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4rWKcAUQe8ZQPad69nQy8c2PeRACi754NB5Om_LZlqFUXmEkvhLCaAC8CF58cUr-_x5b3U8ySgFt-TDNUn-9b9dEAfnzAgzoRH72Lcia0LZwNFyB4KFUXa6hwPP7p7ztooUNc/s320/Screen+Shot+2018-08-22+at+2.01.52+pm.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Image by @perrinjames via @changingtidesfoundation</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdfBPZKVG2Oun_wVyCtdnkg-IEcfsDwBxS59tDoCv_YE1SIMmXbryoCSTLfM6IJKS8fxMsQks-mopZBHz09QEHnuB84WyNSvVKaLNXGK3QeZfji9A5iIglzBScGjFGf4te4F96/s1600/Screen+Shot+2018-08-22+at+3.09.10+pm.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1076" data-original-width="982" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdfBPZKVG2Oun_wVyCtdnkg-IEcfsDwBxS59tDoCv_YE1SIMmXbryoCSTLfM6IJKS8fxMsQks-mopZBHz09QEHnuB84WyNSvVKaLNXGK3QeZfji9A5iIglzBScGjFGf4te4F96/s320/Screen+Shot+2018-08-22+at+3.09.10+pm.png" width="292" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Image by @maliamurphy via @oceanfilmfestival</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2nV3jAJQP5Vdy-46-aIsqbtRrhkaCU2yCrTiXBdquRBa93EhkYl7Wetm9qqPnnX1W2xPLb6SZer0NzqMsw3as2udgz1DoY8vZH8hlpA3ZHr8_ZOI8ijh-C9fIg7mLlKISQsV8/s1600/Screen+Shot+2018-08-22+at+1.59.35+pm.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="475" data-original-width="622" height="244" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2nV3jAJQP5Vdy-46-aIsqbtRrhkaCU2yCrTiXBdquRBa93EhkYl7Wetm9qqPnnX1W2xPLb6SZer0NzqMsw3as2udgz1DoY8vZH8hlpA3ZHr8_ZOI8ijh-C9fIg7mLlKISQsV8/s320/Screen+Shot+2018-08-22+at+1.59.35+pm.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://www.ianerickregnard.com/A-Thousand-Kisses-deep/2/caption" target="_blank"> <span style="font-size: x-small;">Ian and Erik Regnard, 'A Thousand Kisses Deep 2' (nd)</span></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiowo6Kln3nTJvqNWXNGES50nA-HhrtUFMjpDP-LEJ5qjE8jbZZ86cXx2ueRa51UlLXAEA8o6EvPjF92bi-RgAcH93wPI1fO_HRU2WYgxK5QjAiXpLCGH8O7YnXi7NZ7liQuvnp/s1600/Screen+Shot+2018-08-22+at+2.02.02+pm.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="826" data-original-width="880" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiowo6Kln3nTJvqNWXNGES50nA-HhrtUFMjpDP-LEJ5qjE8jbZZ86cXx2ueRa51UlLXAEA8o6EvPjF92bi-RgAcH93wPI1fO_HRU2WYgxK5QjAiXpLCGH8O7YnXi7NZ7liQuvnp/s320/Screen+Shot+2018-08-22+at+2.02.02+pm.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Image by @theroadsoad via @worldsurflols</span></div>
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None of these images is awful or messed up - they're beautiful! (I've included the one of Mick Fanning to highlight how underwater images can be gendered and to emphasise how 'women under water', like 'women in baths', tells a particular story.) But they're not interesting to me because they're images that adhere to a long tradition of European heterosexual men's ideals of female beauty. A male gaze through the past and into our present. A paleo-male gaze of no carbs, no sugar, and no indulgence. A medieval-male gaze of madonnas and whores. A Victorian-male gaze of morality, corsets and self-restraint. A hyper-sexualised male gaze of pouting lips and bare skin dressed up as empowerment.<br />
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The male gaze - or more correctly, the heterosexual male gaze - is far from a new idea. It was an idea presented in 1975 in an essay, <a href="http://theslideprojector.com/pdffiles/art6/visualpleasureandnarrativecinema.pdf" target="_blank">Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema</a>, by Laura Mulvey who worked in feminist film studies (I've provided a link in case you want to read it). Following Mulvey's work, <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-does-the-male-gaze-mean-and-what-about-a-female-gaze-52486" target="_blank">Janice Lorek writes</a> that,<br />
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<i>Visual media that respond to masculine voyeurism tends to sexualise women for a male viewer. As Mulvey wrote, women are characterised by their “to-be-looked-at-ness” in cinema. Woman is “spectacle”, and man is “the bearer of the look”.</i><br />
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<i>Using close-ups, the camera forces the viewer to stare at Cora’s body. It creates a mode of looking that is sexual, voyeuristic, and associated with the male protagonist’s point-of-view. ... A lifetime of seeing women sexualised in television, music videos and advertisements has made us very comfortable with assuming the male gaze.</i><br />
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As so many artists, photographers and Instagram user show us, just because women are in photos of them wearing cute underwear or looking great or posing in swimmers doesn't mean they're defined by this gaze - that's in the motivation and framing of the shots.<br />
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<h3>
III. She's got the power?</h3>
So this is a long way of getting into something that was pointed out to me last night, and which really really bothered me. Or, really, which continues to really bother me: the men's surf magazine, Stab.<br />
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More specifically, an interview Stab published with British surfer, reality TV star and model, Laura Lou Crane, titled, '<a href="https://stabmag.com/style/laura-crane-is-empowered/" target="_blank">Laura Crane is Empowered</a>'.<br />
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I wasn't going to link to the article itself, because I didn't want to electronically tether myself to them. But given that I'd like to have things here as an archive and a resource, I'm going to. No judgement if you do click on it, as I had to look at it a bunch of times myself to write this (what was never meant to be an) essay. There's really no need, though, because if you've ever read a Stab interview with a woman before, you pretty know what it says and does. In sum, Stab uses their interview question to justify their super sexual images of Crane as well as working to make her complicit in her own sexualisation. They get to her to talk about how beautiful the shoot made her feel.<br />
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In the world of Stab's treatment of women, this tactic of making women complicit in sexualising themselves in line with the hetero male gaze, is not new. Eight years ago, Stab published what I would position as a game-changing essay in which they got Laura Enever to talk about how empowering she experienced the photo shoot as being. <a href="https://stabmag.com/girls/laura-enever/" target="_blank">The article was called 'The Devil in Miss Enever</a>'.<br />
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<a href="http://ozbeautyexpert.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Laura-Enever-CoveR-sTBA.jpg" target="_blank"><img border="0" data-original-height="515" data-original-width="371" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiD7AfxJrKvH_h9tj9xng01pzwlMo3x25_SFZY1AiWHnNnkjBAsI8oR4bPs0sR-YVL2OXmojQTeoUdm-p44tWaiREPvmloHL9ihnTNyWsdlQB3Q0Rp-uad-ERTSsu3RpeX6Ahhw/s320/Laura-Enever-Cover-STAB.jpg" width="230" /></a></div>
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Enever was 19 and developing a profile and trying to get and keep sponsors and she was new to these kinds of shoots and they asked her questions on the record that they knew she would answer in certain ways and over which they had editorial control anyway.<br />
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<i><b><u>None of the high-salaried men or women surfers are ugly. Is that a bad thing? Is it so wrong to be employed to sell boardshorts and bikinis? And, has your gal-next-door beauty been a thrill to your sponsor?</u></b> Marketability is everything. It sucks, kinda, but it’s a market. It’s about selling. It’s sad when great surfers don’t get sponsors, though. Sexiness sells. I think about Maria Sharapova and how she was the sexiest girl in tennis. I didn’t follow tennis, but I knew Maria Sharapova because of her sexiness. She did so well for herself because she was sexy and confident and she was an amazing athlete. That’s what it comes down to. </i><br />
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<i><b><u>Were you specifically warned about the Stab shoot? That we were devils?</u></b> (Laughter detonates) I was! I was! I heard from Alana (Blancahrd) and Bruna (Schmitz) who you did the photo shoot with last year. They told me how they were freaked out about how you, like, tried to get them naked. I’d been warned a few times, but it’s fine, because you guys are a men’s magazine and it’s an amazing magazine. At the shoot, I was told my first couple of photos weren’t sexy enough and that I had to take some clothes off, but it ended up being really cool. If we thought the photos were degrading or didn’t suit my image, I wouldn’t agree to have ‘em run. </i><br />
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<i><b><u>We adore women!</u></b> The shots you did of Alana and Bruna are so beautiful and they’re so sexy and I heard the photos that Steph Gilmore didn’t get run look amazing! We want to show how sexy and feminine girl’s surfing is. Stab is helping us out by running us alongside models. It’s just really cool. (Laughing) Here’s something. I was surfing P-Pass with Steph Gilmore and we were talking about how fun it would be to, and this is six-foot perfect P-Pass barrels, to take our tops off and get totally pitted, and how that would be the cover of Stab! Topless! But, we didn’t have the guts.</i><br />
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Enever's answers and the accompanying shots always make my stomach turn. I show them in my sport sociology and gender studies classes to make the same point that I'm making in this discussion. The thing is, Enever clearly understands the system she's operating in and that she can get ahead using her looks, her body. She knows it and she is pretty and hot, so she's decided to run with it. But she also knows and explains that not all women will get ahead in this male-defined way of doing things, which is "sad" for some women but it's also okay because she can take advantage of it. She's fully complicit in the continuation of the power of the hetero male gaze in defining women's representations in (some) surf media, as well as in who gets sponsorship or not. I understand Enever was (is?) a young, vulnerable player here, really I do! But the degree of understanding she shows and is comfortable with, has never stopped feeling shocking to me.<br />
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But Enever suggests it's not just her who had to negotiate decisions in a Stab photoshoot. She describes how other women who surf had warned her about the behaviour of men on photoshoots for this magazine, about how "they were freaked out" about the degree to which they were sexualised. And yet, Alana and Bruna continue to pose for Stab, and to profit from allowing the magazine to sexualise them. The <a href="https://stabmag.com/girls/jack-alana-the-gallery/" target="_blank">fictional 'at home with' style shoot Alana Blanchard made with her partner Jack Freestone</a> is an incredible example of how the male gaze works - a voyeuristic fantasy about who the male editors and their readers want to be and who they want. The stylists and photographers are following a 1950s type of white, heteronormative, gendered domesticity - Jack is clothed and lounging, Alana is a scantily-clad housewife. It's so... lame.<br />
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And here we find Laura Lou Crane, fresh from her celebritising stint on the reality TV show, Love Island. In this series of images (shot by, it seems, a woman) and interview (with a man), Crane comes across as vulnerable and fragile. Alongside the images of her in small pieces of lace, PVC and ill-fitting lycra, she briefly talks about her struggle with bulimia, while at the same time highlighting the pressures that caused it - namely, the pressures of being a young woman surfing and modelling in "that industry". This is highlighted in the pull-out quotes Stab uses:<br />
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<i>Being a surfer and traveling the world and modeling put all these pressures on me as a girl growing up in that industry. Which, don’t get me wrong, it is an amazing way to grow up, but it does weigh on you.</i><br />
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<i>***</i></div>
<i>I think when Instagram and social media became huge, it was hard not to look at myself and compare it to how other girls were looking and what they were posting.</i><br />
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<i>****</i></div>
<i>The reason behind this photoshoot and these photos is I want to show that yes, I have this strong body. I’m a surfer. I’m an athlete. That’s me.</i><br />
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The questions asked of the women have changed since those days with Laura. In this interview, as in others, they're much less explicit in getting Crane to justify Stab's style and sexualisation of women, but that might be because there is a new script that women know to keep to - to talk about feeling empowered through sexualising themselves. But even when the interviews themselves focus on women's surfing lives (as did the interview with Imogen Caldwell), the images remain firmly defined by sex.<br />
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I took some screenshots of the Instagram story Stab used to promote and distribute the article. (For the record, I don't follow them.)<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_WdhS-IL4UnEJQHKIF-1GMO_qUixw8nAH7Bm7kBmP2XwS-zf0b8ZGlwq4hvtm5rtra4dNRdfnT0y8nEVzhmxOl225YVvK0AAEIUbTcdQhGVI_deSGKvwfczcd9kXKPTBASx2m/s1600/LauraCrane1+-+21+August+2018+-+STAB+copy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="719" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_WdhS-IL4UnEJQHKIF-1GMO_qUixw8nAH7Bm7kBmP2XwS-zf0b8ZGlwq4hvtm5rtra4dNRdfnT0y8nEVzhmxOl225YVvK0AAEIUbTcdQhGVI_deSGKvwfczcd9kXKPTBASx2m/s320/LauraCrane1+-+21+August+2018+-+STAB+copy.jpg" width="179" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6SkcU1yTQ7_WoCYCCMNDi77HJhzJ6MmWsEnTz2Zig4lMiXgIVkkeKSv8a3KGs8mS6EY3WA1qT3ekZY2lMNL3BnKUvwBVZjMarO__dks3OudwAIiSD7NmwDvuG-M6zjV3caViH/s1600/LauraCrane2+-+21+August+2018+-+STAB+copy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="719" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6SkcU1yTQ7_WoCYCCMNDi77HJhzJ6MmWsEnTz2Zig4lMiXgIVkkeKSv8a3KGs8mS6EY3WA1qT3ekZY2lMNL3BnKUvwBVZjMarO__dks3OudwAIiSD7NmwDvuG-M6zjV3caViH/s320/LauraCrane2+-+21+August+2018+-+STAB+copy.jpg" width="179" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigfVcPZkTKjyfuPBJO1foV7Yj0LAM9LHzZV1IED3JbAls9krp4KT3xJHOHUhKKhfN016k1H3czbxu9bvtaFYS5BvPsGHOrDi39cdDiRNDjvghdNgUs3Bf-L6LP1lXACpzEMqgx/s1600/LauraCrane3+-+21+August+2018+-+STAB+copy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="719" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigfVcPZkTKjyfuPBJO1foV7Yj0LAM9LHzZV1IED3JbAls9krp4KT3xJHOHUhKKhfN016k1H3czbxu9bvtaFYS5BvPsGHOrDi39cdDiRNDjvghdNgUs3Bf-L6LP1lXACpzEMqgx/s320/LauraCrane3+-+21+August+2018+-+STAB+copy.jpg" width="179" /></a></div>
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The contradictory links Crane makes between the impact on Instagram on her and her resulting bulimia, and then her lack of reflection on her own role in promoting sexy, feminine, idealised, female bodies on social media is, well, alarming! She clearly understands the impacts of social media on body image and mental health, and yet, because she feels as though she's come through it, she makes no attempt to protect anyone else from the same pressures.<br />
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Her body, her choice. But don't expect me to respect her choice.<br />
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<h3>
IV. The legacies of empowerment</h3>
If empowerment is donning lacy lingerie and gazing doe-eyed into a camera so I can feel beautiful in European, heterosexual men's terms and for my own financial gain, then I'm out. If empowerment is going on a reality TV show that belittles and demeans me, then no, I will look for other options. If women's empowerment is defined by Stab, then I don't want a bar of it.<br />
