For a Girl

You skate amazing for a girl.

That’s not actually a compliment, even though it sounds like one. It centers the gender instead of the person. Anna Groß pointed this out—she runs the Suck My Trucks contest in Berlin and built this archive documenting how the skateboarding scene treats women. It’s hostile in a way that’s pretty stupid because everyone kind of knows it’s happening and nobody does anything.

Skateboarding culture is built on individual style and competition. Who lands the sickest trick, who’s got the best style, who looks coolest doing it. That’s not inherently the problem. The problem is it collides with this age-old thing where strength equals masculinity and weakness equals femininity. So women get ranked by their gender first, always. It’s the same in surfing, snowboarding, hip-hop—anywhere the culture worships individual expression. Action sports are just boys’ clubs, mostly teenagers, and teenagers think sex is funny, so companies sell products with breasts on them because it works. Capitalism.

The self-perpetuation is what kills it. No female role models means fewer women try skating. No women in the scene means magazines get to say there’s no talent to film, which is comfortable because you don’t have to actually show the women who are good. The harassment does the work too—jokes about tampons, getting slammed on your chest, constant small things that wear you down. Eventually you quit. Then everyone’s proved right: women just aren’t serious about skateboarding.

Anna’s documenting it, building something different, trying to push back. Whether that actually shifts the culture or just makes space for people who already care, I don’t know. Probably both. Probably neither. But someone’s saying it.