"This is what pushing your limits looks like – it isn’t always pretty."

Four years ago, the Kauai surfer Keala Kennelly, who grew up slinging waves alongside the Irons bros at Pine Trees, won the big-wave world championship, which was decided after one event – the Women’s Jaws Challenge.

Kennelly won the event and the title despite not making a takeoff on her two waves, which the historian Matt Warshaw subsequently described as “an embarrassment. Not for Keala, but the WSL”

Although not surfing’s first openly lesbian world champ, that honour belongs to three-time longboard winner Cori Schumacher, the higher profile of Kennelly, who is a DJ and part-time movie and TV star, gave her the platform to talk of her myriad struggles. 

“I had just all this internalized homophobia and self-hatred for being gay,” Kennelly told People mag. “I was living this double life because on tour, I was pretending to be straight. I’m just a really honest person, I’m a really genuine, authentic person. So, to feel like I was living this lie was just crushing my soul and after so many years of that, it was just, “I can’t do this anymore, this is actually going to kill me if I can’t live my truth.” It got to a point where I didn’t care what the cost was, I couldn’t live like this.”

Kennelly said that it was “not okay to be a lesbian” and that if you did prefer shaved babylike snatches to rock-and-cock Tom Selleck lookalikes it was “career suicide.”

“So,” said Kennelly, “when I got on the tour, I was so freaking nervous because I inherently knew I was gay. So, I was absolutely terrified and I spent the majority of my time on the pro circuit in the closet and just completely terrified to come out — completely terrified to get outed, that I was going to lose my sponsors.”

In 2005, Kennelly, aged twenty-seven, quit the world tour.

“I came out because I couldn’t handle mentally and emotionally what that was like. Then I had a few sponsors drop me and so, that was just more confirmation that it wasn’t okay. I left the tour because, emotionally and mentally, I just couldn’t handle it.”

Incredibly, in the forty-six years since the men’s tour has been around, not one active male pro has admitted to being a barebacking queen.

(Yeah, there’s heavy-metal bear Matt Branson, but for his time on tour he was played as super straight, eating out chicks in the Bells Beach carpark etc, as reported by Paul Sargeant.”

Now, Kennelly, who is forty-four, has hinted she’ll quit the big-wave pro surfing game after suffering one of the worst wipeouts of The Eddie Invitational.

“My entire surfing career has been about pushing the limits in women’s surfing. This is what pushing your limits looks like, it isn’t always pretty but the ones that I’ve had in my career where I went #fullsend and was successful were incredible. This might be my last #send. My body can’t take this shit anymore…I hope you enjoyed the show.”

Heat of the year!

A few days back all hell broke loose when a pretty girl claimed she was monstered by a jacked gym-stud while filming a few cutsie workout routines at her local health club.

Jessica Fernandez, who identifies as Colombian and Nicaraguan and lives in Southern California, has a real healthy 56k followers on Twitch and 10k YouTube subscribers.

A video where she says a lifter stared at her “like a piece of meat” was viewed three million times.

“This guy kept making me extremely uncomfortable at the gym,” she wrote. “This is why I’ll end up crying on stream. I feel so grossed out at times with the amount of sexualisation I experience. Hopefully this spreads awareness for girls who experience this type of treatment at the gym.”

Given the buildup, the video was a real non-event. Lifter looks over a few times and, a little later, offers to help put the weights back on the bar.

Still, Fernandez said the guy “triggered my flight or fight and response to previous traumas… I was completely fine until he followed me to my squat rack in the corner of the gym…I can see how this makes me look like I have an inflated ego but I am an attractive girl in a beauty standard sense and I get extremely sexually harassed online and it makes trusting random strangers that approach me trigger my trauma which is why I respond this way.”

While fans were quick to back her up (“I don’t understand how hard it is to mind your business, people aren’t at the gym to get stared at or get hit on makes no sense”) majority opinion swung towards the demonised man.

“Girls like this go to the gym just to chase clout and be toxic. This man did nothing wrong. And she’s hiding comments calling her out. REALLY weak for someone who hits the gym,” wrote another gal.

“I watched the whole video. The guy glances over a few times, probably wondering why she’s recording herself,” wrote right-wing Daily Wire host Matt Walsh. “Then he comes over and offers to help her rack the weights. She declines, he says, ‘Oh OK’, and walks away. The end. She’s the problem here, not him.”

Women are harassed in gyms and it needs to stop, but you are not one of them. An act of kindness or a glance does not make you a victim. pic.twitter.com/34g9265KXb

— Joey Swoll (@TheJoeySwoll) January 21, 2023

Fernandez, realising the implications of publicly throwing a man under a social media bus, eventually, and with haunted eye penance, apologised.

“I will be coming out with a response to this whole gym situation in a few days. I’m sorry,” wrote Fernandez.

Whereupon Kelly Slater, a man whose Twitter profile warns “I make fun of things, point out absurdities, and tackle serious subjects like the cutback”, delivered the stunning coup de grâce, that famously cool, logical voice wrapped around a heady sense of masculine superiority.

“In a few days? You checking with your lawyers and publicist? Just apologize to the guy in person.”

Touché etc.