Toxic Masculinity, Slurs, and Stares: What it’s Like to be a Woman in Skate Culture
By Lucy Wood
I hate sports, but I love film: I am lazy, uncoordinated, and would rather watch people participate. In Jonah Hill’s Mid90s, a piece of cinematic athleticism that studies a group of young, male Californian skateboarders in 1995 suburban America, this love and hate of mine collide. The aesthetic cinematography and eclectic soundtrack add to the film’s success, but what truly entranced me was the way it portrayed skateboarding: the culture, the community, the freedom.
My first introduction to skateboarding was at a very young age when my brother blessed me with a turn on his Batman skateboard. I grew up in a male-dominated neighbourhood, and the fact that I could just about wobble on the board without falling off earned me an addictive amount of respect. Despite being younger, smaller, and the only girl in my group, having even a shred of talent made me acceptable, even if being a girl did not. Eventually, my brother stopped skateboarding. The boys grew up, and I made friends with girls. I did not think about skateboarding for the best part of a decade.
Flash forward ten years: I am in the middle of a global pandemic, and the only movement I have all day is walking to the kitchen and back again. When lockdown was lifting, and exercise was the only option of spending time outside, I sought out the most tolerable form. I distinctly remember messaging my brother at 2 am with pictures of potential boards to see if his ancient skater knowledge would be of any use. Before I knew it, the board was ordered, and I was already envisioning my A24 style coming-of-age montage.
My best friend and I had decided to tackle the venture together, mainly because we did not want to risk falling in public alone. It wasn’t until a few weeks into my new hobby that I started to notice that something wasn’t right. Every night, I would walk with my board to meet my friend. I did feel a bit like a poser carrying the board on the journey, but I’d become all too familiar with the quality of pavements in certain areas, and I knew that my route was the equivalent to the moon’s surface. I would always pass these two little boys playing in their garden. They would stare at me as if they’d never seen a girl with a skateboard before. Knowing my town, they probably hadn’t. One night, the braver of the two plucked up the courage to ask me why I always carried my board. “Not good enough yet”, I replied.
On the next occasion, my friend and I were walking with our boards when we saw a middle-aged man with his family. “You do know you’re supposed to ride them and not carry them?” he smirked, probably thinking he had just proved some revolutionary point. You could feel the superiority complex radiating off his yuppy sports coat. Why had this man on his seemingly idyllic walk, with his seemingly perfect family, felt the need to stop two random young girls to criticise them? This may sound superficial and harmless, but it became an everyday occurrence.
With the world still shut down, I was skating all the time. In my first week, I’d been harassed by twenty-five people – a conservative estimate – all males. Men would tell me that I was skating wrong or how utterly preposterous it was that I even owned a board. This would be understandable if I lived in a town of X-games gold medallists, and I was trying to skateboard using my elbows. But shockingly, I don’t. Just weeks before, I had seen girls with skateboards while out with my parents, and my own dad had exclaimed, “girl skaters!”. It made no sense to me. If you saw a girl on a bike, you wouldn’t feel the need to comment on the fact that she’s female. Why is it different with skateboards?
Don’t get me wrong, most of the comments from strangers were harmless. I am not a sensitive person. A little boy shouting “Bart Simpson!” at me is not going to evoke a deep panic. However, others might not be so thick-skinned. Once, a friend and I were skating on our regular hill when a group of maybe ten boys raced by screaming female-specific homophobic slurs at us. Neither my friend nor I are LGBTQ, but what if we were? I am straight, white, cisgender, and able-bodied; it’s painful to imagine what these boys would have said to someone who does not fall into these privileged categories. Despite myself, I do also feel pity for those boys. They are a product of their environment. Misogyny is a taught behaviour; it is not inherent for men to hate women.
