Jen See takes on the story everyone's talking
about!
This morning I rode my Schwinn to the coffee
shop with The New York Times Magazine clutched under my arm. Almost
immediately it began to rain, so there I was carrying a paper
magazine in the rain. This was not good planning. There is, it
seems, something to be said for carrying a 10 thousand word feature
in a glowing metal and glass box tucked safely into your
pocket.
I arrived to a packed scene and sardined my way to the counter
to order. After scavenging a chair, I tucked under the awning with
my macchiato to read this week’s cover story, Daniel Duane’s
delicious feature on women’s
big wave surfing.
They had me at the subhead, which calls big-wave surfing “one of
the most dangerous, rapturous sports on Earth.” I’m not sure this
is true, never having experienced it myself, but it would have
lured me straight into reading the story — even if I hadn’t already
heard talk of some pure fire interview quotes from the women
involved.
At length and in full-dress New York Times Magazine feature
style, Duane traces the efforts of women such as Bianca Valenti and
Keala Kennelly to gain admittance to the big wave boys club. This
is a story that’s been begging to be told. It has all the best
ingredients: colorful characters, nature at its most wild and
unpredictable, a near-constant risk of death, and maybe best of
all, men behaving badly.
The story’s sympathies are clear. The women come off as
uniformly badass and determined. Valenti describes riding a wave at
Jaws as feeling as one of “peacefulness” as though “this is where I
was meant to be.” If you’ve wondered what compels surfers to throw
themselves down mountains of water, Duane does as good work as
anyone has at illuminating the seductive draw of big waves to those
who chase them.
The juice of the story is the resistance that women have
encountered in gaining access to big wave lineups, contests, and
prize money. Here, the surf industry and the assorted contest
organizers, from Jeff Clark at Mavericks to the WSL, do not come
off especially well. The sexism appears to run deeply and Duane
does not pull his punches. Men appear largely dismissive of women’s
abilities and view them as rivals for prize money at best and as
dangers in the lineup at worst.
Kennelly’s outspoken comments, in particular, had me cackling
out loud. She describes the surf industry as she found it in the
early 2000’s, when she was surfing on the CT, as teeming with
“creepy team managers.” There’s more, and the story is worth
reading for Kennelly’s unflinching excoriation of the surf industry
as she experienced it. Duane shows the price she paid for the
industry’s close-mindedness at the time as sponsors dropped her and
she struggled to find support.
The WSL and their much-ballyhooed equal prize money initiative
also fall short of the mark in this account. Some of this ground is
familiar as Duane retraces the reporting of the San Jose Mercury
News on Goldschmidt’s description of the women’s “poor performance”
and abuse of #metoo. When placed in the context of the longer
story, the WSL looks a lot more like an continuation of surfing’s
old order than the fabulously shiny, new thing they like to portray
themselves as.
Duane’s given us an inspiring story of guts and glory, the kind
of thing that’s perfect for a rainy Sunday morning. Here’s a group
of women, who didn’t fit within the narrow boundaries that the surf
industry, or the wider culture for that matter, wanted to draw for
them. So they set out to obliterate those boundaries. Duane,
rightly I think, gives Kennelly the kicker. I’m not going to spoil
it, except to say that it’s worth reading all the way to the
end.
Read Duane’s story
here.
