Written by Axel Massin.
Part 1. Longboard Girls Crew & Longboard Women United
While a lot most action sport are widely male dominated, it might be the least the case for Longboard Dancing. It is hard to know what the ratio actually is, since we do not have any demographics, especially that I have not been in China, the biggest community in the world, since 2017 - and I believe it would not be accurate to make any generalization about Longboard Dancing without having a real understanding of the Chinese community. When it comes to what I have been witnessing around me, it varies a lot: competitions seem to always have more men than women participating, while other events like the longboard camp are attended by much more women than men. The LGBTQIA+ community’s voice also seems to be growing within longboard dancing, but it’s again hard to find any data about their representation. In other words, I cannot give you any facts, but just share that, although there is still progress to be made, I feel like Longboard Dancing is quite progressive in comparison to other action sports. And that is something that we mostly owe to Longboard Girls Crew.
Lonboard Girls Crew was created in 2010 by a group of female skaters in Madrid, with the purpose of promoting longboarding among women. And their work has been massive because, back in 2010, Longboard Dancing was still a fragile baby giraffe making its first steps, while Downhill Longboarding, a completely male dominated sport, was the biggest community within Longboarding.
And according to Valeria Kechichian, the co-founder: «it has not been easy, because we were shaking the status quo, and we were doing something that was never done before, so there was a lot of opposition from the action sport industry who very clearly told me that they were never going to support what we do.»
One of the most revolutionary accomplishment of LGC was the content they produced.
«Because we were now choosing how to portray ourselves, and it was not in a sexualized way, it was not in bikinis, it was just doing what we knew at the time, no pressure, learning how to skate», Valeria Kechichian.
Their first 5 videos, all created between 2010 and 2014, amassed more than 15 million views on YouTube, and were, in terms of filmmaking, the biggest productions done at that time within our community. You can see groups of women, traveling the world, charging hills, doing some of the first dancing steps and freestyle tricks, and more importantly having loads of fun. What I personally found particularly touching about these videos, is that I did not see women trying to prove or fit something, but women being unapologetically themselves, and thriving on the happiness resulting from that. These videos had a tremendous impact around the world and inspired countless men and women to get into longboarding, including our camp founder Val, who started longboarding after seeing the LGC movie ‘Endless Roads’.
But LGC has not just paved the way for women in longboarding online. They have been organizing meet-ups, events, and created a safe physical space for women to get into longboarding.
«The most important thing that we did with Longboard Girls Crew was changing the perception of women, from competition to cooperation. As women, we have been taught since a very early age to compete between each other, especially when it is any field that is male dominated. And what we did was actually to create space for all of us.» Valeria Kechichian
And, as a man who has been involved in the community for a decade, what I believe LGC also managed to do with incredible finesse, is to create a particular space for women without excluding them from the rest of the community, without creating a division between men and women. While I was filming LGC’s newest movie ‘Beyond Bo(a)rders’, I got to interview 25 LGC ambassadors, and listening to what they had to endure from men made me feel a lot of anger against my kind. But LGC’s attitude of fighting with love over hate, of repairing over revenge, and including over dividing, has been incredibly inspiring and transformative, both as a man and human being.
Today, LGC has over 130 ambassadors in 60 countries, and is the most followed longboard community page on Instagram (@longboardgirlscrew). The easiest way for you to find if there is a LGC community in your country, is to type «lgc + the name of your country» or «longboardgirlscrew + the name of your country» on Instagram. If you do not find anything, you can also write a message to their main page and ask if they know any riders in your area - they are usually very responsive for such a big page!
Longboard Girls Crew recently pushed their contribution to women in longboarding even further by creating Longboard Women United, an umbrella nonprofit that shapes, funds and supports humanitarian programs that create positive impact on some of the most vulnerable communities worldwide, with a specific focus on children and women. Their approach focuses on trauma healing and empowerment by bringing joy, tailored tools and programs, and financial support.
Among their initiatives, you can find:
Skate Adaptado in Chile, promoting adaptive skateboarding between humans with physical disabilities
Rise in India, bring to kids in orphanages tools to thrive, learn, develop, overcome trauma and improve self-esteem
Wolfpack Skate Girl in Malaysia, standing up against the violence inflicted upon girls and women and creating safe spaces for them in at-risk areas
We Skate in Belgium, organising skate sessions that bring together local kids with kids from refugee centers
Heal, a free online program to help women recover from sexual abuse.