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But here it is - empowerment - apparently being taken up by the many folk commenting on Crane's Instagram post about the interview (you can <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/Bmu7genA-i4/?hl=en&taken-by=lauraloucrane" target="_blank">find the post and comments here</a>):<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrV0aUS8lf8DaR5Ou1ayG0a2v4ZhbINMbp1WD0Byqaq7kQzcsHcWgUZ9A4hGI2q0jly5gWwqihLIhPHKybIgTsNg1DmZ5pDzB60A5aNh6389TptbhwgG-SKg-Re1Q2hPkfKeNv/s1600/Screen+Shot+2018-08-22+at+12.31.27+pm.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="586" data-original-width="1318" height="142" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrV0aUS8lf8DaR5Ou1ayG0a2v4ZhbINMbp1WD0Byqaq7kQzcsHcWgUZ9A4hGI2q0jly5gWwqihLIhPHKybIgTsNg1DmZ5pDzB60A5aNh6389TptbhwgG-SKg-Re1Q2hPkfKeNv/s320/Screen+Shot+2018-08-22+at+12.31.27+pm.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/Bmu7genA-i4/?hl=en&taken-by=lauraloucrane" target="_blank"><img border="0" data-original-height="734" data-original-width="1600" height="146" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUCJBuqqmZ_qzKR9DOxh80ySuOFUKxwdu94nYmUH2wcXhHks6FV1bf0EsZlpDlrHoVnSwWRNcyLe4sOND1-UzuF2yfhwgajEA4F_GnizhfbmgEubbL0heNw66PGQ_ZwoiE2ZyN/s320/Screen+Shot+2018-08-22+at+12.34.01+pm.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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Commenters focus on this story as inspiring and empowering and on Crane as a role model for young people, especially young women and men. Her body is discussed at length as both a recovered bulimic body and a sexy body, and is celebrated for being "sporty" and "different" than super thin models. But I'm just not so sure; as I've argued before, <a href="http://makingfriendswiththeneighbours.blogspot.com/2016/12/diversity-is-not-white-woman.html" target="_blank">diversity is not a white woman</a>, and while not being thin to an emaciated degree might feel different, Crane is still slim, toned, feminine, and young - the ideal of the male gaze.<br />
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But...<br />
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While in this (very long) discussion I'm holding Crane accountable for her choices, it's still Stab that I'm repulsed by and who I'm railing against. The interview title, 'Laura Crane is empowered' is poking fun people who they know will be frustrated by the images and interview. The common rebuttals they will likely offer sit along the lines of "Don't look then", or "you're just jealous" or "femi-nazi". The idea of "don't look" is fair enough, except that it's stupid - it's online, it's available, it's part of my surfing cultural orbit. And anyway, I'm not so much concerned about me and mine as I am about the men who do look at these magazines and ogle the women on the pages, and comment on their bodies and ideas. (Although, to give them some credit, Stab didn't open the comments thread under this interview, which I was super pleased to see.)<br />
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Even worse, critics of my critique accuse me of being a bad feminist or anti-women. But I'm not. I just don't buy the idea that making money by letting faceless men take pleasure from my body is in anyway helpful to the majority of women. A couple of years ago, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/19/from-shopping-to-naked-selfies-how-empowerment-lost-its-meaning-feminism" target="_blank">Hadley Freeman wrote a great article in The Guardian</a> about changing notions of "empowerment":<br />
<br />
<i>The problem with this approach is that it leads to a great big pile of nothing. The suggestion that women should unthinkingly celebrate one another purely out of sisterly feeling is about as patronising as the idea that women shouldn’t trouble their brains with opinions. ... Empowerment has become the cover for doing whatever the hell you like. It is a self-created safe space: as long as you say you are empowered, anyone who complains is trying to oppress you. ... But the biggest irony about empowerment is not just how utterly meaningless – disempowered, I guess – it has become as a term, but how those who claim to feel it and those to whom it is sold are the ones who need it least. It is no surprise that I see so many adverts promising empowerment, because I am precisely the kind of person to whom empowerment is now marketed: white, thirtysomething, educated, middle class with disposable income. I don’t need to be empowered anymore than Kardashian does. Only those already in possession of quite a lot of power would feel empowered by leggings, or a TED talk, or naked selfies. Empowerment has become not only a synonym for self-indulgent narcissism, but a symbol of how identity politics can too often get distracted by those with the loudest voices and forget those most in need of it.</i><br />
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Freeman cites an <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/magazine/how-empowerment-became-something-for-women-to-buy.html" target="_blank">NY Times article by Jia Tolentino</a>, who writes that:<br />
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<i>Sneakily, empowerment had turned into a theory that applied to the needy while describing a process more realistically applicable to the rich. The word was built on a misaligned foundation; no amount of awareness can change the fact that it’s the already-powerful who tend to experience empowerment at any meaningful rate. Today “empowerment” invokes power while signifying the lack of it. It functions like an explorer staking a claim on new territory with a white flag.</i><br />
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<h3>
V. TL;DR: The final word</h3>
This essay is long; much, much longer than I intended when I started to write it, but there we are. It’s the product of frustration and disappointment and concern and reflection that has been going on for many years. I don't tend to write many critiques of things that happen in the surf media, mostly because there is so little that hasn't already been said well (as two examples, <a href="https://lithub.com/pin-ups-first-athletes-second-sexism-of-the-surfing-world/" target="_blank">Holly Isemonger offers a stand-out essay</a>, and <a href="https://www.sophiehellyer.com/blogposts/2018/7/25/rise-fierce-surf-girl-magazine" target="_blank">Sophie Hellyer talks and writes on this too</a>), so little that can be new. While there are some exceptions, and women-driven media are chief amongst them, mainstream surf media is not improving the way it treats women fast enough. It's so rare that it surprises me or excites me - it's boring. Boring and sexist. So, yeah. Usually I don't bother writing about it. But when I saw how upset some of my friends were about this interview and the images that came with it - when I saw the effects it was having - I was compelled to write my way through it.<br />
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Less than 24 hours ago, when I sat down to start writing, I thought I would write a quick 500 words that would summarise what I was thinking and feeling. But it wasn't possible. And I’m not pleased about so clearly using the examples I have of specific women - I’m not usually one to do that. Instead, usually, I talk about the system in which those women are making their choices and I’ve certainly done that here too. But at the same time, with the examples I use here I couldn't avoid that the women in these images are making the choice to sexualise their own bodies and to claim it as empowerment. That’s their choice, but they’re doing it with seemingly clear knowledge of the system in which they’re making their choices, including an understanding that not all women are able to gain benefits from such practices and thus, they’re complicit in things being harder for women who don’t look like them. Not for a moment would I suggest that was their intention! But nonetheless, many girls and young women seem to look up to sexualisation and lingerie shoots as aspirational and inspirational and role models for how to make it as surfers - that is the effect.<br />
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Laura Lou Crane - and Laura Enever and Alana and all of the women I'm discussing here - deserves better than what is on offer for her via Stab. She really does. But the many people who consume the product she's presenting as empowerment deserve better too - and I include boys in that.<br />
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The main thing I learned in my PhD research about women and surfing was the politics that the women I spoke with operated by, which is rooted in a feeling of solidarity with other women and can be summarised very simply; whatever you do to get waves in the surf, don't make things harder for other women.<br />
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<br />Rebecca Olivehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09428676558153909572noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29437172.post-33908945776785334442018-01-17T12:43:00.000+10:002018-01-17T12:43:04.105+10:00A Zine for Water PeopleIt's a truth universally acknowledged that social media can be a real drag. Arguments, comparisons, bitchiness, nastiness, narcissism and more all play out across Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, blogs and more. I've had my fair share of shitty social media interactions, but what I've found is that it doesn't have to be that way.<br />
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Most of my experiences on social media has been really positive, and I've made some wonderful connections over the years with wonderful people. I've met so many folk through blogging and Instagram, and are people I care about and have various relationships with. Like me, Jamie, Toddy, Mick, Sarah and Felix are people you might have come across on your digital travels, and they are people I've come to care about and to , different degrees, to know. For me, these relationships are some of the best of social media.<br />
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I love connecting with people and projects in various places around the world, and being able to watch their work develop and grow over time. It's really incredible that they can be part of my everyday life in a non-intrusive, but meaningful way. I know that not all of social media is like that, but some of it is.<br />
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My latest 'I heart social media' moment was discovering a recent project of a group of women who surf in California - Feather Weight, Margaret Seelie and Mia Bolton - who edited a zine for water people; more specifically, people who love salt and waves and surfing.<br />
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I saw their '<a href="https://www.instagram.com/azineforwaterpeople/" target="_blank">zine for water people</a>' emerge through my Instagram feed in little bites that hinted at a project about surfing by women. I saw images of them hand dying the stock for the cover, advertising the launch party, and then celebrating their beautiful little love. I read the post where they revealed they were changing the name from 'Seawitches', because that name was already in use by some other women, and they didn't wish to jeopardise what those other women had been building. Their chose was an ethical one, consistent with the politics of the project they were producing.<br />
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I saw the post advertising the availability of the zine, a post I quickly replied to, wondering how I could get my hands on a copy! I was directed to a website (https://www.seawitcheszine.com/) where you can order copies. It took me a while to get organised, but after providing my address through Instagram messages, I got a reply from a sea witch who was at the post-office, and who organised for one to fly on it's way to me.<br />
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And then my copy arrived in the my pigeon hole at work, and what a beauty it is!<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAaWV8mB6I4VSySJrxDh5C8DRlPUTprsVXMZdh6RCfpO0CAIlnoIazmRSjgBoMQ51WbNbiNnpQxQFZ8ugzdBq45a7z2fzkpxFPVWUtvdUsT6vi3U257UOi5FWj7UaKbmseMltF/s1600/Seawitches+1+-+Jan+2018.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1165" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAaWV8mB6I4VSySJrxDh5C8DRlPUTprsVXMZdh6RCfpO0CAIlnoIazmRSjgBoMQ51WbNbiNnpQxQFZ8ugzdBq45a7z2fzkpxFPVWUtvdUsT6vi3U257UOi5FWj7UaKbmseMltF/s320/Seawitches+1+-+Jan+2018.jpg" width="232" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"> (Loooooove!!!)</span></div>
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From Instagram and California, to a pigeon hole at a university in Queensland, Australia, this beautiful zine is a tribute to the ways we live across digital spaces.</div>
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To open the package, and to hold this labour of love - even the carefully chosen font has a story - is an absolute joy.<br />
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But the cherry on the top, was the tiny little handwritten thank-you note inside, which thoroughly made my day when I found it in the package.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhk6EXH5TFuLlbxtwuDPrCxNXOFfTcNkp0Fx81OuYLvM0NgQaM2mmkXEKsm1GSol7taXO41CuPQSV7jO30xz_pxJzuaNQ-_s0-R_WkyLvxxsBnqeHt2cUerVXxexBJ-_H0SZwu7/s1600/Seawitches+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1006" data-original-width="1280" height="251" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhk6EXH5TFuLlbxtwuDPrCxNXOFfTcNkp0Fx81OuYLvM0NgQaM2mmkXEKsm1GSol7taXO41CuPQSV7jO30xz_pxJzuaNQ-_s0-R_WkyLvxxsBnqeHt2cUerVXxexBJ-_H0SZwu7/s320/Seawitches+2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">(Apologies for the dodgy focus, which wouldn't leave my wrinkles alone!)</span></div>
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Thank you, sea witches. Thank you for being the very best of what social media can be.<br />
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<br />Rebecca Olivehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09428676558153909572noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29437172.post-14516413614833424672017-12-28T16:00:00.000+10:002017-12-31T11:06:22.746+10:00It's always worth asking!I follow lots (and lots) of surfing accounts on Instagram. Lots. Many of these are focused on and run by women, but I also follow lots of other general surf sites and magazines. Most of the general sites follow the usual pattern of not including much content about women, which is annoying and always stands out to me. Of course.<br />
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The other day, I saw an interesting post on the account <a href="https://www.instagram.com/oldsurfermags/" target="_blank">@oldsurfermags</a>. The post was a collection of ten of the most liked images that have been posted by the (I'm assuming) male administrator, Chris Allen.<br />
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<a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BdKxw12H5x3/?taken-by=oldsurfermags" target="_blank"><img border="0" data-original-height="795" data-original-width="1600" height="158" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiyEsM7-sDAIBS_jiNNOG_hXCaoOWcOGSDE_9RMX7_3go2HFfJwL41Tz8SXi4N-PLgmt0OPt0QpkYmzuJOjJqJZhdBGD_AJIuZlQ2xPjNPr48a9NiDGPVNSU-35Yu68vwGqssy/s320/Screen+Shot+2017-12-28+at+3.48.39+pm.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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While I still had hopes, the most liked images, not surprisingly, were all of men. The images are amazing, but I felt a bit bummed. Instead of stewing in my bummed-ness though, I commented on the post:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJ-MKEA9TuBqDTJANvr4sqqBUp5l2lexaX3kpAT3VHyZPRcSx0GnmgHyx_LFLlVPnb7KqsHNQiQOXsHcjmdTAuvYuDEGhuJseFsXSeMBRTDEpCtMYf2K-5YFqkSpr769J2mk1r/s1600/Screen+Shot+2017-12-28+at+3.51.13+pm.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="222" data-original-width="646" height="109" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJ-MKEA9TuBqDTJANvr4sqqBUp5l2lexaX3kpAT3VHyZPRcSx0GnmgHyx_LFLlVPnb7KqsHNQiQOXsHcjmdTAuvYuDEGhuJseFsXSeMBRTDEpCtMYf2K-5YFqkSpr769J2mk1r/s320/Screen+Shot+2017-12-28+at+3.51.13+pm.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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(Before I go on, let's take a moment to enjoy my excellent typo! Hahaha.)</div>
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I don't comment a lot on posts link this way (although there was one occasion that I did and got into a discussion with Kelly Slater about trans bodies, but that's a story for another time), but on this occasion, I though, why not! The account has over 57,000 followers, so I figured it'd get lost in the thread anyway. But it didn't! The administrator replied!</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj85rzGsu_AHTMVDSRydOWtEQSm1G87zJmGNpOXtrpKIDG0rRrxsVgHTmD1WsoIbBVhxp3atis7Mp4TNERajfIkLZtR7WNbc93hFxdq9s60xXwWV4Gk82moGp8cOFQ4pKfU4Rts/s1600/Screen+Shot+2017-12-28+at+3.51.25+pm.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="120" data-original-width="594" height="64" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj85rzGsu_AHTMVDSRydOWtEQSm1G87zJmGNpOXtrpKIDG0rRrxsVgHTmD1WsoIbBVhxp3atis7Mp4TNERajfIkLZtR7WNbc93hFxdq9s60xXwWV4Gk82moGp8cOFQ4pKfU4Rts/s320/Screen+Shot+2017-12-28+at+3.51.25+pm.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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Not only did he reply, he posted two multi-image posts the following day!!<br />
