Women on Deck: Skateboarding’s Untold Gender-Inclusive History
History, it is said, is written by the victors. And so it is that the male-dominated history of skateboarding has been written by men, is about men, and celebrates men, with a few delightful women popping up hither and yon.
This story is about skateboarders who identify as anything but men. Which isn’t to say that men who skateboard are bad. Many are good. Super, even. Fantastic! But it’s time to tell some different stories. To set some records straight. To recognize and historicize the female, queer, bi, and nonbinary humans responsible for today’s more equitable skate culture.
Nothing exists in a vacuum; societies and political constructs are reflections of their respective eras. It’s what Olivia Laing calls the “immense entanglement of everything”—the idea that everything affects everything affects everything else. Even rebel things like skateboarding have long reflected, and been a reflection of, the world around them: In the ’70s it personified the punk-rock, lock-up-your-daughters, middle-finger-to-the-Man ethos.
In the ’80s it was fingerless gloves, parachute pants, neon graphics, and synthetic beats. In the ’90s it channeled New York City—graffiti, hip-hop, and a high-low street style personified by the Supreme shop on Lafayette, where hip-hop and incense wafted out the open doors onto the sidewalk, erasing the division between public and private space.
And in all those decades, skateboarding mirrored/reflected not only pop culture, but the sexist, homophobic framework surrounding it. Women were excluded entirely or welcomed to get paid mind-numbingly less for skating the same contests as men, just as women in corporate America got paid less than their male peers and were barred from the C-suite.
Rarely did you see a woman’s name in a skate video—either on a deck or behind the lens—the same way a woman’s name rarely graced the top line of a Hollywood film under the title “producer” or “director.” And there were no gay skaters. At least, no out gay skaters. Like the rest of the world, skateboarding considered anyone who wasn’t straight an aberration.
Sometime within the past decade, though, skateboarding stopped moving in lockstep with the world around it and started resembling the dissenters it had long professed to rep, rejecting the stupid status quo to include whoever, and dress however, they wanted. It’s these genuine outcasts who are at the heart of this story, their collective story anchored by the personal experiences of four skaters, each with a vastly different relationship to skate culture:
Alana Smith fell in love with skateboarding at the age of 8, a precocious phenom breaking records and taking names, until their talent threatened to destroy their life.
Marbie Miller grew up skating in a tiny town in Iowa. She liked how she didn’t have to pretend to be someone else when she skated. She had zero designs on fame. When it happened, she was more surprised than you.
Victoria Taylor was raised to look hot, nab a husband, have kids, and live happily ever after. At the age of 21, she stepped onto a skateboard and found a more inspired happily ever after. That is, until, as in all fairy tales, the wolves showed up at her door.
And then there’s Vanessa Torres, a real-life rebel teen heroine with a lapful of gold medallions, getting into catfights, crying in secret; misunderstood. All she wanted to do, forever, was skate with her friends. She’d like it if her sponsors liked her, but in 2003, no one in the skate industry knew what to do with a rebel girl. If you’re one today, you owe Vanessa a thank-you card.
But for all their differences, every one of these skaters fell in love with the same thing: a piece of wood with four wheels, two trucks, some kingpins, nuts, and bolts. They all loved that thing so badly that even when it didn’t love them back they kept returning to it. And that’s how they broke the mold. By refusing to slot neatly into a nebulous collection of preordained boxes, and instead, fighting for their space in the world—which, contrary to popular belief, there’s enough of to go around.
The first rule of fight club is you do not talk about fight club.
When I started writing about this topic in the summer of 2020, I didn’t know the club existed. And then my niece skateboarded down to meet me at the surf break. The world was in lockdown, and everything was the worst. But that day, after teaching her to turtle roll against the cold, crashy waves, she showed me how to tic tac across the pebble-pocketed road, and everything was the best(ish).
We’d never bonded over anything before and suddenly were inseparable, pushing each other to try things that scared us on boards. Things that left us breathless and bruised, smiling bigger than ever.
I said, Let’s have a sleepover!
The night she showed up at my place we decided to only watch movies that featured girls surfing and girls skating.
Skateboarding has recently weathered a number of significant changes. Most controversial was the one-time fringe subculture being catapulted onto the world stage as a result of being in the Olympics. In response, a new era of skateboarding sprung up—one too young to know its past, much less the parts that have seldom been told.
So before things go any further and the history of skateboarding is forever cemented in myopia, here are some stories that tell a different tale. And sometimes the same tale, from a different perspective, with the same rapturous fervor.
“Often, if you want to write about women in history, you have to distort history to do it, or substitute fantasy for facts,” said historical novelist Hilary Mantel. This story is meant to avoid future historians having to make shit up.
This excerpt, adapted from Drop In: The Gender Rebels Who Changed the Face of Skateboarding by Deborah Stoll (Dey Street Books, 2024), appears by permission of the publisher.
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Deborah Stoll is a journalist, lyricist, writer and animator. Her work has appeared in The Economist, Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, Portland Mercury, San Francisco Chronicle, Punch Drink, Buzz Bands, Ignite and White Hot Magazine. Her short stories have appeared in Slake, Swivel, and Fresh Yarn. Her band, Hot As Sun, has opened for Phantogram, Gotye, and Foster the People, been featured on TV shows like Vampire Diaries, Pretty Little Liars, Glee, and CSI: Miami, and in the movie For a Good Time, Call and the forthcoming Space Cadet. Her first book, Unvarnished, was co-written with Eric Alperin. Drop In is her first book as a solo author.
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