Skate #2: Sisters Doing It For Themselves
I took up skateboarding because my older brother did. My brother was one of those typical early 2000s teenage skaters: peroxide hair, zero hoody and baggy jeans. At the time, I thought this was extremely cool, and so I took up skateboarding, hoping to be more like him and his skater friends. As I got older, it was apparent that it was impossible for me to achieve this goal (and not just because I wasn’t a very good skater). Skateboarding was a man’s world. At the skateparks, the “girls’ role” was to sit, look pretty and be a hanger on while the boys skated. This seemed to be true all the way up the skateboarding hierarchy; even on Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater on PlayStation 2, my favourite game, Elissa Steamer was the only woman that ever featured. Elissa is an amazing role model, and we’ll come back to her later, but even on the game, it felt like a token. This has been a powerful and pervasive rhetoric in the skateboarding world, in fact, Nyjah Huston (the skateboarding powerhouse) infamously commented in 2016: “Some girls can skate but I personally believe that skateboarding is not for girls at all. Not one bit.”
I continued to follow the skateboarding world, although dipping in and out of active participation, and the recent rise of the female skaters has been spectacular to watch. Over the last few years, female skaters have started to made themselves known on the scene, especially in the competition circuit, even Nyjah has developed a close public friendship with his Nike SB teammate, Leticia Bufoni. But the fascinating part of the development of female skateboarding is the prevalence of the very young girls, mostly of Japanese or Brazilian descent, who are dominating the scene. The relative youth of the women’s skating circuit has allowed for a new kind of competition to emerge; one that celebrates femininity whilst simultaneously bucking norms. Take, for example, Rayssa Leal, who rose to fame after going viral doing a gnarly kickflip in a princess dress (aged 7). Rayssa is now, at 11-years-old, regularly gaining medals at world skate competitions, and has become a force to be reckoned with.
In the less mainstream aspects of skating too, there has been a resurgence of female skaters. The film Skate Kitchen explores the lives of an all-female skate crew in New York City, based on the lives of the actors themselves. Skate Kitchen describes the same story I’ve described above of girls being rejected by the all-male skate scene), albeit with a much cooler outcome, and there are countless versions of this story (even Bufoni’s own background has aspects of this). But these stories are being rewritten, as can be seen in Skate Kitchen or in the TV show, Betty. And this is where skateboarding as a subculture really becomes important. Skateboarding has always been a counterculture (although, historically a sexist one that excludes women), one based on rejecting “jock culture”, one that has sought to redefine machismo and typical expressions of masculinity. This same ethic seems to be applying to some of the women in the scene, although slowly. With the women on the scene, there seems to be more of a widespread acceptance of LGBT+ rights in the scene, and I think we owe a lot to Elissa Steamer for this (though skateboarding has historically not been on the right side of this, see here).
Skateboarding has a long way to go to improve its image, or even to be considered progressive, but its situation as a prominent counterculture offers a significant space for a potential rejection of these historical injustices and to start a new normal. This comes at the same time as a massive shift in skateboarding towards the mainstream, largely because of skateboarding becoming the newest sport at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. Skateboarding then, has the potential to develop a mainstream space, with a large audience, whilst maintaining the values of a counterculture, and allowing the young, female and queer skaters to lead the charge.