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<a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BdNQNJdna0U/?taken-by=oldsurfermags" target="_blank"><img border="0" data-original-height="1032" data-original-width="1600" height="206" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7W8B-V_AS9YqTeo2gebMhhyAm-On7xo7fe0PXiNrE0tHy1Ptx_A5sB5L37zGO8idLfbPg0DLF4XG0i3CQIoR566XnoTbszenVxx4PBicJuOcTkV9tCDpZmz_bSvtBpL6NJ2pO/s320/Screen+Shot+2017-12-28+at+3.55.09+pm.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BdOCz85nPIQ/?taken-by=oldsurfermags" target="_blank"><img border="0" data-original-height="777" data-original-width="1600" height="155" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOlKtmXZvDpqJwv5PPl37yaPXrmAEGrMpNgjffK5fMLBj2cc4qpVABbzlXq_q7cPg9QAsmulPqGtYHVMK5zRqc0ZVYw7NgQzQDgrtrkz4bCtVve9B5HJ_RYHB6kvMbagvGpFCt/s320/Screen+Shot+2017-12-28+at+3.55.20+pm.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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I've linked each image to the post, so you should totally go to the account and like both of these posts. I know it's a bit lame, but likes really make a difference to whether and how people are represented on Instagram, so I try to always like things that I want to support and see more of.<br />
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Thanks so much Chris Allen, not only for listening, but for following through! This is just so cool!<br />
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<br />Rebecca Olivehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09428676558153909572noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29437172.post-86912773093692628212017-12-05T05:00:00.000+10:002017-12-05T05:00:20.111+10:00Noice<div style="text-align: center;">
So this is to be one of my new favourite images of women's surfing...</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIqG0Z5n_s_5AiChj6bxjoDgDR0UAPWCbAtDJCMlEV-48wxPYiSLZWtcftkpMBRAdhGE8cPby6-38HguzyMaaFGuPbJ_4bOX2AQ2zii7UTnAcXJFxmjD7Y5ZS6Q63TTmDC-xmJ/s1600/Ashleigh+Browne+by+Kane+Brown+-+4+Dec+2017.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="747" data-original-width="750" height="318" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIqG0Z5n_s_5AiChj6bxjoDgDR0UAPWCbAtDJCMlEV-48wxPYiSLZWtcftkpMBRAdhGE8cPby6-38HguzyMaaFGuPbJ_4bOX2AQ2zii7UTnAcXJFxmjD7Y5ZS6Q63TTmDC-xmJ/s320/Ashleigh+Browne+by+Kane+Brown+-+4+Dec+2017.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Surfer is <a href="https://www.instagram.com/a_browneeee/" target="_blank">Ashleigh Browne</a> and photo is by <a href="https://www.instagram.com/kanebrownphoto/" target="_blank">Kane Brown</a></div>
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(click their names for links to their Instagram accounts)</div>
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Screen shot by me and my phone!</div>
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Rebecca Olivehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09428676558153909572noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29437172.post-5466678522486697832017-12-04T13:57:00.003+10:002017-12-31T11:05:18.062+10:00Still breathingWhen people ask me what I think about Tim Winton's books, I always answer that he writes incredibly beautiful landscapes. He really, really does.<br />
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But for me, like many women I know, Winton's books are difficult to read, because his portrayals of women tend to paint them as either prudish or damaged. The men and boys in his stories - always coming of age it seems - are much more complex and nuanced characters, but his women and girls are simple, borderlining on tropes.</div>
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I'm not suggesting Winton doesn't like women though! He talks often about the women in his life, and how his sisters taught him to surf. Winton knows and loves women well, it's just that this doesn't seem to translate into his stories, which makes it difficult for me to read them, let alone like them.</div>
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With the release of the film version of <i>Breath</i>, directed by Simon Baker, all of this was driven home even more strongly. </div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hY8KFlOm7qo" width="560"></iframe></div>
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Here is a story about men, in which women are trouble or bit players, used to move the men's stories forward, rather than to be stories of their own. Given the amount of visibility of Eva in this clip, it's hard for me to expand on that much without giving the story away, which I won't do. </div>
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I will definitely go and see this film. The cinematography look incredible and I'm sure the film is captivating. And I think Tim Winton is a beautiful writer, especially when it comes to landscapes that really resonate with me. But I do also think... this is another surfing film about white boys and men, coming of age. </div>
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Or not, as the case may be. </div>
Rebecca Olivehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09428676558153909572noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29437172.post-65827052887709443242017-11-28T06:00:00.000+10:002017-11-28T06:29:02.049+10:00Stupid women (Always in the way)<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">I’ve been
surfing again lately. Not as much as I’d like, but surfing. In fact, I managed
to surf twice this week! Twice! Once down on the Gold Coast and on Sunday, up
on the Sunshine Coast. To my shame, I still don’t know the coastlines of south
east Queensland very well, so it’s always very hit and miss for me in terms of
where I go and why. Since I surf so little at the moment, mostly I’m just happy
to get in the water anyway.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">In the
past, I use to avoid the Gold Coast, because it has a reputation for a
localised, aggressive, male-dominated, shortboard culture. There have been many
surf reports of violence there over the years, and the things I’ve often read
in surf media and research spaces have deepened these assumptions. When it’s
come up as an option, the idea of surfing there made me nervous in advance. But
I’ve surfed there a bit over the years – at Currumbin and Burleigh and Rainbow
and Snapper and Duranbah – and I’ve never had any experiences to back this up. I’m
on a longboard, I sit wide, and I don’t compete with the dominant crew, so all
of that will have had some impact on how I get about in the water, and how
others there treat me, and I can’t speak for what it would be link in the thick
of things, but I’ve never been really shouted at or anything. Dropped in on and
snaked, for sure, but I’ve never been frightened or intimidated by someone’s behaviour.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">In
comparison, the Sunshine Coast always struck me as much more laid back. I never
felt nervous about surfing there. It’s got a strong longboard culture, and it
seems like a very different kind of crew. Again, these were all assumptions based
on, well, I can’t remember actually. Assumptions based on assumptions. But it’s
my assumptions about the Sunshine Coast that have so consistently been proven
not entirely correct. I've met some great people in the water on the Sunny Coast, but more than once I’ve felt unsafe surfing north of Brisbane, including at
Noosa. Especially during the Noosa Surf Festival when some of the best, most
media saturating longboarding crew have the lenses of some of the best, most
media saturating surf photographers pointed at the pumping, peeling waves. I wouldn’t
suggest we judge Noosa by the culture in the water during the chaos of the
Festival though. Of course not! <a href="http://makingfriendswiththeneighbours.blogspot.com.au/2010/11/noosa.html" target="_blank">But even on mid-week small days, I’ve found the points can be needlessly aggressive, and that they have not always brought out the best in me either</a>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"><br /></span></div>
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It's not just me though, and it's not just Noosa. <a href="https://makingfriendswiththeneighbours.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/grumpy-old-men.html" target="_blank">There seems to be a strong culture of localism and rudeness (and more) in the waves around the Sunshine Coast that isn't new</a> and which, I discovered on Sunday, is enduring.</div>
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On Sunday, I went surfing with a visiting friend up at Alexandra Headland. I've only surfed there once before, on a day that was pumping and lots of fun, but when I was hungover and had no right to be in the water, actually. But that day was friendly and folk in the water seemed nice enough. I was, of course, surfing wide, but that let me get waves that were solid and fun and still within my capacities. I remember being hooted and cheered on waves that day, and coming away feeling good about the place, wanting to surf there again. Until yesterday, my visits to Alex had seen me skunked on surf, so until Sunday, I hadn't surfed there again.</div>
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My friend and I arrived late morning - well after 11 - and parked and walked over the check out the surf. The Alexandra Headland Longboarding Club had a contest on, which was a bit of a drag, but that's okay. I'm in the Byron Bay Malibu Club that runs a monthly contests at Wategos, so I know how it can go. Wategos is insanely busy and it's impossible to clear folk out of the water for a local, low-stakes, social comp, so as long as you're not taking waves from the surfers in the heat, and that you're not being a dick about it, surfing in a comp area can be fine. We ended up taking to one of the men who seemed to be part of the comp (which seemed to be mostly grey-haired men and no women, but maybe the crew were different earlier), and asked him about it all, and he was encouraging that we stay, and that we get some waves and that "the comp will be over in an hour anyway". He seemed welcoming enough, so we decided to stay and surf there, rather than scope out down the coast, where he told us it would be busier anyway. He was nice, and directed us the easiest place to paddle out, and that with the high tide the rocks on the inside were covered so don't worry about them. </div>
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We made it out into the surf, which wasn't terrible, <a href="https://makingfriendswiththeneighbours.blogspot.com.au/2017/11/sitting-wide.html" target="_blank">and sat wide, away from the comp surfers</a>. Where we were sitting, there weren't a bunch of options as it really was breaking better along where the comp was being held, of course, but an occasional wide one would come through. We got very few waves, but we did a lot of paddling around, and the waves we got were fun enough. In all honesty, I got about two closeouts for every wave that held up, but that was fun too. In it's own way.</div>
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I did a lot of looking about as I sat in between waves, and noticed that, for the first time in as long as I can remember, my friend and I were the only women out! I'm so used to women being a common sight in any lineup I surf, so it really struck me. My friend, who has Japanese heritage, also noticed how white it was. She's visiting from the USA and is really blown away by how white surfing in Australia is. But we sat, and we waited, and we stayed out of the way, and we watched the comp surfers dominate, which was fine. I dropped in on no-one and no-one dropped in on me either (although, admittedly, considering that I was on the outside, dropping in would have been tough - lol).</div>
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Others had different experiences, and I heard some altercations between surfers - words exchanged about who'd had right of way, with one guy on an old mal reprimanding someone for being in his way, which was a problem for him because old mals are had to control. Actually, most of the altercations did seem to be about someone being in someone else's way. A guy next to me commented on the aggression of the surfers, and questioned why they got to have right of way and run a comp there, and that they only seemed to ever run a comp when the conditions were good. I sort of shrugged and said that it was unlikely and that was only once a month that they would run contests. The guys certainly weren't friendly though. One guy paddled out in red, and as he passed me I wished him luck, but he didn't turn his head or acknowledge me. He was so close though, and he definitely heard me. Whatever, mate. </div>
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The heats continued to change and new surfers in red, blue, yellow and white rashees replaced the previous ones. One guy in a white rashee got a nice waves and raced off and away, and as I turned my head to look back at the sea I heard shouting back down the line, where he'd headed. There was shouting that sounded not like cheering or hooting, but yelling and anger. I asked the guy next to me, 'Is there fighting?" to which he shrugged and answered something like "Probably". I looked back to see what was going on, and could see the white shirted competitor talking at some women who were just paddling out. His words were muffled by the moving wind and water, but I head "woman!" shouted as he paddled back towards the takeoff point. I saw the women talking to each other in the water in a way that seemed to me like checking in and de-briefing. I wasn't sure what had happened, but as they made their way to me I wanted to make sure they were okay too. </div>
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There were three women paddling out. "Was that guy yelling at you?" I asked. They nodded. "Did he call you, 'woman'"? He called me 'stupid woman'", one of them replied. She paddled off, but he friend stayed to tell me, "He said she was in his way, but she was nowhere near him!"</div>
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I felt my chest contract in the way it does when I see this stuff play out. I looked up at the headland, where the tents and judges for the comp were sat, looking out to sea, wondering if they'd seen and heard this happen? Wondering if they cared? </div>
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I kept talking to two of the women for a while, making sure I thought it wasn't okay, that it was sill behaviour to be so rude towards them as they just paddled out, that even if she was in the way, so what, everyone gets in the way from time to time. We chatted for a while and it was nice to be able to support them. </div>
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A little while later I paddled for a wave. With the changing tide, they'd become fat in front and harder to paddle onto. But as I pulled through the water, gaining speed, I saw the white rashee guy in front of me, right in the path of where I was paddling. He did nothing, just cruising back through the water. As I floated over the back of the wave, letting it pass, he was almost beside me and I couldn't help myself but say, "Sorry. Was I in your way?" He scowled and carried on paddling out. </div>
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After that, I floated down the beach a bit more. I didn't want any part of what was going on, and knew that I'd made myself visible to him by being a smart-arse, which could not bode well.</div>
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The waves were coming though more consistently, and more close-out-edly, but it was fun! As I paddled back after one wave, I was next to a young guy on a fish or something, and he commented on how it was closing out along that bit. I laughed and agreed heartily. I also explained why I was surfing, there - to get away from the comp guys. I told him what had happened, how he called someone a "stupid woman". </div>
