Gender Stereotypes In Surfing

“There are about 5 million people in the world who surf, and ten to fifteen percent of them are women” (Endo, 2010). The women also purchase around 500 million dollars’ worth of surf and skate product a year, making it easy to say women have a big impact on surf culture and are becoming more prominent. The number of female amateur and pro surfers has been steadily increasing through the last decade which is also fueling the guy and girl surfing class. Who owns the waters. Surfing has been and continues to be an increasingly huge part of the world of sports, for both men and women, it is also clear that this has primarily been a male dominated sport and culture throughout the very beginning of surfing. Of course a majority of the most famous surfers are male, but even at that, some of the best surfers in the world are female. Even though this is clearly true, over
The first topic I will focus on in this paper is the different stereotypes that exist for female surfers. There are stereotypes for female athletes across the board and it is true that in many situations, female sporting events aren’t taken as seriously as their male counterparts and they are definitely not as popular. Besides all the stereotypes that exists about female surfers, whether scholarly or popular beliefs, I also plan to focus on how surfing sponsorships affect female surfers and how they are “applied” to both male and female surfers. Throughout this paper I intend to primarily show how popular culture and media shape and influence the views that people have about female surfers by looking further into the views based on “sex appeal”, how female surfers are overly sexualized and the different ways that female surfers are views with the stereotypes that are put upon