One of big-wave surfing’s most accomplished surfers, Paige Alms, undeniably charged at Jaws just a week and a half ago, but are there other takeaways from the women’s event at Peahi? Photo: WSL/Kelly Cestari
Women are winning the battle to achieve parity in big wave surfing. The WSL just ran the first ever female-only Big Wave event at Pe’ahi, and recently a group of notable female surfers called “Committee for Equity in Women’s Surfing” pressured the California Coastal Commission, forcing the Titans of Mavericks organizers to allow women to compete. I think this is great. Despite what American politics might suggest, I think that the majority of us in the free world are still pulling for equality. But despite the headlines imbuing the historical and cultural significance of allowing women to take part in big wave competitions, I’m not actually sure it represents progress for women’s surfing.
There’s a reason that the women’s CT no longer includes Teahupoo. It’s because many top female surfers refused to paddle out when it was big. Of course, this doesn’t apply to all women. Paige Alms looked as good as anyone in the Pe’ahi line-up, and Keala Kennelly certainly deserved her award last year for her monster Teahupoo pit. But these women are the freak-ish exceptions to the rule, and I mean that in the same regard and with the same respect that I might refer to Kelly Slater as a freak. A cut above.
Of the three women who took part in what was supposed to be a six-person final at Pe’ahi, only Alms looked comfortable. She won by a mile with a score of 21.66, more than doubling the score of Justine Dupont in 2nd place. In third place, Felicity Palmateer barely scraped together a two-wave total of 1.63 for attempting to paddle in, if not actually catching any waves.
It is easy to spin the Pe’ahi event as a success simply because it was the first of its kind, and it will doubtless be remembered as such, but as a spectacle, I believe it was an abject failure. The headlines would have you believe it was an undeniable breakthrough. The facts would suggest differently.
Just four of the twelve women can actually claim to have caught waves, and two of them were taken to the hospital. Was this inspirational? Or did it meekly highlight the limitations of competing in a sport in which basic physiology is nearly impossible to ignore?
Why is it that the success of women in surfing must be measured against the standards of men? It’s not okay for the biggest compliment ever leveled at Tyler Wright or Carissa Moore to be, as Red Bull eloquently put it, that they “surf like a man.” Why can’t women’s surfing be its own thing? Women’s surfing is not the same as men’s surfing, nor will it ever be. And there is nothing wrong with admitting that.
Call me old fashioned, but I still believe there are fundamental differences between women and men. Is it okay to point that out anymore? There are physical limitations to paddling into giant waves. That’s a fact. Therefore, in order to compete on the same playing field as men, women need to be as physically strong as men. This, for the most part, is a biological impossibility, one that Keala Kennelly noted in a piece she wrote on The Inertia claiming that women should compete separately from men in big waves. Men have greater muscle mass than women, and the advantage of testosterone as well as denser bones, tendons and ligaments.
When I look at the list of invitees for the Pe’ahi Women’s Challenge I don’t see women achieving equality; I see women striving for masculinity, because it is the only way they might be accepted by a culture ingrained with testosterone. And this is the paradox of parity: how can things be equal if one side is forced to change to be more like the other?
In many other high profile sports, the physical differences between men and women are wholly and unabashedly taken into account. In tennis, women’s competitions take place over 3 sets rather than 5 for men. In golf, the women’s tees are a little closer to the green, giving them shorter holes than men. Competitive weightlifting wouldn’t be much of a spectacle if women were expected to lift the same weights as men. Is engineering sport so that it’s accessible to a greater range of people not more of a victory for liberty?
Why do we expect successful women to be more like men? Why is it not okay to say women are better at some things than men? Why is it not okay to admit that there might be physical limitations that distinguish what men and women are capable of achieving? Sometimes, I feel like the end game is just one, big, asexual and homogeneous race of people, and that’s a bit depressing.
Effectively forcing women to become more like men in order to achieve equality in sport cannot be the answer. It might be hard to wrap your head around, but in surfing the discrimination might not exist in banning women from competing with the men; but rather in encouraging them to compete with men.
