Suck My Trucks
Anna Groß organizes a skateboard contest in Berlin called Suck My Trucks—and yes, that name is doing exactly what it sounds like—that centers on female participation in a scene that has spent decades treating women as either props or punchlines. She’s also been running a site called Women And The Skateboard Business, documenting how pervasive the problem actually is: not just in attitudes but in the structural logic of the industry, in who gets filmed, who gets featured, who gets treated as an athlete and who gets pressed decoratively against a product.
Jan Stremmel interviewed her on Jetzt.de and the answers are worth spending time with. On why skating specifically holds onto this particular flavor of chauvinism: I think it’s because it’s a sport that places enormous emphasis on the individual. It’s about poses, competition—who can do the sicker trick, who has better style, who looks the coolest doing it.
That framing of skateboarding as essentially a masculine performance contest is correct. Skating fetishizes cool in a very specific, very male way. Masculinity equals strength, the logic goes, and femininity equals weakness—which is why the default insult when someone won’t commit to a trick is calling them a girl. She noted it’s not unique to skating: the same current runs through hip-hop, surfing, snowboarding.
What makes it feel more concentrated in action sports is scale and demographics. Football has enough women competing at serious levels that the culture has had to make room. In skateboarding the numbers are still thin enough that the boys are functionally alone in it, and the marketing speaks accordingly. The audience skews young—teenagers, largely—and teenagers tend to find sexism funny. Breast-shaped skate wax sells because three out of twenty guys think it’s hilarious and actually buy it, and that math works fine for the manufacturer. Anna’s summary of it: At the end of the day, sex sells. We live in capitalism.
The circular logic is the ugliest part. Women get marginalized in the coverage, so there are no visible role models, so fewer women push to improve, so the skill ceiling stays comparatively lower, so the industry points at that ceiling and says: see, there just aren’t any good female skaters. Whenever someone asks why so few women appear in videos and magazines, the standard response is apparently We’d film them if there were good ones.
There can’t be good ones at scale if you never show the ones you already have. It’s an argument engineered to maintain the exact condition it claims to be describing.
I’ve been around skate culture long enough to have heard every version of this. The condescending compliments delivered with total sincerity—for a girl she actually rips—as if the caveat is generosity rather than diminishment. The editorial and advertising use of women as set dressing that’s been standard in skate magazines for decades, defended as just the culture, as if culture isn’t something people actively choose to reproduce. The contest-floor comments Groß specifically called out—the tampon questions, the chest-slam questions—that get laughed off as trash talk and aren’t.
The British magazine Cooler has been covering skating, surfing, and snowboarding differently for years—serious, without treating female athletes as a novelty category or a special issue. I’ve read it well outside its intended demographic and it’s consistently good. That a publication like that has to exist as a separate thing, rather than as the default, says something about where the rest of the industry still sits.
The Suck My Trucks project, with backing from brands like Vans and publications like Golden Ride, is at least building something in the gap. It won’t dissolve a decades-old cultural reflex by itself—you don’t fix structural contempt with a contest—but visibility matters and so does having a community that refuses the usual terms. The name helps too. It commits.