Is Surfing Hip?

Lisa Andersen Surfs Better Than You

Killer Cute

Kelly Slater is Just Warming Up

Rebel for Hire

I Believe I Can Fly

A Monster in Half Moon Bay

Mark Foo's Last Ride

Open Throttle

Laird Means Lord

Tahitian Scream

A Webcam for Every Wave

Last Call for Print Media

Taylor Steele Likes it Rough

Searching for the Perfect Phrase

Hollywood Tries Again

Thirty is the New Twenty

Andy Irons' Poetic Fury

The Beast and Beyond

A Dance with the Past

Foam is Dead, Long Live Foam

Nature Gets a Makeover

Surf in a Box

The End of History

The Ride of Your Life

Lisa Andersen’s idea that women's surfing needed a "girly-girl" makeover was a champagne magnum smashing against the bow of Quiksilver’s new Roxy line, which then sailed off to become the flagship for the newest, richest, most sexed-up division of the surf industry. For two or three years, Roxy’s growth was merely steady. Then suddenly it exploded. Yearly revenue shot past $100 million in 1999 and reached $500 million by 2003, at which point the brand was stamped not just on surfwear, but sweaters, pajamas, luggage, bedding, jewelry, watches, sunglasses, and perfume. Other major surfwear brands—including Billabong, Rusty, and a 1998-launched outfit called Hurley—rushed their own girl’s lines into production. California surf journalist Sam George chortled over this business-model turnaround: “Suddenly, an incredibly gender-biased industry woke up and said, ‘Wait a minute. Women buy 

 more clothing and accessories than guys. What were we thinking?'”

Female-targeted surf magazines, surf shops, and surf schools were suddenly up and running. Women-only surf videos were produced, with titles like 

. The watershed cultural moment was Universal’s surf-chick-flick 

—whose $30-million price tag was roughly double the combined cost of every surf movie made in history up to that point. 

 opened nationwide in the summer of 2002 and earned its three female leads a “Night Out” column in the 

 reality show debuted in 2003, and half the cast of a competing WB program called 

 was female. That same year, PBS aired a documentary on Makaha’s Rell Sunn, a warm and graceful first-generation pro who surfed her way through cancer for nearly 15 years before dying at age 47—having become a Hawaiian surf icon nearly equal to Duke Kahanamoku.

 writer Susan Orlean observed in 1998, “surfing has appeared as the embodiment of everything cool and wild and free; this is one of those moments.” The sport had always been a “tough guy domain,” Orlean added. But “to be a girl surfer [today] is even cooler, wilder, and more modern than being a guy surfer.”

But the transformation felt off somehow. The term “girl” itself was part of the issue: it was eagerly reclaimed after 25 years of feminist blacklisting, and none of the new female-targeted surf products would be marketed for “women.” Yet it helped give female surfing an infantilized look and style that made a lot of grownups roll their eyes. Pink and baby-blue were the "surfer girl" movement's identifying colors; everything was decorated in flowers, hearts, and butterflies; and the logos were almost all drafted in looping Barbie-style cursive. Lisa Andersen’s “girly-girl” wish had come to pass with a vengeance. Judging by product design, it was as if female surfers, after decades of being made to feel unwelcome because of their gender, had turned around and were now doing the same to anyone—male or female—over the age of 13.

Then there was the Roxy Girl phenomenon—a 1990s-launched promotional campaign that gave the new women’s movement its signature look. The Roxy Girls were active, fun, beach-loving surfers. They weren’t on the pro tour. Contests, world titles, ripping and tearing; these things weren't part of the Roxy Girl world. As a company executive put it, this was about “the lifestyle thing.” Roxy ads (print, mostly) were shot in a faux-improv style and depicted a sun-drenched tropical world inhabited a smiling group of friends, all in their mid- or late-teens, who rode longboards together in plastic hula skirts and palm-frond hats, cruised the boardwalk on skateboards, and made pancake breakfasts in their bikinis. Of course, there was also a lot of hip-cocked nymphet flesh and lecherous below-the-waist close-ups. It was a weird sort of empowerment. Roxy higher-ups (almost all men) claimed their models were just having a great time in the sun; that they were self-confident, independent young women; that the whole campaign was nothing more than an idealized version of what was happening on beaches everywhere. There was some truth to that. It was also true that few companies this side of Calvin Klein worked harder than Roxy to sexualize the underage female. Sure, old-school Navratilova-style feminism could be a bit astringent. But it was honest and direct and encompassing. Whatever feminist achievement the Roxy Girl phenomenon represented was narrow at best. It was empowerment by way of 

