Roxy Celebrates Surfing Women By Showing Woman Surfer Faceless, Topless, Stretching, Not Surfing

Even when women are doing amazing, non-sexual things with our bodies, they’re still sexual objects. That was the message we got when every mouth-breathing tennis fan on Twitter rushed to inform the entire world that they wouldn’t fuck the new Wimbledon champion, Marion Bartoli, and that she shouldn’t have won because of how much they wouldn’t fuck her.

It was also the message we got when BBC commentator John Inverdale confessed his grudging respect for her fighting spirit, despite the fact that he wouldn’t fuck her. (By his logic, prettier tennis players don’t have to “fight” as hard. Could someone let Maria Sharapova know that all the grunting’s even more unnecessary, and while you’re there, ask Anna Kournikova to come back and pick up a few retrospective championships?)

And it was certainly the message when Roxy released this Vaseline-on-the-lens promo for the Biarritz Pro women’s competition – where, I guess, we can expect the women to chillax and look fine, but not actually surf much?

It’s a romantic, evocative ad, and it makes me wish I were the kind of person who could roll out of bed at quarter to six to do strenuous exercise in freezing water that’s actively trying to piledrive me into the sand.

It makes me wish my waist was a little slimmer, my bedsheets a little whiter, my car and my phone and my laptop a little newer, my mornings better lit.

It’s an ad. It’s supposed to make us yearn.

And it’s not like surfing has nothing to do with bodies, or pleasure, or sensuality. Surfing is elemental, just your body and the board and the waves and the quiet moments when a perfect barrel cuts you off from the rest of the world (or so I’m told). There are a hundred ways this ad for a surfing competition could have been about surfing – instead, the world-class athlete who features in it is faceless, as much of an object as the car and the phone and the laptop that’s been given “promotional consideration”. Some people are a bit worked up about that.

But don’t get your singed C-cups in a knot, womyn! The focus on the body and not the person is totally understandable given that Roxy are getting fans to guess which surfer it might be, in order to win a prize. So the decision to NOT ACTUALLY SHOW HER DOING ANY ACTUAL SURFING — ahem. — to not show her doing any actual surfing is probably also in the service of not making it too easy for fans to guess correctly. Showing this famous surfer doing a whole bunch of sexy things like stretching topless in front of a window, stretching while wearing an undone white shirt in front of a window, padding catlike over to her shower and dropping the white shirt artlessly by her feet (the way all women do when undressing alone at home) because she doesn’t need it any more because she only wore it to walk the ten feet between her bed and the shower… Yep, all those long minutes spent watching her morning routine when she’s just hanging out at home alone are just meant to make the contest hard.

But as always, a good litmus test for when you’re wondering if something is sexist is to picture a man in the same situation. Man getting up, stretching, grabbing his board and pulling on his favourite shorts to go for a surf – totally normal! Lingering shots that trail down his toned body, focus on his arse as he walks onto the beach, watches him stretch erotically in front of a window?

Allow this French parody ad (Quiksilver and Roxy are a huge deal there, for some reason) to illustrate the sexiness:

Well, that all looks in order to us! Really sexy. Equality restored.

So yeah. Congrats, Roxy, for looking at a sport where the women are toned, tanned, soaking wet and wearing Lycra, and sexing it up by taking the sport out.