Nothing could encapsulate my understanding of how misogynistic skateboarding truly was until I actually visited a skatepark. I had adapted to only skating at the park at night when it was empty. My friend and I would skate in a car park behind a swimming pool close to but away from the park during the day. There was some degree of embarrassment about my lack of skill that prevented me from going, but just as we condition little girls to not get in the way, I believed it was good manners to leave the park for ‘proper’ skaters. A boy my age had passed my friend and me one day, letting us know that there was a skatepark within eyeshot of the carpark. He said the same thing when he saw us the next day. It occurred to me that this was an invitation to go to the skatepark with him. I warned him that we were painfully unskilled, but he didn’t seem to mind.
All of his friends were in their mid-twenties, something he’d failed to mention in the small talk we made on the way over. Before I’d even ‘dropped in’ to the bowls, I was hit by verbal harassment. I am a teenage girl; I’m no stranger to whistles from pathetic older men. But something about their comments seemed so despicable. The explicitness, the fact that they thought that I was younger than I actually was but still went ahead with it. For the first time, the verbal abuse wasn’t because I was a girl skater. It was because I was a skater and a girl. Less than five minutes later, my friend felt so uncomfortable that we had to leave. I thanked the boy for inviting me and told him in my final attempt at some John Hughes style dialogue that I would “catch him later”. I never did, but he is still the nicest male skater I’ve met to this day. In truth, though, the bar is not that high.
As a regular attendee of indie music concerts before the pandemic, I’m not unfamiliar with modern skate culture. It infiltrates a number of different groups and subcultures. It is also inexplicably elitist. As a skater who likes indie music, you must despise goth skaters (yes, there actually is such a thing as goth skaters). Because they listen to The Sisters of Mercy and I favour Current Joys, I am expected to sneer if I come across them. I have learnt that a large number of male skaters do not only take issue with female skaters but with anyone even remotely different to themselves. Skaters that are worse than them, skaters that are better. If you dress like them, you are a ‘poser’; you are also a ‘poser’ if you do not. There is no winning. It’s a blood sport to them, despite the fact that skating is barely even a sport. Toxic masculinity has taught them to be threatened by anyone remotely better at anything than them, even if it's being better at wobbling about on a piece of wood.
After being briefly discouraged by the misogyny in the skating community, I found my saving grace in a diverse group of female skaters from New York. Skate Kitchen, a collective of ethnically and socially diverse artists who also happen to skate, managed to produce both a film and a TV series displaying the unfair treatment of women within skate culture (and the world in general). I finally saw myself reflected in something that I loved, and it certainly helped that the Skate Kitchen women were able to get their very own coming-of-age film (with a great soundtrack, no less). I came across them at a very fortunate time; they gave me the confidence to go out skating the next day regardless of who saw me. There was no more hiding away in my garden.
Skating may just have been a summer lockdown hobby. Truthfully, I’ve not skated in a while – but I would sooner choke than let someone say men stopped me. Skating didn’t give me a hoard of new friends or rugged athleticism like the characters in my beloved Mid90s. Skating did give me a reignited passion for women's equality and made me see just how unequal things still are. I am ashamed to say that I had become increasingly disillusioned with feminism in the year prior to the pandemic, but even a few minor experiences have highlighted to me how necessary it still is. I am incredibly fortunate that the biggest inequality I faced was in a niche hobby like skating. But if misogyny still runs deep within even the most specific of communities, it must still too run deep within governments, organisations, unions: the structures that affect our everyday lives.
For every ten men I skated by who would snigger at me, I would pass one little girl. She would look up in awe, unaware that girls were allowed to skate. Looking back, I realise that I was setting myself up for disappointment in my attempt to recreate the cathartic scenes of Mid90s. I craved teenage cinematic freedom, but this type of freedom is out of reach for girls. The characters in Mid90s could skate by themselves until sunrise – as a young woman, I am expected to be in before sunset for my own safety. They could rage to The Pixies at a house party – in these environments, I must guard my drink. Maybe it’s a cultural difference, or maybe teenagers had more freedom in a pre 9/11 world, but girls have never been allowed to be as free as the boys we see on screen, or even the boys in our real lives. Stop making films that teach women how to love a male-dominated world and start making films that teach a male-dominated world how to love women.