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"Yeah. These guys are like that. They're really local. They surf here every day, so they're really full on about the break." </div>
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I suggested to him that it wasn't just here they were so awful, that they might behave like that if they surfed other places, but he shook his head. "Nah. They don't surf anywhere else. They only surf here. Every day." I told him how I knew people who surfed the same place every day in Byron too, and how they found a way to be, if not always welcoming to visitors, to accommodate them. They know the place best so they get more waves anyway. The young man told me that these guys were well known to be pretty horrible and unlikeable. I said they were awful. We'd paddled back over towards the main break, so we parted ways - I stayed on the outside, while he headed to the peaky inside. I couldn't stop thinking about that man being so rude to those women, and when looked back up at the tents, I decided tI would say something to them if I went in. Not to have a go, but to let them know what had happened. I had few expectations of it having any effect, but I've heard that, in the past, members of my own club have been kicked out for horrible behaviour in the surf. </div>
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Waves came and went and I got some and missed some and got some and missed some, but I was having fun. I talked again to the women from earlier and told them that I do research about women and surfing and so I get particularly bristly about it when I see it out in the water. They were really nice. Another woman paddled out in a small bikini, and as she paddled past commented on the tone of the crew we were avoiding, and that "Oh well, you've just got to get amongst it anyway". She's right. In a way. But as I suggested the other day, <a href="https://makingfriendswiththeneighbours.blogspot.com.au/2017/11/sitting-wide.html" target="_blank">I don't want to play their game by their rules</a>. I don't want to get waves by being complicit in a lineup that carries on traditions of exclusion and aggression. I don't like who it turns me into. If she can avoid that, then great. But I don't want to be part of it. </div>
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I stayed wide, and kept talking to the women I'd befriended, but as a wave came I started to paddle. It formed up and I jumped to my feet speeding along to get through a crumbly section, turning back into the pocket, and heading back along the face. I'd not had many waves that formed up this well, but I was also aware that they were running in towards the rocky inside. As the face started to form up again in a way that suggested a close out, I heard a man yelling at me form the inside. He was yelling at me, his face angry, but I didn't know what it was about. I got a fright and changed my thinking, looking differently at the wave and missing the moment I was going to kick off. As the face started to collapse, I lost my board into the white wash, failing to catch it, but managing to grab the legrope and pull it back before it got too far. </div>
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I don't know what happened next, but I know he had more of a go at me - that I was scary and that I was going to hit him and that he was worried because I couldn't turn - and I know that I said that was not true and that I wasn't going to hit him and that the behaviour o f him and his mates was awful. And he told me that there was a comp on and I told him that yeah, I surf in comps at Wategoes where there are many, many more people in the water than this, so I know what it's like, but that I wasn't in his way, and he told me that I should just get out of his way and that they only ran the comp once a month and get out the way (again) because they only had six minutes left! And then I told him that their behaviour and attitude was disgusting, yelling at women in the water who weren't even in their way, they were disgusting men. We weren't yelling at each other, but our words were firm and I felt awful and upset and decided I was done, so I started to paddle in. </div>
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I paddled across to the beach and went in, but felt embarrassed doing so. Was I so thin-skinned? I was upset, but I wasn't furious. </div>
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The thing was, he was yelling at me from the water for being in the wrong place on the wave and not seeing him while I was on the wave, but just a while before, the guy in the white rashee who was on the wave was yelling at women in the water for being int he wrong place. The consistent accusations despite the reversal of positions was hypocritical and lame. </div>
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Stupid women. Always, stupid women, in the wrong place, whether on a wave or paddling out.</div>
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I rinsed off under a shower, and then walked up the hill towards the comp tents. I put my board in the shade and walked to the men bringing the tents down. I walked over smiling - I had no intention of yelling - and when they saw me coming and turned their backs on me and made it clear they weren't interested. I stood there waiting til they turned. And explained my positioned.</div>
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"Hey, look, I'm from Byron and I'm in the mal club down there, and we have monthly comps at Wategoes, so I know what it's like to have a comp in a busy spot and that it's very frustrating, but that I'd see none of the guys yelling at some women and that he'd called them "stupid women" and that that was not okay and beyond what should be deemed acceptable and that I'd just been yelled at by someone too." They replied with "Yeah right", and some mumbling that was a bit dismissive an a lot of exchanged smirks, and none of them fully turned around to look at or acknowledge me. "I just thought, that maybe you could say something to the members about that kind of behaviour? They they can't be yelling at people who have done nothing wrong." Again, I didn't yell, and I was weirdly calm about it all, but it as clear that they didn't care. I looked at them once more before leaving. </div>
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"I guess I just won't be surfing here again, which might be a god outcome for you, but I think that's pretty terrible."</div>
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I walked down the hill so they could talk about me out of my hearing, and stood the fenceline watching the water and awaiting my friend. The young guy I'd met in the water came up, smiling, and we talked again about the lineup. He nodded at my story of talking to the guys, and assured it that they wouldn't change, but that not everywhere was like that, just here, that these guys had been surfing here a long time and that they felt really entitled to waves here and that everyone around here got the same treatment. He said that as a grom they used to surf the inside and just ignore the guys when they yelled at them. He also told me that there was a council by-law that ruled comps got precedence in lineups, something I should look up and check in on. He also told me that despite my assumption, they actually do run their contest in line with conditions, and that there did seem to have been a number of contest running on weekends. I don't know what to think about that. </div>
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"I live just up there," he pointed along the coast to the north, "but I'm down in Byron a but, so maybe I'll see you out in the surf", he smiled as he ran off. I do hope so. </div>
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As my friend came and joined me, and we walked to the shower talking about what had happened, the guy who'd had a go at me in the water walked past at a respectful distance. He'd just come in from the water and was dripping wet, walking back to the comp crew. He called out to me, "Sorry about that. I just thought you were going to hit me. Sorry about that." He looked a bit hang-dog about it, and I was sure he was sincere, but I didn't have it in me to say "That's okay!" and smile, the way I knew I was meant to. I could see that he felt pretty bad about it - having someone paddle in because you're rude to them isn't a great feeling - but I didn't feel like it was my job to absolve him at that point. I was still too bummed about it all. </div>
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Of course, I know, and as the young men I met in the surf was a smiling reminder of, #notallmen are horrible in the surf, and that #notalllocalsurfers are aggressive. These men are likely lovely to their loved ones, and we've not always our best selves in the surf. I'll never deny this 'not always our best selves' applies to me too, but as I modify this, as I try to do better and better and get less and less frustrated, I find it harder and harder to manage my emotional responses to seeing pointless aggression in the water. Especially by men who've had the most access to waves at any one spot. </div>
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I love my home break too, and I hate that my access to waves is now mitigated by hordes of tourists, visitors and newcomers to surfing. But I have to balance this against my politics, which is that I don't get to decide who surfs and who gets waves. If I really believe that, if I really believe that surfing cultures need to change, then I don't get to be pissed off about the way more people can mean fewer waves for me. Instead, if I want to surf busy breaks, even if they're places I've been visiting my whole life, I need to find new ways to negotiate that. I don't own the beach, the surf, the waves, and even if I'd like it if I got certain breaks to myself sometimes, well, bad luck. </div>
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<span style="font-size: 16px;">The sad thing is that those men at Alex Headland are killing their own club with this kind of behaviour, because no-one new will join and be part of it. Instead, their club, which Luke told me they claim to be one of, if not the, oldest in Australia, will die with them and their exclusionary localism. And that is a bummer. </span></div>
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Rebecca Olivehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09428676558153909572noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29437172.post-92067057831202591472017-11-27T10:15:00.000+10:002017-11-27T10:15:06.222+10:002nd Annual Rockaway Beach Bodysurfing ContestFollowing <a href="http://makingfriendswiththeneighbours.blogspot.com.au/2017/11/ice-cream-headaches.html" target="_blank">yesterday's NYC post about <i>Ice Cream Headaches</i></a>, I poached this from <a href="https://endlessbummerny.blogspot.com.au/2017/09/this.html" target="_blank">Toddy</a>! The contest was back in September 9th, but I've been doing some catch-up blog stalking this weekend:<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" mozallowfullscreen="" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/235383098" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="640"></iframe><br />
<a href="https://vimeo.com/235383098">2nd Annual Rockaway Beach Bodysurfing Contest</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/user53073117">Noah Clothing</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.<br />
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My favourite bits are people running in fins, and way the person in the blue hat gets a wave at about 1.10. I also like seeing the view from the water, back on to the developed world just beyond the sand. It's like the Gold Coast, but without the green hinterland. I also love to know what the view from the water is.<br />
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<br />Rebecca Olivehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09428676558153909572noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29437172.post-51185848796911349302017-11-26T09:48:00.000+10:002017-11-26T09:48:19.294+10:00Ice Cream HeadachesGiven my experiences with Kurungabaa, I'm always keen to support an interesting project about surfing.<br />
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<a href="https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ice-cream-headaches-book-photography#/" target="_blank"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="556" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgw2fSE4aElRzQU07KgDvNDW4M6dZOM5uQKRQSld8p2tQYuUDJd-l0cdGC9A9Vidc8RaGx_liWrJfZr_TK3q7VnP_PcXdpVYKV-MWv6-H59J1UU7O_V9s80moyuBaja2B10NR2k/s320/Screen+Shot+2017-11-26+at+9.40.15+am.png" width="247" /></a></div>
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<i><a href="http://www.icecreamheadaches.nyc/home-1/" target="_blank">Ice Cream Headaches,</a> </i>a book and photo project about surfing in New York, is the latest one that captured my attention. To be honest, being a city dweller myself, any project about city-related surfing grabs my attention, and New York surfing culture in particular, bucks the ideals of surfing in pristine nature, of surfing in warm, clear waters, of surfing as accessible. New York has a strong coastal culture and the beaches look amazing. While it sure looks like it has an enthusiastic surf crew, but actually surfing it does not look so easy.<br />
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This project is focused on folk who live and surf in New York, telling surfing the city's stories through their experiences. The two chaps producing it <a href="https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ice-cream-headaches-book-photography#/" target="_blank">have a crowd-funding page</a> for the production of the book, offering a range of options from throwing in some cash to pre-purchasing books, t-shirts, art prints, and even surf lessons!<br />
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I don't contribute to every project I see, but I'm a fool for a book and fascinated by NYC surfing, so this is one I've contributed to this one.<br />
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If you're keen, you can <a href="https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ice-cream-headaches-book-photography#/" target="_blank">find the <i>Ice Cream Headaches</i> fundraising page here</a>, and their <a href="https://www.instagram.com/icecream.headaches/" target="_blank">Instagram account here</a> (which is where I grabbed the images below).<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjT8BBCdK5x7skZsM9-1E5CKmlf1N-HCW-j1evrJre15nLkL1cRbydn16PpL8zJyE8Ph6bOrF6P4Sp0flDHT4iAbkebth9SAzPh0AFOlvk8sRn6ddufFFE78Ey2Imgo8DvID9SR/s1600/Screen+Shot+2017-11-26+at+9.42.02+am.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="796" data-original-width="1148" height="221" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjT8BBCdK5x7skZsM9-1E5CKmlf1N-HCW-j1evrJre15nLkL1cRbydn16PpL8zJyE8Ph6bOrF6P4Sp0flDHT4iAbkebth9SAzPh0AFOlvk8sRn6ddufFFE78Ey2Imgo8DvID9SR/s320/Screen+Shot+2017-11-26+at+9.42.02+am.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhj1E2qoYQY4Sr1yalxbOeZGEwF645jqewFx8C236F_UtessJja_JyoMOuUc1VGKzaA4C2vref8WSsswhPXDMMkogI_lL7lDBVVEKW8hirnHmEXZKZWzy8_iQ2t5Tt0Y-o9cB_f/s1600/Screen+Shot+2017-11-26+at+9.42.24+am.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="798" data-original-width="1198" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhj1E2qoYQY4Sr1yalxbOeZGEwF645jqewFx8C236F_UtessJja_JyoMOuUc1VGKzaA4C2vref8WSsswhPXDMMkogI_lL7lDBVVEKW8hirnHmEXZKZWzy8_iQ2t5Tt0Y-o9cB_f/s320/Screen+Shot+2017-11-26+at+9.42.24+am.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhb7oJpEJLUYWVD0Bk_WCC4zA_YVTz0R6K0OGtMp16T4er8EaCTGaQ5A1mCV5GMiRIZWrVJbompA5uH75fhKielaszJ16jtkvMTS9FwmzmcUc0vmIzQ4PpwW4fRssNwv0Qk7RdU/s1600/Screen+Shot+2017-11-26+at+9.42.43+am.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="794" data-original-width="1194" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhb7oJpEJLUYWVD0Bk_WCC4zA_YVTz0R6K0OGtMp16T4er8EaCTGaQ5A1mCV5GMiRIZWrVJbompA5uH75fhKielaszJ16jtkvMTS9FwmzmcUc0vmIzQ4PpwW4fRssNwv0Qk7RdU/s320/Screen+Shot+2017-11-26+at+9.42.43+am.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7hANpHmQUHiuuIuaTJbdQc2iaqiMrDWhnop-Am5vU1kZSdxv6F0gpIXHWpMKg2Rr_RCuoQLK2G4ZB6ShrRC5Xe7mvzotqk9cDm2SqQi1nseKzg89VkCow6cZtGj7Y9F99UFFK/s1600/Screen+Shot+2017-11-26+at+9.43.10+am.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1194" data-original-width="956" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7hANpHmQUHiuuIuaTJbdQc2iaqiMrDWhnop-Am5vU1kZSdxv6F0gpIXHWpMKg2Rr_RCuoQLK2G4ZB6ShrRC5Xe7mvzotqk9cDm2SqQi1nseKzg89VkCow6cZtGj7Y9F99UFFK/s320/Screen+Shot+2017-11-26+at+9.43.10+am.png" width="256" /></a></div>
