CNN
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Kanoa Greene was born into a family of surfers, but for a long time she didn’t think she belonged in the ocean.
“I’m Hawaiian and surfing has been part of my family since the beginning. My uncle is a well-known surfer in Hawaii, so I was immersed in that world,” she told CNN Sport.
Growing up in Orlando, Florida, Greene spent a lot of time at the beach amid the surf culture. But despite her urge to surf, she grew up thinking surfing wasn’t a place she belonged.
“I never saw anyone who looked like me there,” she said. “For me, surfing was one of those really far-fetched ones. You know, we’re so conditioned to see a certain body type do it.
After years of dreaming of surfing the waves, she finally decided she wanted to try surfing, although it took Greene another two years to jump in the water as she couldn’t find any surf clothes that fit. suited him.
“And that really turned me off because…the industry tells me I don’t belong here.”
Elizabeth Sneed, who started surfing five years ago, had a similar experience.
“It weighed on me a bit because even when I tried to buy performance swimwear, the items weren’t available in my size or, if they were, they weren’t really designed. to fit my body type,” Sneed, 31, told CNN.
“If you think about it, on the right, a triangle bikini with tie bottoms isn’t ideal, if you have a double D chest and a wider hip structure. I got to this point in my mind where I thought it was a punishment for being overweight,” she said.
Two years after deciding to surf for the first time, Greene found the courage to finally take the plunge.
“It wasn’t until 2018 that I decided, ‘You know what, I’m just going to be the person I want to see, whether I have the right outfit or not.
“You know, I want to look cute, but that’s not how it’s going to be. If I have to go out in shorts and a t-shirt, I’m going to do it for me and prove it to myself,” said Greene, who now works as a fitness trainer and documents her adventures on social media.
“When people talk about surf culture, they usually mean a culture that’s very centered around Southern California and Australia,” Lauren Hill, surfer and author of “She Surf,” told CNN Sport.
“And when you think about that culture, you see that it was shaped by and for largely young, white, straight men who have a particular worldview., a particular definition of what ‘good surfing’ means,” she said.
“Historically, this didn’t necessarily include the unique ways women tend to ride the waves.”
The roots of surfing are found in pre-modern Hawaii and Polynesia, where the sport was practiced by men and women of all social levels.
Meanwhile, many countries like Peru have rich surfing cultures, and tales of surfing on the African continent are believed to date back to the 1640s.
“If we look at the long arc of surfing history, we know that right next to the first boys riding the waves…there were little girls surfing right next to those boys,” Hill explained. .
Not that the media and popular culture showed it.
“Surf culture … had a very narrow representation and has been quite exclusive and exclusionary, of a lot of different types of people, people of color, people who have different abilities, [different] various races, ethnicities,” Hill said.
As a young surfer in Florida, Hill says she saw a lot of women portrayed in surf media, but not many women riding the waves.
“I saw a lot of women passively posed in bikinis at least partially nude, they were almost always white. They were almost always skinny and hairless,” Hill added.
“They often had blonde hair and blue eyes and were a very heteronormative picture of what a woman is – and that rules out most women.”
These types of attitudes even initially deterred a champion surfer like Risa Mara Machuca.
“Boys have always laughed at me. [As a child] I had a very particular funny little body, you know, a bubbly body,” Machuca told CNN Sport.
“And so I would body surf – [I’d] keep my body in the water, you know, the water up here, my neck. But because boys teased me when I was a kid, I never even wanted to try surfing, to be honest.
After a breakup in her mid-twenties, Los Angeles native Machuca thought “F**k it” and set off to travel – and surf – Central America.
“I just arrived and haven’t seen many other women like that, so it was really difficult,” Machuca added.
Now, 45, Machuca owns her own swimwear line and is an instructor at her surf school in Sayulita, Mexico, where she teaches clients of all backgrounds and sizes.
“Maybe you change the teaching format a bit, or teach a different way of getting up or you actually realize, ‘Wow, these women are amazing.’ They are those big, wide, strong, confident beings who just needed the right board or an opportunity to get out there and do it.
Sneed agrees. “We rarely see people in the beginner to intermediate space in surfing, whether you’re male or female,” she said.
Sneed credits Greene’s social media posts for motivating her to try the sport, even though she was a beginner.
“One day I saw Kanoa Greene appear on my Instagram feed and she was holding a surfboard. And that’s when it all clicked for me.
“There have always been round surfers. It’s just not something that’s been visual and mainstream,” she said.
Sneed inspired her to create her Instagram page, Curvy Surfer Girl, which has over 75,000 followers on Instagram and over 100,000 on TikTok.
“A lot of times when people first come across the page, I think there’s an element like, ‘Wow, I just didn’t know women like us surfed or could surf.’
Greene says surf brands and the community need to do more to make people of all sizes feel welcome in the sport.
“What if they’re inspired, but they go to a local surf school and they don’t have the right gear, and then they don’t have the wetsuit and they go away, discouraged, maybe like me, wait another two years, maybe five years, maybe never get out?
“For me, as a tall person, the first question that always comes to mind when I want to try something new is, ‘Will the equipment support my body?’ And for someone who is in a smaller body, they may never ask themselves that question,” she said.
Machuca says there has been a lot of progress in recent years, with surf brands becoming more representative.
“We make our moves and we do things – I honestly feel like we do… the biggest companies in surfing are opening up.”
Sneed added, “We are entering a new era of inclusion for women’s athletics in general and in particular with the body positive movement in surfing. It really is making waves – not to sound cliché.
“I know a lot of women think if you’re older you can’t surf either. So we’re just trying to break down those barriers and show women around the world that this stuff doesn’t matter when it comes to ocean space and is welcome.