, strained through a hundred marketing meetings, and topped with a plastic lei.

While Roxy and a dozen or more imitators created a vast surf-themed fashion nebula during the late 1990s and early 2000s—doomed to collapse, in the way of all fashion trends—another, quieter development was set in motion. Females were actually surfing in numbers never seen before. A lot of teens and preteens were initially drawn in by the voguish surf-chick look of it all. But they discovered soon enough that learning to ride waves was nonglamorous in the way of anything requiring total mental and physical focus. It took work. Just advancing out of the rank beginner stage was a one- or two-year project, and every grace moment along the way was paid for with hours of struggle. You almost always felt great afterward—but you looked damp and bedraggled. For those who kept at it, surfing had nothing to do with cute outfits and accessories.

Females sparked a beginner’s explosion in the late 1990s that extended well beyond Roxy-wearing middle schoolers to include dawn-patrolling housewives, urban professionals, and vacationers in every warm-water port of call from Mazatlan to Phuket. In 2002, Australian surf journalist Nick Carroll counted more than 1,000 surf schools worldwide, most of them less than five years old. The Manly Beach Surf School, all by itself, provided 25,000 pupil-lessons that year. In 2002, there were an estimated 5 million surfers worldwide. By 2010, some estimates went as high as 20 million (although, as 

 magazine pointed out, the surf industry was “confused and unprofessional” when it came to demographics, and nobody’s figures were “detailed or accurate”). Because almost everybody took lessons now, or enrolled in a surf camp, wave-riding came into one’s life in a friendly, supportive, sociable manner. Crowds at popular beginner’s spots were beehive-thick, yet everybody smiled and talked and in general behaved nothing like surfers. Learning how to ride waves was no longer an extended and often lonely trial-by-fire journey. Beginners, of course, hardened as they advanced—but not like they had in previous decades.

As for women, it was still hard to isolate the 

 part of the women’s surfing movement from the fashion craze. The women’s surf magazines didn’t bother; 

 was the opposite. Beginning in the late 1990s, however, the standard industry line was that females accounted for somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of the surfing population—a six-fold increase, give or take, from a decade earlier.

Oddly, this new rush of women surfers took place with little or no comment from the men. This was more a sign of changes in the culture at large, especially in America, than in surfing in particular. After 20 years’ worth of Title IX funding (which mandated that public school programs fund women’s and men's sports equally), and a rousing 1996 Olympic gold medal win for the US women’s soccer team—plus a few million games of mixed-doubles beach volleyball—by the late 1990s it didn’t seem especially novel to be sitting in a gender-integrated lineup.

But it was more than that. With a few women scattered into the crowd—and not women in the abstract, but neighbors, classmates, girlfriends, wives, and mothers—the sport was a little better behaved. Lineup violations still boiled over to the yelling stage, but not quite as often. There was a bit less dick-talk. None of this felt imposed or restrictive. Just the opposite, in fact. It was a relief. “It’s generally a nicer experience with girls in the water,” Australian surf journalist Nick Carroll wrote. “Most of us dudes aren’t nearly as tough as we pretend to be in a men’s-only environment. The girls gave us permission to act a bit more like gentlemen.”

Whatever feminist achievement the Roxy Girl phenomenon represented was narrow at best. It was empowerment by way of 

Chapter: 8

The Ride of Your Life

Killer Cute

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