<br />Rebecca Olivehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09428676558153909572noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29437172.post-51077414801691376912017-11-25T14:02:00.001+10:002019-06-12T11:02:32.199+10:00Sitting wide<div class="MsoNormal">
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times";"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">I was surfing recently at a spot that I often avoid as it's mostly populated by
aggressive shortboarders. They were sitting so deep and are constantly playing
for the inside position, a game that left most of them in the wrong spot to
take off and miss the section of wave that crumbled and filled up. On the other
side of the section, the waves ran much further and longer and cleaner and
formed fast little sections to play in before they closed out. This didn't stop
the crew from still sitting deep and hassling each other and then pumping their
way along the face, trying to gain speed to get around the close-out section. As
a longboarder, and as a someone who can generally (and unnecessarily) lack
confidence in their surfing, the inside was not an option for me. Longboards
are not welcome, and not making a wave is not an option. </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times";"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">Instead, I sat wide,
out on the shoulder. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times";"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">I was sitting wide
for more reasons than my board and my ability though. I was sitting wide because
I don’t like being in the thick of a hassle-heavy lineup. I don’t like fighting
for waves, I don’t like having to win them. I surf because I don’t like competitive
or team sports. I surf because I like just being out in the water, in nature,
on my own terms. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times";"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">But you can’t have
that kind of attitude when you’re in a competitive lineup, you can’t wait and
enjoy the space and time of being in the water. You have to be active in
getting waves, as many as you can, otherwise, you’re just a sitter. And once
you’re identified as a sitter, well, you’re fair game for being dropped-in on
and getting snaked. After a while, being treated this way can be frustrating
and upsetting, and you either give up and go in, or give in and change your tactics,
so no matter what you want and how you behave, if you sit in the hassling section
of a lineup, you’re part of the game. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times";"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">Knowing this, I usually
stay away. I didn’t use to – I used to get right in there – but I don’t like
being part of it all, and I often recall the words of one of my research
participants who explained that “You just have to stay really calm and try not
to cross over to the dark side. Because once you’re like them, you’re like
them.” When she said this, she was talking about politics of the lineup, and
her choice to not participate in the competitive, aggressive, winner-takes-all
sections off the points. She was explaining that there are other ways to do
things, other ways to surf, that we don’t have to buy into the culture and
politics created by men of the past and present. She was explaining that to do
so was to be complicit and to be just as bad: Once you’re like them, you’re
like them. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times";"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">Over the years, I’ve
certainly had my fair share of moments of being like them, of crossing over to
the dark side. I’ve been complicit in hassling, yelling, dropping in, snaking, and
being generally unpleasant, and none of it has ever made me feel proud. I’ve never
pretended otherwise and have written about such moments over time, implicating
myself in the politics of surfing and lineups. But since having this
conversation with my friend, I’ve changed this. Her approach to surfing is one
I’ve always respected and admired. She makes people feel welcome, but has a firm
but gentle word with folk when they’re getting out of hand. She checks on
people when bad things happen, and she’s consoled me in the sea at other times,
holding my hand as I helplessly, publicly cried with grief. She surfs with
skill, competence and style, and is always a stand out person at any break. She never shuns people who are learning or who aren’t as skilled, she
encourages them. She encouraged me as I learned, cheering my small triumphs and
making me feel like I was welcome. Her support in my early years of surfing was
key to me being able to persist, and to feel like the lineups I surfed at were
available to me. I have never seen her cross over to the dark side. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times";"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">Her way of surfing is
to not be complicit, and to not sit in the thick of the busy lineup, and yet
she always gets waves. Good waves! As I watched her over the years I learned
how she did it – by sitting wide and making good choices; not taking the
obvious options; by knowing how the waves are breaking and how various folk are
surfing. She does it by being better at surfing than the crew out on the point.
She’s so awesome.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times";"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">She is why, on that
busy day that started this story, I sat wide.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times";"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">I sat wide, and I watched. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times";"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">I got to know how the
break was working, how the waves were breaking, the rhythm of the sets, who was
going to make it, who wasn't. I used all of this to know when I could take off
to make the most of the long wave face, just like crew out in the busy section, but without my hassling or playing politics.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times";"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">Sitting wide has long
worked for me. I've used it a lot at my home breaks, as well as new places that
I surf: Newcastle, Manu Bay, The Pass, Rocky Rights, Currumbin, Burleigh…<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times";"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">Sitting wide has
taught me how to surf outside a lineup, and to value things other than status
or performance. It’s helped me find more patience in my surfing, to expect
less, and to make more room for other people with less confidence and skill
than me. Out wide, the stakes are lower: take offs are less critical,
the water less crowded and there are fewer egos. Not always, but mostly. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times";"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">That’s not to say it’s
a tactic always works nor is it the only option in my repertoire of lineup strategies,
but it’s a good one. Well, it's a good one as long as I am in a good
headspace. As long as my expectations are mitigated, as long as I’m not looking
for attention or validation or visibility, and certainly so long as I'm not trying to
build my place in the pecking order amongst those who operate on the old,
traditional lineup rules.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times";"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">All of this goes
through my head when I’m surfing at a busy break. Lineups ask me to find out how
I can get waves, but they also ask me who I want to be – as a surfer and as a
person. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times";"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">And all of this is
representative of a bigger aspect of surfing which is about the role performance
plays in who we value in the surf and why. While the saying goes that the best
surfer in the water is the one having the most fun, this doesn’t always
translate into that person getting waves. Often the people having the most fun
are those in the whitewash, learning, not those getting the most critical take-offs
or getting the best and most waves. Yet the style and aggressiveness of some
surfers as they battle the throngs for respect and access, visibility and
validation, lets the ‘having fun’ story fall by the wayside. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times";"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">Not for me. I don’t
have respect for people based on their surfing alone. I know plenty of very-good-surfers – they’re a dime a dozen around my parts. I can certainly
appreciate and admire someone’s skill, but if they’re awful or rude or if they
make things harder for people who are not as good as them, if they take every
wave because they can and leave little for anyone else, then my respect
dissolves into derision. I’m certainly not my best self around those folk. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times";"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">For me, the best
surfer in the water is someone who gets waves, but leaves waves for others, who
take pleasure from watching others have fun, who doesn’t surf at the expense of
others. I’ve mostly learned this way of thinking from other women who surf, but
I see lots of my male friends do it too. They’re kind and generous, and at no real
loss to their own enjoyment or wave count. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times";"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">Sitting wide helps me
be a better surfer. It helps me see more, understand more, know more. It helps
me be more patient and expect less. It helps me better appreciate the waves I
get, and to take more time to appreciate being in the sea.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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Rebecca Olivehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09428676558153909572noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29437172.post-36681330187773601042017-11-09T01:05:00.001+10:002018-05-09T16:40:58.429+10:00The Ocean Doesn't CareI first moved to Brisbane from Byron Bay to take up a PhD opportunity in 2008. It would be a gross understatement to say I was not thrilled about the move at the time, but I was thrilled about the chance to undertake my study (about women's surfing). Putting surfing first was not making me happy. Living where I did meant limited job opportunities, and I was bored. I'm not saying my life was boring, nor that life in Byron Bay is boring. I'm saying that I was bored.<br />
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But the transition from surfing every day to a much more a mediated surfing life was not easy. I was over an hour from the closest break and I was poor as you can imagine, so I couldn't regularly afford the petrol money. I couldn't just take off when I wanted, but often had to wait until I could get away, so I often got skunked on the surf as well. Getting shit waves might not have too much of an effect when you can surf all the time, but when it's rare that you get into the sea, it can really bite.<br />
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It took a while, but I slowly relaxed into making sense of what surfing could mean from a different perspective. From a non-local, weekend-warrior, city-based surfing perspective. A couple of experiences (<a href="http://makingfriendswiththeneighbours.blogspot.com.au/2009/07/broken-pipe.html" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="https://makingfriendswiththeneighbours.blogspot.com.au/2010/09/realities.html" target="_blank">here</a>) really drove home <a href="https://makingfriendswiththeneighbours.blogspot.com.au/2014/02/things-i-think-about-in-sea-when-i.html" target="_blank">how desperately crazy about waves local surfers can be</a>, and how surfing every day can make you even hungrier and less appreciative of waves than people who get to the coast to surf much less often. And yet, I saw these people - me included - treated as though they'd given something up! As though they - we - weren't real surfers.<br />
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Not that I care what anyone might think about that, about my surfing. But I do care about how I can access the surf and the sea. Even though it doesn't always work out - that I don't get waves that I get smashed or that I don't always even enjoy it (which has been the case lately, but that's a whole other story). Because the ocean doesn't care either - not about me, not about you. It is always there, and it's always an option for seeing how I feel, but that doesn't guarantee it will be kind or make me feel better. It does, but not in that "the cure for everything" romanticised way. It makes me feel better in that I can get there.<br />
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So the film below resonated with me. As the film tells us,<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/YYeybzkXf2U" width="560"></iframe><br />
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I know this is a bit of a marketing exercise, but it's nice. And sure, Brisbane is no NYC. Brisbane city is nowhere near as populated or busy as New York, our winters are crazy warm and we live in fairly close proximity to the coast, so sure, none of that was anything I have a reference point for (except the cold, a little, from my time in NZ). But I did understand the points about making time to get out into the world in ways I want to. Cities are very beautiful, but it is also pretty wonderful to get out of them and to the coast. (Or to a forest, or to a mountain.) And to be in the water where there are no phones, no emails, no knocks on your door. That's all so wonderful. Wave-riding offers me all that and more!<br />
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Please don't get me wrong in thinking that just being in the sea is always enough or that I don't care about waves, or that waves are a backdrop to the other stuff, because that's not how I feel at all. Not at all. I love getting waves and I wish I could get more of them. And that's sort of the point.<br />
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A lot of what I know about surfing in cities come from <a href="http://endlessbummerny.blogspot.com.au/" target="_blank">Toddy over at Endless Bummer NY</a>. If you . don't know that blog, I don't really know what to say to you. Toddy talks as much about not-surfing as he does about surfing, and how despite that, surfing still shapes the way he sees, thinks about and experiences his city. it also means that belonging to a place is a bit different, and seems to be more based on going to a place, rather than claiming a place. He, along with a bunch of others, <a href="https://www.birdwell.com/blogs/birdwell-blog/dazzling-blue-61-new-york-surfers" target="_blank">was recently asked about the NY surf scene</a>:<br />
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<i>“The thing that defines the New York surf scene? How intimate it is, even among strangers. This is evolving, of course. But it still holds true. People still talk in the water, say hi in the parking lot after a session. Yesterday an older guy came up while I was drying off the kids and just started talking about how the high tide was bumping him off the waves then smiled and said, ‘Well anyways, I was watching you out there, I really like your footwork!’ and walked away. Typical of certain corners around here. How’s it different? Well, there is a seeming inverse proportion of stoke to consistency of quality waves. And that’s weird.”</i></blockquote>
Getting waves when you live away from the coast isn't easy. It is a hard won prize, based on decision and effort. When you're working a lot (by choice!) then going surfing means taking a day off or waiting for the weekend, or not seeing your friends, or not getting things done around the house, or not sleeping in when you're dog tired, or missing a deadline, or myriad other things that you have to decide not to prioritise, when surfing means all of that, well, surfing means a lot.<br />
<br />Rebecca Olivehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09428676558153909572noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29437172.post-86443167829111360832017-11-07T13:55:00.004+10:002017-11-07T17:33:47.105+10:00The dangers of a Boys' ClubThis is not new, but it is great, so I thought it was worth sharing.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/VCRhMwVZMBI" width="560"></iframe><br />
