Hello again, skate bros. I imagine you’ve probably been enjoying my time away from this column with some Lowcard-koozie-sheathed Miller High Lifes by the bowl at your local skatepark, and while I hate to cut that short, we’ve got another important conversation to have. To review: You should absolutely still stop calling everything and everyone gay, headphones at crowded skateparks are still a faux pas, and Nick Tershay’s teal Lambo should still be liquidated to pay for more affordable housing in LA. But I’ve noticed a new, more troubling trend: Men supporting women skateboarders by—let me check my notes here—talking shit about women skateboarders!?

Words by Tobias Coughlin-Bogue

Yes, you read that right. I have had the difference between “real” girl skaters and “those fake ass Instagram models” explained to me far too often recently. The theory goes like this: Women who are very conventionally attractive but not very good at skateboarding have more followers on social media, and thus more prominence in our increasingly online subculture, than women who just put their heads down and skate hard, and this is an injustice somehow. Victoria Taylor (aka @Skatemosss) vs Fabiana Delfino, basically.

Indeed, in Delfino’s recent Jenkem interview, the intro just up and said the quiet part out loud:

“Although women’s skateboarding is growing rapidly and impressively, it’s still rare to find women who go all in on street skating. Many prefer skateparks and bowls, or find their niche as crossover fashion influencers, or focus on training for big contests.” [Emphasis mine.]

They didn’t quite accuse anyone of using skateboarding to gain Insta clout, but “crossover fashion influencers” still pretty effectively conveys the resentment I’ve discovered among a surprising number of men towards conventionally attractive women who skate.

Taylor summed it up neatly on her recent Nine Club appearance: “They can hardflip a 12-stair and I can’t, and they deserve to be here over me. Those are the DMs that I get. I get comments saying that I’m a poser.” They being all the dudes who covet her Grizzly Grip collabo and Nine Club spot, which is misguided enough to begin with!

Taylor is, to be perfectly fair, not pushing the limits of what’s physically possible on a board. And she is definitely a fashionista, as she literally goes to school for it. But let’s be clear: she can ollie, she can kickflip, and she can take a slam, which is more than enough to make her a real skater. Shit, she can do fakie heelflips, arguably the hardest flatground trick. Regardless, I’m just going to go ahead and define a real skater as anyone who does it consistently and has a good time doing it, end of discussion.

Now, is it a travesty that many women toil in obscurity, doing really gnarly tricks for not as large of an audience? Yes. But is it the fault of their hotter compatriots, who do really basic tricks for massive audience? Hellllll fucking no, my dudes. It is the fault of the many horny men who follow them. Or rather, a little thing called the male gaze, which organizes society in terms of the desires of heterosexual men.

The concept was first introduced by film critic and scholar Laura Mulvey, as an explanation of how women are portrayed in movies, which actually makes it apply very easily to online skate clips. “It takes as its starting point the way film reflects, reveals and even plays on the straight, socially established interpretation of sexual difference, which controls images, erotic ways of looking and spectacle.” she wrote in her now famous article for the journal Screen, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”

To offer a hasty summary of her piece, she’s basically arguing that, because we live in a society run by men, movies are made as if a man is always watching. Women are featured in film primarily as idealized male fantasies, not true-to-life characters. Women who have success in film, therefore, are conventionally beautiful by male standards. To apply that to the world outside of film, because men have run the Western world for so long, everything is organized in accordance to their beauty standards, and because this is considered “normal,” women internalize these standards and adopt them as their own. Women who adapt to this constant objectification find more success in society, though this success is largely illusory, as it is contingent on their beauty. This is changing rapidly, of course—Mulvey wrote that shit in 1975—but American culture is still very much organized around straight male horniness, and this definitely includes skate culture.

(Update: I’ve been informed that, somewhat ironically, the model from this video works at Thrasher and fucking rips.)

Point is, when you say that someone like Victoria Taylor is only popular because she’s hot, you’re not necessarily wrong, but you’re wrong to be mad at her. The male gaze might benefit her a little, but it does not benefit women on the aggregate. As this Psychology Today article by Dr. Tara Well explains:

“Through media representations and direct experience, both women and girls learn their appearance is social currency and begin to take the male gazer’s perspective (Fredrickson and Roberts, 1997). The process of habitual body monitoring, wherein women monitor their bodies as they believe outside observers do is called self-objectification. Over time, as women place more attention on their appearance, they began to internalize this observer view of their bodies as a primary way to think about themselves and end up placing greater value on how they look than how they feel.”

That article cites a whole host of studies about how this kind of self-objectification predicts a lot of negative outcomes for women who are subjected to it, but it also has some good news. While the mirror can be an amplifier for feelings of body shame, it can also be a way of reclaiming one’s body image. A 2016 study by Dr. Well found that, by performing “mirror meditation,” which involves simply staring at oneself in the mirror with the simple goal of contemplating one’s appearance, women reported “greater comfort with their appearance (e.g., more comfortable not wearing makeup) and more focused attention on their internal feelings than their external appearance after doing the practice regularly.”

What I’m getting at here is that, while men who are attracted to women may greatly appreciate all the women posting kickflips in a cute fit, those posts might not even be intended for them. A common feature of Instagram comments is women telling other women how gorgeous they are, which is a way of banding together against the male gaze if I’ve ever heard of it. And while Instagram may be a bit of a funhouse mirror, it’s still a mirror. Women who post their clips may be doing so simply because they like their clips, and the likes are just a bonus.

Fakie tre in San Diego tehehehe A post shared by 𝒱𝔦𝔠𝔱𝔬𝔯𝔦𝔞 𝔗𝔞𝔶𝔩𝔬𝔯 (@skatemosss) on Apr 5, 2019 at 10:52am PDT

As Taylor herself put it, “I’m not fucking posting this video for you. I’m doing it because I landed a new clip, and I’m wearing what is in my closet.” And, as evidence that she is to some extent motivated by reclaiming and resisting the male gaze, she added that, “I’m a girl—I’m allowed to—I can dress myself up. I want to look good, I want to feel good. ‘Cause when you feel good and you look good, you skate good.” A-fucking-men, which is why I never skate in basketball shorts. But I digress.

There’s also the fact that, as my dear friend and Skate Like a Girl executive director Kristin Ebeling pointed out to me, lots of girls like seeing Taylor do a backside flip on a mellow bank because it’s relatable. Plenty of women are just getting into skateboarding now, as men have finally decided to open the door a crack and let them in, so they’re not actually interested in hardflips down 12-stairs.

Beyond that, it’s also not that rare to find women who “go all in on street skating,” if you are indeed a connoisseur of women’s skateboarding. Many of them have plenty of followers, even! To wit:

3 piece. 📱 @_drewflores A post shared by samarriabrevard (@samarriabrevard) on Jan 17, 2019 at 8:47am PST

So while men could, as ever, do better here, this is not to say the men who are bothered by Taylor’s fame are bad. Their hearts are very much in the right place, a place of wanting to live in a society that celebrates women for their talents and contributions, not how badly men want to sleep with them. Our solidarity-seeking critics are grasping at the real issue here, which is that Instagram skate babes are popular because men, despite their protestations, care more about butts than backside smiths, but not quite getting ahold of it.

I would urge all the almost allies out there to remember that age old saying: Don’t hate the player, hate the game. The game being, just to make it crystal clear, the patriarchy.

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