The surf industry has not exactly been cutting edge in its portrayal of women surfers. Most surf lifestyle ads show tanned bodies wearing very little and surfing even less. In that regard, Roxy wasn”t exactly breaking from the norm with its three-minute homage to Stephanie Gilmore”s backside this summer in its “#WhoAmIJustGuess” teaser ad.

Roxy”s title of the video, “Roxy Pro Biarritz 2013 Official Teaser,” lacked a critical feature to professional sports ads: sports. Of any kind.

Instead, three minutes of Gilmore”s butt were set to an R&B track, including a pre-surf sexy shower cameo (how many surfers shower before jumping in the ocean?).

To Roxy”s apparent surprise, the ad drew a reception colder than a rainy day in Biarritz, a town in southwestern France.

The company decided to acknowledge the heat with a statement on The Roxy Blog earlier this month.

“We are disappointed by recent mischaracterizations of the Roxy brand and wanted to take this opportunity to share with our fans the true vision and voice of Roxy. … Roxy believes in being naturally beautiful, daring and confident. We hope those qualities are conveyed in everything we do.”

While the tribute to Gilmore”s butt might promote being “naturally beautiful, daring and confident” to, say, a blonde girl whose goal in life is to be sexy, it does little to impress on the public how hard these athletes work or give any sense of what they actually achieve. That”s where, for instance, showing her surfing might have been relevant.

The Roxy Blog”s comments section blares at a loud volume the reaction from women, most of whom are surfers. One was local surfer Sally Smith-Weymouth.

“Basically they just whitewashed it. They said, ”We”re Roxy and we”re great,” taking no responsibility for any of the criticisms or addressing the issues people were criticizing them for,” said Smith-Weymouth, owner of Paradise Surf Shop, the first and only women”s surf shop in Santa Cruz.

In response to the video, world longboarding champion Cori Schumacher created and delivered a petition to Roxy that got more than 20,000 signatures requesting the company revise its marketing policy. She included a packet rich with research indicating that while the “sex sells” motto works in selling bikinis to teens and magazines to men, it fails and even hinders Roxy”s mission to promote the sport.

Findings by sports media expert Janet Fink were among those included in the packet that Schumacher hand-delivered to Roxy.

“Studies have shown that focusing on an athlete”s attractiveness or sex appeal can actually have deleterious effects for the athlete in the eyes of the consumer,” Fink wrote in a 2010 study.

Fink found that, while it boosted men”s enjoyment of the pictures, the sexier the images are, the less seriously anyone took the athletes.

Roxy representatives did not return a phone call asking for comment on the meeting with Schumacher or give any response to the packet.

While the video itself garnered nearly 2 million views, the argument made by Schumacher”s “Less Sex More Surf” petition is that viewers of a faceless surfer”s butt don”t translate into professional surfing fans, a stated goal of Roxy”s. So why is Roxy pretending to promote the sport, if all it is promoting is bikini sales?

Speaking with Schumacher last year before any of this unfolded, I knew she had a strong message for the surf industry: Broaden your perspective of women”s surfing.

“In the ”90s, Roxy emerged, focused on women as a niche market, and women”s surfing flourished,” Schumacher said in an interview about sponsorships. “But what the brands ended up doing is focusing on the lifestyle of it.”

The lifestyle focus opened up opportunities for skilled male surfers and beach babe girls, but it shut down opportunities for a lot of athletic women, according to Schumacher.

“The parallel of the men”s surf trip is bikini-clad chicks,” Schumacher said, adding that there is no place, right now, for a woman to be a well-paid lifestyle surfer, a la Dane Reynolds. “It”s aesthetics over performance.”

That marketing choice appeals to landlocked teens who identify with the ads more than female surfers, Smith-Weymouth said, while local companies like Girls4Sport and Carver Design cater to actual surfers.

“Companies like Roxy and the other top brands are marketing towards young, white, Midwestern girls. They”re not marketing towards women who surf,” Smith-Weymouth said.

So, if the image they are portraying isn”t of surfers for surfers, then who are we, actually?

It turns out we are a lot of different types of women, and our diversity, along with the number of surfers in general, is growing exponentially. Marketing snafus like Roxy”s are what motivates organizations like Bay Area organization Brown Girl Surf to broaden what a surfer girl is in the public eye locally and globally.

“Surf imagery abroad is of women that don”t look like the girls they are selling to,” said BGS founder Farhana Huq, adding that the iconic blonde surfer can be seen in surfwear ads in India, whereas Indian surfers cannot. Huq, who is of South Asian descent, founded the BGS partly to recognize the accomplishments and expand the opportunities for girls of diverse backgrounds who surf in South Asia and in the Bay Area. However, she also created it to address the disparity between the monotone media images of women surfers and the diversified reality she has witnessed evolve over the last 10 years while surfing locally and globally. She wants other people to see that change too.

“Diverse women surfing is a powerful image, it means a lot of different things: risk-taking, facing the unknown,” Huq said . “It may inspire something in someone.”

For better or worse, the fact is surfing is popular, and a lot of the new surfers — especially in the Bay Area and even Santa Cruz — no longer look like what Huq calls “the archetypal blonde, blue-eyed industry icon.”

“It”s a dynamic sport that”s changing,” said Camille Ramani, an Indian-American surfer and an operations consultant and volunteer to Brown Girl Surf. “We see that in the water but not the media. BGS aims to create awareness of what”s actually in the water.”

In Santa Cruz, it”s more women, which in turn has drawn more women, like surf instructor and shaper Ashley Lloyd Thompson.

“What impressed me before moving here was I knew there was a lot of women surfers, and that was very apparent. I loved that about Santa Cruz,” said Thompson, who relocated from Ventura County eight years ago.

Like Huq, Ramani has found in her 10 years of surfing that, while the diversity in the water has increased over time, the media imagery that should reflect that change has stagnated.

As an ironic twist, it wasn”t too long ago that the door to surfing was open for only hardcore women, according to former pro Kim Mayer, who started surfing Pleasure Point as a child in the late ”80s.

“Before, it was just gnarly chicks that surfed,” Mayer said. “It”s a new era of claiming back femininity.”

That”s good news for a lot of women, but it seems the pendulum swung too far, and the Roxy video might just be the final straw. Besides, since when is a woman ripping on a wave not super hot?

Respect earned is respect deserved. So, with pro women earning it, let”s hope Roxy, and the industry as a whole, remembers this basic tenet of surfing.

Brooke Wright”s surf column appears on the last Sunday of every month. Contact her at sports@santacruzsentinel.com.