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As great as it is, there is stillnothing new in this clip that women haven't been saying for a long time now.In a way it strikes at the heart of the difficulty of how it's possible to get things to change.<br />
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<i>We too fear being excluded.</i><br />
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Women can't fix this. Women have been doing what they can to participate, be visible, create new content, promote each others' achievements, build their own skills, push their own edges. Women fighting for change is not the problems. Instead, women's bodies, femininity and skills are still seen as the 'problem', and it is up to men to change their own minds and hearts, to change their responses to women's participation.<br />
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By highlighting the challenges for women to participate, at the way the accusation that fear of exclusions keeps the culture closed to difference, this clips hints at the challenges for many others to participate freely and safely as well.<br />
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<i>We too fear being excluded.</i><br />
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This is clear in the story of skateboarder Brian Anderson, and his own struggles with fitting in skating culture, even as he was one of the most dominant and respected figures. This little film is great and totally worth watching al the way through.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/5ZU5K3y7QhU" width="560"></iframe><br />
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BA came out as gay in 2016. In this doco, he reveals that he was "totally scared" of anyone in skateboarding finding out he was gay, and that he chose to hide his sexuality because he thought that it would be "dangerous to talk about it" in the world of professional skateboarding and skateboarding culture more broadly.<br />
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Brian Anderson is a super successful, highly respected, really handsome, conventionally masculine man, who was revered an adored and admired in his world, and yet he feared people knowing he was gay. So imagine how hard it is for someone who conforms even less to established markers of belonging.<br />
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<i>We too fear being excluded.</i><br />
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Our own fears around belonging and exclusion have the effect of excluding others, and as long as "we too fear being excluded" to the point where we create closed circles of self-reference, then we make things truly dangerous for anyone who doesn't fit.<br />
<br />Rebecca Olivehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09428676558153909572noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29437172.post-22705214759795294782017-10-13T16:10:00.000+10:002017-10-13T16:10:03.004+10:00#goals<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXyFLfUwD6tcCpDrnHG_i_FuyCVzepvZuzBUOfm084blcLjYoZOezi2cSMBOFChiPWexWbUKqyZH4WGJrFWG0sDuWlih3kQmI8cnDVfZzJVI4hMm5-BxIfjl9CzvXegwIYwAfu/s1600/Screen+Shot+2017-10-13+at+4.06.59+pm.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="574" data-original-width="810" height="226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXyFLfUwD6tcCpDrnHG_i_FuyCVzepvZuzBUOfm084blcLjYoZOezi2cSMBOFChiPWexWbUKqyZH4WGJrFWG0sDuWlih3kQmI8cnDVfZzJVI4hMm5-BxIfjl9CzvXegwIYwAfu/s320/Screen+Shot+2017-10-13+at+4.06.59+pm.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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Photographer unknown but via: <i><a href="http://www.surfemmemag.com/" target="_blank">Surfemme Magazine</a>,</i> <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BYaS95Jgd-d/?taken-by=surfemme" target="_blank">Instagram feed</a></div>
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<br />Rebecca Olivehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09428676558153909572noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29437172.post-86054429181716637722017-09-16T10:03:00.003+10:002019-06-12T11:03:01.722+10:00Memorialise this! - Politics of inclusion in surfing historyMy home town, Byron Bay, is renowned for the number of women who surf there. It’s a point of pride that at some breaks it’s not unusual for women to outnumber men, and women also shape the aesthetic associated with Byron – nonchalance, femininity, grace, colour, and an unashamed preference for smaller peelers. You will have seen this in the many, many, many images and videos and stories of women surfing there, and the many, many, many Instagram posts by women of them on the beach, with familiar lines north coast hinterland acting as a backdrop across the bay.<br />
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Women’s surfing in Byron is a robust and highly visible affair, and this has meant opportunities for women to start out here in the surf industry, taking roles or building businesses of their own as surfers, social media celebrities, photographers, surf wear producers, writers, and even researchers! If you took women away from lineups today, all you’d have left is a 1980s issue of a Tracks magazine shoot, and a lot of confused and pretty bummed men.<br />
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So when I saw this news piece in the ABC yesterday, I was a bit confused.<br />
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<b><a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-09-15/pauline-menczer-surfing-snub/8949758?pfmredir=sm" target="_blank">Surfer Pauline Menczer is a world champion so why isn't her name on Byron Bay's honour roll?</a></b><br />
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<a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-09-15/pauline-menczer-surfing-snub/8949758?pfmredir=sm" target="_blank"><img border="0" data-original-height="1254" data-original-width="1434" height="279" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhJ21wUuMIyQ3XgNrlkhB6PPIjc5W3FBUy8UoZ1GVtq2EPS-pe1jePKnVtz2rCHLD0CE0ZRw-3AZEk_foZcuS9Q1fif3t1SmKXx6Ve_6CybLPLMnotittpgRBtu6BRKPQps2FL/s320/Screen+Shot+2017-09-16+at+10.01.36+am.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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This is in reference to a mural about surfing that has been in a Byron laneway for some years now. The mural included a list of famous Byron surfers. It’s opposite the Great Northern Hotel, and has been there for years. I don’t notice it much. In a nod to the continued impact of city-lovers on the Byron landscape there’s a current project to reinvigorate this particular laneway. Admittedly, as far as new residents changing the town, painting a laneway and getting buskers to play is much less controversially impactful than other "let’s-build-a-new-suburb-with-inadequate-infrastructure" developmentss, but there are still politics of space and community that come into play.<br />
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In this case, it seems, women, including World Champions, have been left off the updated honour roll, which, given everything I began this post with, seems odd. And annoying. And disrespectful. Because not only are women a vibrant part of the recreational surfing scene today, they have been for many, many years. In the boardriders clubs – shortboarding and longboarding – and in local, national and international competitive scenes.<br />
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As well Pauline Menczer – World Champ in 1993, her story is AMAZING, you should look her up and read about her – Byron Bay has been home to a number of successful and inspirational competitive women surfers, who led the charge for where we are today, and deserve especial recognition for doing so in an era when women’s surfing received little attention or support. Without making any effort at all, I can tell you that Jenny Boggis, Laurina McGrath and Julie Morris were surfing and competing while we were at high school, rare female faces amongst all the teenage boys, a lack of sponsorship support making it especially challenging to stay on tour. In longboarding, Isabelle Braly has competed on the Women’s World Longboarding Tour while living in Byron, while Roisin Carolan continues to dominate the local and national women’s competitive scene.<br />
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And keep in mind this is a two-minute consideration of competitive surfing (which isn’t even the space I think in very often) written in a café, as I am running late to meet friends!<br />
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Women, like men, in Byron Bay, have contributed to more than competitive surfing, but have also shaped surfing culture in Byron Bay. Just last weekend, there was a big paddle out to celebrate the life of Elaine Reid, who, along with her dear friend Yvonne Pendergast, has been at the heart of surfing in Byron Bay since the 1960s. These women are as much a part of surf history here as any of the men, and continue to make contributions through community work and encouraging kids to get in the sea.<br />
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At this point in time, if you’re working on an Honour Roll and you have no women included, you need to stop. If you are the kind of person who wouldn’t notice such a thing, then you need to consult with other people. If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t care about this, then you need to take a long, hard look in the mirror and think about what a terrible dinosaur you are. It is no longer acceptable to continue with this great surfing tradition of “chicks don’t surf” which was never true anyway, and is a misnomer that reveals more about the person saying it than it does to reflect any kind of historical or current reality. Excluding women from murals like this is lame and disrespectful and damaging and untrue, and they do a dis-service to everyone in the town.<br />
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And look, this is the first I’ve heard of this, so it’s a bit rich of me to jump in and critique without knowing all the details. I fully admit that. I’ve not been spending much time at home this year, and I didn’t see the debate that surrounded the decision about who to include. But the politics about who we memorialise in public tributes is not an unfamiliar topic for me, nor should it be for anyone else – the debates about statues arising from Charlottesville in the USA have highlighted how statues (and other memorials) act to privilege certain kinds of histories in certain kinds of ways. I’m not suggesting that this mural is anything so horrible as celebrating wars to maintain practices of slavery, but the notion of what is rendered worthy of remembering through public monuments resonates here.<br />
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The article proposes a separate “Women’s Honour Roll”, which I think is a terrible idea. Separating women from men in how we think about and celebrate surfing bears no resemblance to what surfing looks like or is. Sure, it is in a competitive sense, but that’s problematic too, and replicating those separations through a memorial shouldn’t be our goal. Women’s surfing is not lesser, nor should it be suggested to be so.<br />
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Because women shouldn’t ever be an afterthought in thinking about the past in Byron Bay, in surfing, or in any other history.<br />
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Rebecca Olivehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09428676558153909572noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29437172.post-52048775441278575562017-09-05T16:28:00.000+10:002019-06-12T11:03:18.446+10:00Fragments of surfing bodiesAs someone who is interested in the ways people, experiences, ideas, relationships and places are represented - in how we come to know them - social media fascinates me. What we're all willing to share, to repost, to like, comment on, and talk about offline, gives lots of insight into other aspects of our lives and thoughts and relationships.<br />
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Each social media - e.g. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Twitter - is different and allows us to do different things. For example, one that I use and study (a little), Instagram, claims to offer a behind the scenes look into people's lives, allowing us to share fragments of our days with each other. And for me, that's certainly the best of it. When I was living in New Zealand, Instagram let me remain a part of my friend's daily lives in a mundane way. Yes, it's all selected and filtered and cropped and edited and reframed to be as pretty as possible, but when it comes to people I know, I could read through all that, situating their posts against my long relationships with them and their families and homes, and against what I know of them through their emails and phone-calls.<br />
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Still, we all prefer to post the best of ourselves. Of course.<br />
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The fragments we see on Instagram are much more complicated, commercialised and professional than the cheery sales pitch. And if it's like that for people like me and my friends, well, when it comes to celebrities and famous folk, so much of how they use social media is an explicit and targeted exercise in marketing and branding. Social media offers an incredible opportunity to sell themselves and to make money through endorsements and sponsorships. I'm don't need to talk about that today, other that to establish that that things we see famous folk post online are usually done so to be consistent with their own brand. It can be more than that too, and for many celebrities and sports stars etc, it's a great way to reach and be in touch with fans and followers and other interested observers. Like me. When it comes to celebrity, social media is offers a seemingly direct way for fans to access the lives of those they admire, obsess about, aspire to be, or are simply curious about. Instagram, and other social media cuts out the editorial processes of traditional media.<br />
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I'm not entirely sure what all of this means yet. In a superficial ways, it does seem to diversify the kinds of images we see about different cultures, bodies, and places, which is great. Take women's surfing (just, you know, an example off the top of my head). On a small study I did of women's surfing accounts, I found that Instagram has offered the chance for various women and girls - sponsored, non-sponsored, wiht bog and small followings, and of various capabilities - to present themselves as surfers in their own way: there is an abundance of images of women surfing in a way that continues to eludes magazine publication; women position themselves as holding in depth knowledge about surfing culture, practices and places; and they highlight the ays that other women shape and define their surfing worlds, with men a part of their surfing world, but not all of it. It's pretty cool. Of course, since so much of social media is driven by quantifiable likes, we often end up with the same images anyway; Filtered, processed, angled, well-lit, and often still focused on bikini-clad, heterosexy, female bodies.<br />
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Still, the Instagram accounts of the women I looked at are far from the huge, sponsor driven accounts of female elite-athlete surfers. The primary images of women's surfing, especially on the bigger accounts at that stage tended to still often be of hot female bodies in bikinis. The accounts of the pro female surfers have a different agenda, which is mediated by the need to maintain sponsorship, and media presence and so on. Essentially, their use of Instagram is often mediated by their job, and the need to conform to the happy, cute, girl-next-door, ideal of female surfers.<br />
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But every so often, even on the most professionalised, most sponsor-driven accounts with the highest followers, little non-scripted slivers from behind the scenes shine through. Every so often we get the feeling that it's not media teams running everyone's account, but that individuals themselves still choose and post the images.<br />