You can find all of the information and donate at https://longboardwomen.org.
Part 2. A personal testimony about discrimination
There are a lot more things that could be said both about LGC and LWU, but I don’t really feel, as a cis-white-straight man, like I am the right person to elaborate on that. I would prefer to conclude this article by sharing my experience with feminism. Growing up, I was mostly surrounded by girls. Although for a significant part of my teenage years, I had a group of guy friends where toxic masculinity was underlying most of our interactions, I have spent most my life in groups of friends with mostly or exclusively women. For many years, I was skinny, hairless, very sensitive, and did not feel masculine as my peers defined it, even though I could sometimes act like it to feel like I belonged. I have seen from the first row the annoying behaviour of boys flirting and when the topic of feminism started to appear in my life, I did not feel too concerned because I thought that I already knew what women were going through and felt like I did not have anything to be reproached for.
When I became part of the longboard community and watched its development, I felt like it was incredibly progressive even though, as a community organiser, some incidents were reported to me every now and then. It was not until the shooting of the last LGC movie that all my views on the matter changed. Interviewing 25 female community leaders on their experience with sexism made me realize how far from the reality I was standing. On a mental level, I discovered that there was a lot more situations of injustice or violence than I imagined, but on an emotional level I was completely detached from the emotions that this injustice made me feel: sadness and anger.
After being impregnated with these stories all day long for a couple days, we (25 women and I) were cruising down the street, heading to a shooting location, and a group of guys started cat calling them. I got filled with so much rage, that me, who had been on the receiving hand of physical confrontations my whole life, started to considered expressing that rage with my fists. As a third emotion popped in - fear-, a pretentious voice inside my head said «you’re better than this», and was followed by a disappointed voice saying «coward». While I watched the girls unbothered and smiling, I started to question myself and my reaction. Are they more affected by it than they appear to be? Is feeling sad, angry to fight an injustice, scared of expressing that anger, and then angry at myself for not standing out for myself, what women are confronted to on a daily basis? Are they forced to repress and replace it with humour, rationalisation or other protection mechanisms because there is not really any space where these emotions are welcomed? If women don’t always express their feelings regarding these injustices, have I contributed to this injustice without realizing it?
That day, I learnt two lessons. The first, my intellectual understanding of feminism and belief that I was a good student was mostly a defence against the feelings of sadness, anger, fear, and powerlessness I felt in front of this injustice. The second, it is not because I do not see and feel the damage made by this injustice that it is not there. It seems that a lot of women are not vocal about what they endure and, I imagine that some probably don’t even realize that this is happening inside them.
My years as a psychologist taught me that you don’t make somebody change by attacking them, and, where revenge from one side can just provoke a defensive or more anger on the other side, empathy and non judgment will invite the other side to be more open, vulnerable and empathetic in return. And I absolutely admire LGC for sharing these values. That said, I don’t think that we, as men, are legitimate to demand this position from women and accuse the angry feminists of hurting their own cause. Because, I think if the situation was the reversed, I’m not sure we would be capable doing what we are demanding from women. At least, I don’t think I would. And the fact that I would have physically assaulted this group of guys, if I had spent my childhood practicing MMA instead of learning how to juggle, supports my idea. So I believe that we should learn to accept that women have the right to be angry, sad, scared, or else, because of an injustice that I believe would make any human feel injustice.
And since I am speaking of injustices, I would like to share two additional personal anecdotes: one about race and another about sexuality, which I believe to be relevant to this article because LGC often includes other minorities in their fight.
Since I grew up in a very socially diverse neighborhood and half of my group of friends were persons of color, I naively never thought I could act in a racist way. Even though I have never had to say it, I think I could have been the kind of person to say «I can’t be a racist because a part of my friends are people of color». Just like with women, I thought I understood their struggle, and every time I would encounter somebody being openly racist, I would severely judge and give myself internal confirmation that I’m not a racist.