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A few weeks ago, I was killing time, looking on Instagram and I saw a post in Alana Blanchard's feed. Alana Blanchard has over 1.9 million Instagram followers and is one of the most promoted and highly paid women surfers in the world. <a href="https://www.surfer.com/features/alana-blanchard/" target="_blank">This is not only because she surfs really well - and she really does - but also because she's very willing and happy to pose in bikinis - very small bikinis - and to play up her sexuality</a>. You know the drill. She giggles and flicks her hair and has perfected looking over her shoulder back at a camera that is angled at her butt. She's also willing to say that she loves these tiny bikinis because they're what everyone wears and that they stay on better in the surf, a statement that continues to blow my mind.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/B-6SO1jdvAc" width="560"></iframe><br />
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The photos and captions on <a href="https://www.instagram.com/alanarblanchard/?hl=en" target="_blank">Alana Blanchard's Instagram profile</a> are evidence of all of this. You can go check it out off you feel like it. Her images are a bit more mixed lately, because she's currently 30-something weeks pregnant, which is very exciting for her and her partner. She's also still totally heteronormatively gorgeous and posing in bikinis.</div>
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Her posts usually sell a life of ease and glamour and fun and play and surfing and modelling, and these kinds of images of her non-pregnant body remain interspersed through her recent pregnancy updates as well. There's nothing unexpected about that - it's social media marketing for her personal brand after all. But recently a sliver of something else slipped through. Something that is consistent with a lot of first time mother narratives, but which I found a little unexpected, given her defence of her girly, sexy, femininity. <br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">(This post is from August 17th)</span></div>
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While Alana Blanchard has never pretended she isn't playing a media game for her own gain, I've never seen her talk about her sense of self and her body in this way before. Usually, as in the Sports Illustrated video and Surfer profile I liked to above, her self-confidence is highlighted. That she is so confident is no surprise and it's great to hear! But I've never seen her talk about body image in this way - about the pressure to, as she puts it, be thin enough.</div>
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This is just an edited, framed up fragment of a moment of a though of Alana Blanchard's life. But to me it feels as well as though there is something more there too. This fragment feels more like a little fissure or a crack through the media persona that Blanchard has so carefully crafted; a little view to something not unexpected, but unusual for her to admit.</div>
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The pressure to be thin enough. But thin enough for what?</div>
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Thin enough to be the most famous female surfer? Thin enough to be coveted for surf magazine, underwear and Sports Illustrated photo shoots? Thin enough to be the face of Rip Curl? Thin enough to exude the confidence she usually feels?</div>
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These questions in response to this little glimpse into how Alana might or might not think and feel about her body and the industry she is part of aren't an accusation, nor are they anything approaching glee that she too feels pressure to be thin enough. I feel no glee at all about that. Instead, they're a fascinated consideration of this insight into how Alana Blanchard might really think and feel about the world she lives in and the pressures she faces, despite the need to always present herself otherwise. </div>
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When I read this particular post of Alana's, it felt like a refreshing breeze that has found its way through an accidentally opened window. As much as I try not to, it's easy to forget that celebrities are people like me, with all the attendant negotiations of various pressures. In Alana's case, she's making a living from her looks and her skill as a model, as well as her skills as a high performance surfer. And it is a tricky negotiation. <a href="https://issuu.com/pacific_media/docs/over_exposed_for_web" target="_blank">As one surfer noted in a 2012 issue of Curl Magazine about the sexualisation of women surfers</a>, Alana's body changed shape and lost power as she shifted into more full time modelling. Again, it wasn't a criticism, but an observation on the conflicting demands of what a professional surfer's and a model's body should look like and/or be able to do. </div>
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And this issue is not new. As well as the discussions in that Curl Magazine, other professional women who surf have talked about feeling this pressure: <a href="https://makingfriendswiththeneighbours.blogspot.com.au/search?q=carissa+moore" target="_blank">Carissa Moore has famously talked about it in Surfer Magazine</a> and <a href="http://www.theinertia.com/surf/carissa-moore-headspace/" target="_blank">to The Inertia</a>. To be good at surfing, there should be no pressure for Alana to be thin, to worry that she's thin enough. Physiologically, it is not necessary. The worry about being thin is something else, something that is part of, but not uniquely of, surfing culture. But surfing culture and surf media, certainly don't make it easy to escape the feeling that surfing and thinness are and should be connected, even at the most high-performance levels. </div>
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In the end, my point about the damaging nature the links between thinness and surfing and being female, and how this all peeked through the fragment of a day posted by Alana Blanchard is not aimed to critiquing Alana herself. As always, it is aimed at the industry and media that have encouraged her into a position whereby her, and other women's, thinness is their financial and cultural capital. </div>
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Rebecca Olivehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09428676558153909572noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29437172.post-48066588074694515552017-08-15T11:57:00.000+10:002017-08-16T12:59:46.619+10:00Mountain - a review<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Last night I took myself to see the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s (ACO) performance, </span><i style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif;">Mountain, </i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">which</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> I’d been looking forward to for months. I'm no expert on classical music. I still learning about the histories, personalities and bodies of work of various composers, but what I do know is that I love listening to this genre of music. Even more, I love attending the performances. Every time, I'm still surprised by those first notes as they float across the room - how is it possible that people are making something so beautiful?! Over the last few years, I've become fascinated by classical compositions about nature. About how it is possible to reflect nature and wildlife in music in a way that is recognizable, musically, literally and emotionally. This interest emerges from my research about surfing, but it's also in no small part a reaction to previous ACO performances and programmes. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">Following the success and acclaim of their <a href="https://makingfriendswiththeneighbours.blogspot.com.au/2013/02/watching-musica-surfica-few-years-after.html" target="_blank">collaborations with film-maker Mick Sowry and surfer Derek Hynd to make </a><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="https://makingfriendswiththeneighbours.blogspot.com.au/2013/02/watching-musica-surfica-few-years-after.html" target="_blank"><i>Musica Surfica</i></a></span> and <span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><i>The Reef</i></span>, <span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><i>Mountain</i></span> marks another foray into human experiences of nature, and of how we, individually and collectively, are extended through challenge, risk, failure and awe. In the previous collaborations, surfing, the sea and waves took centre stage, with the project including immersive trips for all participants in two remote Australian surfing places. <i>Musica Surfica</i> was set in the southern island, King Island (SA), while <i>The Reef</i> explored notorious west coast desert break, Gnarloo (WA). In each place, the challenge of the wave was further ramped up by taking the control from the surfboards. Finless surfing on such waves is still new territory in contemporary cultural terms, if not historical; Hawaiians have been doing so for many, many years. Despite the similar formulas and the shared focus on surfing, place and style, each film asked different questions. <span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><i>Muscia Surfica</i></span> explored what happens when those who are masters of their craft – surfing and music – remove a key component that shapes how they are able to control, to steer, to know their directions? For Derek Hynd, this was the removal of the fins from his board, while for Richard Tognetti – Director of the ACO – this was the shift away from the traditions and cultures of chamber orchestras. The performance of classical music alongside surfing explored these ideas, with a memorable and educational performance of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcKgbzmUCuA" target="_blank">Nicolo Paganini's <i>Caprice No. 5</i> by Tognetti</a>, standing in a dis-used dairy, playing such complex music to many people who had never before seen or been interested in classical music, let alone performances. A strange vulnerability cut through Togenetti’s own confidence, giving the performance a liveliness and accessibility it might not otherwise usually present. <span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><i>The Reef</i></span> extended these ideas into a heavier, more unforgiving place of red sand, sharp rocks and dangerous waves. This film and performance was less about the relationships people have with themselves and their craft (surfing and music), and was more focused on bodies moving in a place. As well as the surfing – featuring a much younger, more cutting edge cast – I recall the focus on surfaces. Scenes lingered on water, sand, scrub, flies, and human detritus, as well as on things just beneath the surface: bubbles, rocks, bodies, sharks. I only saw <span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><i>Musica Surfica</i></span> as a film, but I was lucky enough to see <span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><i>The Reef</i></span> performed in 2013, something I’ve thought about often. I've posted the trailers below, but you can buy the films: <a href="https://www.aco.com.au/buy/merchandise_detail?id=musica-surfica" target="_blank"><i>Musica Surfica</i> is here</a>, and <a href="https://www.aco.com.au/buy/merchandise_detail?id=the-reef-dvd" target="_blank">here is <i>The Reef</i></a>.</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;">Mountain</span></i><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"> follows this tradition of
exploration. While it (and the previous films) could be read as action or extreme
sports films (and they certainly fit that genre), the lingering, intimate focus
on these often harsh, always beautiful places makes them so much more. In <i>Mountain</i>,
people are like extras to the place, their presence, and their attempts at
conquer so small against the timeless backdrop. While water is always moving
and changing, mountains offer different challenges and require different responses.
And yet it had echoes – a phrase sung by Danny Spooner in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Musica Surfica</i> makes an appearance in Sublime, which immediately
took me back to King Island, and placed this performance within what is perhaps
a particular genre in the ACO’s repertoire.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">As a performance, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mountain</i> has three key components – the orchestra and music, the
footage and the narration – and four key players. Richard Tognetti is Artistic
Director of the ACO, responsible for driving the direction of this celebrated
ensemble, He composed much of the score, and is the lead violin, so while his
voice is silent, his contribution and presence shape the entire event. Jennifer
Peedom is the Director of the film. Peedom delivers a narrative of human
engagement with various aspects of mountains – from standing in wonder and
terror, to taking them on as a challenge – climbing, skiing, jumping, walking,
and playing amongst and between them. People facing sheer walls of rock and
snow and ice, and facing them as an adventure. Renan Ozturk’s cinematography is
breath-taking, and I can’t imagine I will forget it anytime soon. His magically
clear images linger on places and events, replicating the slowness of time
associated with mountains, allowing us to get a real sense of the size and
scope of the vistas we encounter. Even gentle and spare shots – a minutes long
sequence of falling snow against a black sky – offer moments for reflection and
rest, and remind us that there is softness to offset the rock and stone. Finally,
Robert Macfarlane’s narrative (voiced by William Dafoe). Macfarlane is a British
writer whose first book, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mountains of the
Mind</i>, won multiple awards. His love of wilderness is clear in his advocacy
for the natural world, and his critique of contemporary human engagement with
risk, such as his scathing observation of the commercialised consumption of an
increasingly crowded Everest: “This is not climbing. This is queueing.” <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The contributions of each of the collaborators
weaves together beautifully, to offer a performance that left me floating out
of the room, and wishing I could go straight back to watch it all over again.
As always, the physicality of the ACO’s performance was mesmerising, the musicians
lifting, swaying and moving with the music, their postures and stances adapting
in response to the music. Musicians bodies always help me better understand the
music, and, with him so prominent at the front, Tognetti’s movements offer insights
into the messages of the scores, as well as what might be physically required
to produce such music. Arvo Pärt’s buzzing and then rolling <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Fratres</i> was played wide-stanced with
bent knees, the notes seeming to flow through his feet and core, while
Beethoven’s Larghetto was played while standing tall and with an arch to his
back, as though the music descended from above, and action of his shoulders and
fingers, more than the earthiness of his performance of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Fratres</i>. I can only imagine how exhilarating and exhausting
performing at such a level and for such a length of time, must be.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The film takes you high amongst the mountain peaks,
soaring through rocks and snow and clouds, watching from on high as time-lapse
of rolling clouds flood valleys and softening the harsh terrain. The definition
in the images is so clear, that it feels hyper-real, the way that being amongst
the mountain tops can be – the kind of clarity that comes with removing
ourselves from the mundane every day. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mountain</i>
plays on this exact point; the specular, sublime nature of being amongst mountains,
of ascending to places where the line between death and life shimmers with
uncertainty, places not meant for people. Indeed, it is the relationships of
humans with mountains that is the key narrative of the film: Risk, danger, arrogance,
humility, wonder, awe and a sense of the fleetingness of human existence in
comparison to the age evoked by rocky and icy peaks. How do we make sense of
such enormous ideas, seemingly insurmountable challenges, and such
breath-taking vistas? How is it possible to think in such terms, and to
consider that we are able to find a place for ourselves in all of this? It is
the ways that humans make sense of such big ideas that is the core of the film.
It offers no answers, instead inspiring the kind of awe in the natural world
that seems so necessary in how we might successfully re-negotiate our
relationship with the natural world in an era of human-produced climate change.