Back when I was a much more active member of the longboard community than I am today, my closest friend was black. In our group of friend, there was constant teasing, and this teasing included racist jokes. We would make black jokes, he would make white jokes (which by the way were a lot funnier than ours), and I genuinely thought that it was harmless because he’d always laugh or smile at our jokes. One day, I made a joke, my friend laughed as usual, but another black member of our group overheard me and l saw in his eyes that what I had said was not ok. I felt the instant need to justify myself, to explain that of course there was absolutely no meaning behind it, but a feeling of shame stuck with me no matter what. I apologized to both and asked my friend if we could have a conversation, during which he said : «In our daily lives, we have a lot of reminders that we are black. Some are painful, like being discriminated at work or somebody crossing the street to avoid walking on the same sidewalk, and some are not really painful, like these jokes between friends. As black people we are taught to learn to live with this and not let it affect us, but every time it is still a reminder».
It was the very first time I had a serious conversation about race with my friend, and his words went through my heart like a bazooka. Firstly, I was very sad to hear how frequently he was dealing with this and numb to it he had to become, and secondly, I felt terribly guilty to have contributed to it. It’s now been a few years, so I don’t remember exactly for how long, but this feeling stayed with me for quite some time, and this conversation changed something inside me.
After recently sharing this text with my friend to ask for his permission to share this story, he added some interesting nuance about context : «If it is just the two of us, we can joke around harmlessly because the base feeling between us is care, trust and friendship, but the moment a third person outside of this relationship appears in the context, the very same joke can become a humiliation.»
The second anecdote, concerns my work as one of the community leaders of DockSession. During our sessions, I heard a bunch of homophobic comments towards a member’s sexuality, sometimes even to their face. Feeling empowered by role as an ambassador, I reported the problem to my fellow community leaders, and we had a talk with the victim of these comments to let them know we did not want to tolerate them and would do what we could to sanction these behaviors within our community. That person was actually quite surprised and said «don’t worry I am used to it».
We also wrote a message about homophobia to our community and reminded it orally a couple of times when there would be an inappropriate joke. However, I started to realize something weird happening within me. In my life outside of the longboarding community, whenever I’d hear an inappropriate comment or joke, sometimes I would vocally express my discontentment, and other times I’d keep my mouth shut and end up resenting the person and myself. So why this inconsistency? It seemed that first of all, my ambassador role gave me some sort of responsibility and protection that I struggled to find once back to my day to day life. I have also realized that when I am speaking with somebody that I somehow look up to or desire for them to like me, I tend to try and ignore the comment, first to keep the idealized image I have of them, and secondly not to risk them finding me annoying. In other words, I understood that I would allow things that I stand against to be said, just because I was scared of not being liked. I have been working on my need to be liked and my fear of conflict in therapy and feel like today it is easier for me to stand against a comment, even though I still let a few slip. In these situations, I first ask myself «why is it so important for me that this person (that apparently doesn’t share my values) like me?» and then reminds myself that there are many ways to stand for what you believe in without attacking somebody.
If I had to sum up the lessons I learned through these anecdotes and my overall journey with discrimination, I’d say that there is a very important emotional component to it. In my case there has been a lot of fear, and there still quite some as I am writing this article today. Empathetically feeling the pain of these injustices is scary, and the feeling guilt of potentially contributing to that pain is even scarier. Admitting «I have been acting in a racist, sexist, homophobic way» is incredibly scary. My intention here is not to victimize or justify myself or, but just to share the emotional process that happened within me and helped me grow, hoping that it will inspire other people like me. While I think it’s important to have some intellectual knowledge about discrimination, I strongly believe it’s important to look at the emotional level. I feel like people who face discriminations on a daily basis had to learn to numb or minimize that pain, so even though these situations happen every day around us, I think I was never really in contact with the pain that underlies the injustice. And when I did, it would be so violent that I would tend to deny it, sometimes even convincing myself that the person is an extremist and not being constructive.
In my case, accepting the fear, the sadness, the anger and the guilt that all of this made me feel, helped me to be more understanding of people suffering of discrimination, and the energy I was wasting fighting against my emotion became available to help me find courage to question myself and stand for what I believe in, not out of guilt or being a good citizen, but out of sincere desire.
So what does this all have to do with longboarding? I think we, the longboard community, have a very unique opportunity to have conversations about subjects a lot more global than longboarding. This beautiful sport seems to be bringing all kinds of people together, that might come from extremely different backgrounds and have different values but share a common passion, which I believe to be quite rare. While it is really hard to change the world, I like to think of our community as a «mini world», and think we can impact the change we’d like to see in the world within our small community. I hope this article, that speaks of touchy nevertheless important subjects did not offend anybody, and if it is the case, I am sorry because I certainly did not intend it that way.
May the flow be with you,
Axel
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