It was difficult not to notice the whiteness of the snow reflected in the skin
tone of the dominant number of participants. This is not to suggest Peedom and
Macfarlance were unaware of this. They each actively commented on the colonial
undertones in their own way – Peedom though her constant return to Nepalese
people and culture, and Macfarlane in his critiques of Everest, and of the arrogance
that drives people to take risks in climbing and other sports. But these were
subtle, especially considering that audiences for classical music performances
such as this remain, for many reasons, white, and middle class. The people in
this film are so well kitted out in brightly coloured outdoor wear, so imbued
with access to leisure time, so committed to seeking refuge from middle-class
comforts though cultures of play and risk in the extremes of nature. As with
Peedom and Macfarlane, this fact does not escape the attention of Tognetti and
performances like this are meant to be an attempt to broaden who can access classical
music, as well as shaking up the often elitist culture that surrounds chamber
orchestras by taking the ACO to regional and rural towns and performing in venues
more usual for local populations. Tognetti’s contribution to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Musica Surfica</i> played on his commitment to
opening the classical music and the ACO up to more people, both in its
production, as well as the way it was toured. It’s a remarkable and admirable
approach. While Tognetti’s diverse programs make excellent steps in welcoming
new audience members, the price and the still-intimidating nature of performances
spaces reman barriers.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The musical programme was similarly lovely, offering
a moving interpretation of the footage and words, that sometimes led me to
think anew about behaviours and spaces. I’ve already looked it up and have been
listening to it again as I write this review. You can <a href="https://open.spotify.com/album/7oI4Iq76YfgJVgPX01Wn8G" target="_blank">listen to it here</a> or, even better, <a href="https://www.aco.com.au/buy/merchandise_detail?id=mountain-soundtrack" target="_blank">contribute to the ACO by buying the soundtrack here</a>.* The music soared and floated and reflected the beauty,
terror and enormity of the film. I wish I could tell you more about the music,
but all I know is that I was carried along on every note, my heart full to
bursting with the magic of all the best of humanity – people made this music
and people play it. In a world of climate change and war and poverty and
cruelty, all of which is created by people, the arts is an incredibly powerful reminder
that people can create beauty as well. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">As an audience, the experience of Mountain is shaped
by these three spaces – footage, music and narration. From my seat in the balcony,
I had a lovely view of the orchestra playing, but it offered some challenges,
as my attentions shifted between the footage and the music. The footage is
compelling an immense – both in subject matter and as a presence – and it was
easy to get lost in the images. This meant that the ACO often acted as
soundtrack. In a film, a good soundtrack is often invisible in its presence –
inciting emotion and adding to the story that is only understood afterwards. But considering this was a live performance, the role of the music and musicians is
different. While it might have simply been a consequence of my elevated
position (perhaps they were more framed by the film from below), the dominance
of the visual left me feeling as though I missed much of the performance and
backgrounded the music. But then, I kept thinking of stream of consciousness styles
of writing, and how, as a reader, these often incite in me drifting thoughts as
I move along with the flow of the words, often slipping into my own streams of
thought. In particular, I was thinking of Virginia Woolf, and how the almost meditative
nature of her compositions can take me several attempts to focus on. Perhaps
instead of worrying about my own drifting attention, I should consider this a
part of the style of performance – if only I could return to the performance again
and again!</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">If you’ve not been, and </span><a href="https://www.aco.com.au/whats_on/event_detail/mountain17" target="_blank">you have the chance to go</a><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">, I cannot recommend enough that you make the effort. You will be supporting
the arts, but you will also be immersing yourself in an incredible and
memorable experience.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">*Note: Having moved house so often, CDs are a
thing of my past. I now live digitally, but I’d buy this soundtrack if it was
on iTunes.</span></span></div>
Rebecca Olivehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09428676558153909572noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29437172.post-88406226079423335952017-07-23T17:33:00.001+10:002019-06-12T11:03:31.624+10:00Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, by William FinneganI have come late to Finnegan’s celebrated book, ‘Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life’. It sat, unread, by my beside for months, and I was never sure what my hesitation was. Perhaps the singularly glowing reviews in the New York Review of Book, The New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal following his awarding of a Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography. A Pulitzer! For a book about surfing! Or perhaps it was the claim (I can’t remember where), that this book would change the surf writing genre. Books about surfing's past are a growing genre of non-fiction. As men who started surfing in the 50s, 60s and 70s head into their sunset years, the scramble to claim their place in the surfing past appears to have come upon them suddenly and absolutely. This genre has a big market. Thousands of surfers - like them, who knew them, or who admired them – love reading these stories to reflect on their own surfing lives and histories, while the current affinity for the apparent “golden era of surfing” among younger surfers, who seem to think the past was crowd free and idyllic, have a similar hunger. And I too, not fitting easily into either of these categories, love reading about past days of surfing. Memoir is a favourite genre of mine, so books about people's surfing lives always make it onto my radar. And so, surf writing is a genre with legs – quite an achievement, I think we can all agree.<br />
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Finnegan’s book, ‘Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life’, can easily be placed in this category. A memoir of his days in the waves, Finnegan’s book traces his life surfing from (and this is a non-exhaustive list) Hawai’i to California, island-hopping across the Pacific, to Australia and South Africa, and through parts of Europe and his current home, in New York. The books travels to every significant shortboarding break you can imagine, and Finnegan offers an incredibly detailed and intimate catalogue of the coastlines, beaches, waves, currents, water and light at these breaks. This is a book about a man who loves surfing. Finnegan says this is a book about the ocean, ‘about that myth-encrusted place” (432), but I disagree. The ocean is deep, vast, terrifying, unknowable, filled with secrets and creatures and death. This is not a book about anything beyond the coastal surface in which ocean energy explodes onto the rocks and sand and coral. This is a book about a love of waves, and the various waves he has ridden.<br />
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Loving waves is an easy way in for surfers - I love waves too! - but Finnegan is careful in his crafting to ensure the book welcomes non-surfers too. It would be hard for me to know if he succeeded (surfing’s exclusionary tendencies are hard to spot from inside the fence), but a non-surfing friend once, very briefly, talked about the book to me, saying how amazing she found the descriptions, and how much she enjoyed the whole story. <a href="https://www.outsideonline.com/2072661/william-finnegan-surf-writing-and-winning-pulitzer" target="_blank">Finnegan himself has discussed the care he took to make sure the book eased non-surfers in</a> so they could understand what waves are, how they are ridden, why surfers love them, and to catch a glimpse of what it’s like to surf them. Even for me, this easing in was important. My own surfing life, while pushing at my own boundaries, does not reach waves of the size and consequence that Finnegan routinely seeks out. I've never understood thrill seeking at the expense of physical safety and health. I still don't understand the motivation, but having finished 'Barbarian Days', I understand something more of what the experience might be like. The depth to which the white-water can reach, the power with which the lip can hit, the speed of the waves, the hyper-awareness of the proximity to rocks, currents, sets and the shore. Somewhat surprisingly, - surprisingly in that I'm surprised – Finnegan doesn't reflect on his interest in chasing such waves and experiences until the very last chapter of the book. His yearning to follow a life-long boy's-own-adventure goes without pause until his advancing age forces the questions. Questions, and I do not mind this, I cannot remember him answering.<br />
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The topic of waves is organised chronologically and geographically, with time and place intertwined; there is not 1960s without California and Oahu, no 1970s without Maui, the South Pacific and Australia. Clearly, this organisation made sense, personally – we are a product of the times and places we inhabit – but it also makes sense historically, in that Finnegan’s travels are in sync with developments in surfing. From the perfection of southern Californian peelers in the hot-dogging days, to Makaha’s place in the single-fin canon and onto Tavarua and Kirra and J-Bay and San Francisco as fins grew in number while boards shrank in size. The kinds of waves Finnegan sought out changed, not only with his own personal development and ageing, but also with the surfing times. These historical links to time and place shaped more than the book’s narrative structure. They shaped my own experience of the book and Finnegan’s stories. In the end, these flows could be used as a map of my own reading pleasures and frustrations, which were myriad, and which were linked to what I know of surfing history. Just as Finnegan did, I couldn’t help but tie his journeys and ideas and behaviours and decisions in with my own joys and frustrations of what I know of the surfing past, and thus, now, his place in it. Not his place in surfing as a sport, because his book suggests very little interest in contests and athlete-surfers and surf industry and media (well, beyond some dabblings with ‘Tracks’). Instead his claims are in relation to various waves that pushed surfing cultural developments and imaginations. While, perhaps, it wasn’t his intention, Finnegan’s book inserts him into surfing history by describing his own “discoveries” or near discoveries in Fiji, and his presence at the shortboard surfing forefront in Kirra, J-Bay, and Madeira. It’s a place-name-dropping extravaganza of an 'I was there before...' variety.<br />
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The other history Finnegan’s own sits alongside, is that of surfing’s colonising shadow. As Finnegan and his companion make their way across (especially) the South Pacific, they foreshadow the tourism and leisure-seeking to come. While he remains aware of it in hindsight, and suggests they were aware of it at the time, their travels are not an exchange of experiences and cultures (and sex) the way he’d hoped. Instead, they read as naïve and selfish and self-indulgent. His felt relationships to places come too easily to him, and he adopts an attitude of comfort and ease in a way that is only available to some. Perhaps this ease is a product of storytelling about the past, but by the time Finnegan took us to Fiji, I was annoyed and bored. Finnegan’s stories were all about the boys, with girls and women relegated to often-nameless support roles as someone else’s sister or girlfriend or mother. Two-dimensional women who didn’t surf and didn’t contribute to surfing. Other than his own significant romantic loves, and his mother and sister, in this book women are barely apparent and have little impact on men’s surfing lives. For me, this is a frustrating consistency with surfing history as it’s already told: women didn’t surf, girlfriends could be left behind or come along if it didn’t stop a guy from having a space on the ride. I’m certainly not suggesting that Finnegan didn’t and doesn’t love and respect the women in his life, but with those few exceptions, his book relegates women to the same role that so many other surf histories do as well. His wife Caroline, clearly provides moments of reflection for Finnegan, when she mocks his surfing lingo, and later on when he realises that she has never asked him not to take off on his crazy wave-riding pursuits. Injured, shocked and lying in a bath recovering after a particularly hairy brush with disaster while his wife takes care of him, it dawns on Finnegan that she has had to endure these things too, and that so many of his surfing stories are hers (and his previous loves’) to own as well. This realisation is strong and I’d say it impacted the inclusion of his girlfriends in the ways they appeared. But for Finnegan, surfing itself has a pronoun, and that pronoun is male.<br />
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My irritation with these two aspects of this period of the book that covers Maui, the South Pacific and Australia (and on into South Africa) – the exclusion of women from surfing, and the celebration of Western sufers' “discoveries” of waves – was the root of my boredom. I put the book aside, declared it to myself as overwritten and more-of-the-same. I spoke to some (male) friends about it, one of whom professed the same boredom with the familiar narrative, and I thought about it all a lot more.<br />
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As I dwelt on my frustration, my own self-reflection kicked in generating uncertainty in my reactions, and I questioned whether this was a fair way to approach the book. I remembered that is writing hard, and that writing books must be even harder. I remembered that my goal with reviewing is always to find the core of the book, of what the author was trying to do, separate from my own historical and cultural relationships. I remembered that books are best read in a spirit of generosity, in which the book is allowed to play out to its conclusion. I remembered that this is how I would want people to approach my own work. And so, after a couple of weeks of mild fuming, I picked it back up. I felt like a <a href="http://www.theonion.com/article/woman-takes-short-half-hour-break-from-being-femin-35026" target="_blank">satirical piece in 'The Onion'</a>, but it really is hard to ignore relentless exclusion of women from so many surf histories and memoirs, no matter how celebrated the writing is. Reading and reviews are never objective, but the goal, I suppose, is to weave a thread between the various cloths - the author's purpose, the book itself, and my own relationships to and knowledge of surfing.<br />
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It took a little time to find my way back in, but once I shifted my approach to reading it opened back up to me and I found myself enjoying it (once we got into South Africa and beyond). It was back to the best of the book, which is not the teenaged and twenty-something-year-old claims or discovery of waves and Self, but the early years of Finnegan’s childhood, and the later years once he’s moved to New York. In these sections, he seems most reconciled with his own ever-shifting relationships to surfing, which becomes a part of his life only, rather than the romanticised demon on his shoulder, driving him to his South Pacific adventure. Even I know this demonic little voice – the voice that is the worst of me as a surfer, the voice that drives and dominates until waves are all that matters. That <a href="http://makingfriendswiththeneighbours.blogspot.com.au/2009/05/i-often-see-hear-and-read-people.html" target="_blank">voice that means we’re never free</a>. This demon seems to re-emerge near the end of Finnegan’s story, but his self-reflection is such that it’s instructive more than anything else.<br />
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The book is best when the relationships drive the narrative as much as the waves do. That is an odd summation to make about a book that is subtitled, ‘A Surfing Life’, but as well as the waves, it’s the relationships that are key throughout. For Finnegan, like for me, surfing is nothing without the folk we do it with. The solo ideal so often courted in surf media does not resonate with me – I can count the number of times I’ve surfed alone and really enjoyed it. I loved how relationships were always at the heart of Finnegan’s surfing life, never more so in those favourite sections of mine – the beginning and the end. The sections that frustrated me were the sections where the hunt for waves was shared, but not really framed by his friends and surfing community. That’s not to say relationships weren’t as important, it’s just that they weren’t at the heart of his motivations and his way of making sense of what surfing is and can be. The chapter on San Francisco, so famous as a series in the New Yorker in the 1990s, was a turning point in this, and perhaps in Finnegan’s self-awareness of the impact of his surfing buddies.<br />
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This is a beautiful and compelling book written by someone who’s spent a lifetime on their craft. The writing is largely clear and simple, descriptions easy to access and imagine, a poetic tone is woven through yet hyperbole is saved for appropriate moments, while sentences, paragraphs and chapters maintain rhythm and pace that reflect their subject. I could always see how good he is at what he does, but my favour with the writing flowed with the times and places he visited, and the matching set of my own pleasures and pains. When I re-entered the book after a break, I got the sense that the writing styles shifted to reflect his development as a person. His writing about the South Pacific admitted but skirted attitudes and behaviours that clearly still cause self-consciousness despite their idyllic nature – him and Bryan both – while in describing his later years in Madeira, his words manage to confidently embrace the contradictions of his own contributions and participation in the changes there. Finnegan cannot point the finger at anyone and blame them for the way things have gone, unless he dos it into a mirror. His book is bountiful evidence of his own participation in these changes and challenges, no matter how much he wishes they weren’t.<br />
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With my own favourite books about surfing being those by Fiona Capp, Robert Drewe and Brett d’Arcy – albeit it the last two are about bodysurfing – this book did not feel as though it is a genre changer for me. Like these books, ‘Barbarian Days’ is aimed at a literary rather than surfing audience, so it opens up the experience of catching waves, of being in waves, to non-surfing readers, helping them imagine what surfing is like and why it might become so all-consuming. When we speak about surfing to surfers too much, everything gets reduced to waves in a way that ignores the myriad other things that make surfing all that it is – people, places, cultures, knowledge, time, family, romance, love. Without all of that, surfing is nothing, and it is this, more than anything else, that ‘Barbarian Days’ makes clear.<br />
<br />Rebecca Olivehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09428676558153909572noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29437172.post-23949672534970653132017-07-17T08:03:00.001+10:002017-07-17T08:40:45.601+10:00The 13th DoctorYay!<br />
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Somewhat strangely, I wasn't bothered about who played the next Dr (although, I do have a soft spot for Idris Elba), but when I watched this I felt so stoked and excited!</div>
Rebecca Olivehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09428676558153909572noreply@blogger.com0