When looking through my piles of images in folders of saved articles and screenshots, one thing became clear to me. 

To be a real skater is an ambiguous thing. And it seems to come down to giving a lot of fucks about not giving a fuck. 

Just like, how to be cool, is to not care about being cool. A little ouroboros of not caring too much but then again, caring a lot about not caring too much.

I got absorbed by this existential skate question when I descended into gloomy online forums.

It was surely quite overwhelming to read this amount of homophobia and mysoginy (that I otherwise did not experience as much in the physical reality of the skatepark and from the skatehomies). Especially, as you could perhaps expect, in the Youtube or Instragram comment sections.

My idea of the skateboarding started to crumble a little.


Why was I actually reading these things? 

I was actually researching for tips and tricks to give the young girls I was teaching.

I observed and understood after many conversations, that recurring topic in

our skate lessons and sessions, were subjects around the girls' 

self confidence.


They often felt uncomfortable, exposed, or ashamed to pull up to the skatepark or skate in the streets, resulting in them skating almost only during the lessons or the girl skatesession. My main goal was to get them comfortable on a board and hope they would not need these girls only skate sessions after a while. But some of them only skated during these sessions for an entire year, which means some would skate only once a month or once a week, purely due to lack of self-confidence that the patriarchy had caused. 

Of course I could imagine how hard it must be to be a teenager taking part in such a performative activity in public. But I didn't experience that much shame to skate in public – until I looked up the term "girl skater".

I started to be able to get an image about how it might feel when you start to skate at a young age and look for tips on the internet on your own.

All my thoughts could be reduced to one question 
— what is a real skater, and what does it take to be one?

Opposed to the real skater is the

poser, "

someone who

"acts like they can skate but cannot and make no effort to actually learn. Often this is to look cool, like just carrying a skateboard or saying you skate but often never actually skating to not break the illusion that that can skate."  (source)

You might be able to imagine how easily the skatergirl trope became the perfect target to embody the idea of 
"the poser".

The peak of male domination in skating came around the 90's – before that, women would also partake in competition and in the sport, still not equally, but the difference was less tangible than when skate culture rose to become relentlessy sexist. You can read more in detail about the 90's and the fem skate scene in this dope article by Womxn Skate History!

This period remained until the femme revival of skating arose in the last 5 years or so. 



Fashion 

As skateboarding blew up as a style or "aesthetic" in  fashion (especially around the start of the Tik Tok era) , the skater look has been taken as inspiration for many. And of course, young girls were in the main row – being part of the formation of "trends" in our society and being the main target of business and fashion owners. Don't forget how skate-brands would also make profit of this new pool of buyers, while the skateboard community was trying to gate keep itself.
This, along with misogyny, my be at the root of what has made up this toxic skater girl poser trope. 

And yes, I know we are in an era where skating is getting more inclusive and it's amazing how we got this far in this short amount of time.

Yet, when I talk with the younger generations — the teenagers and the kids — they do let me know about the hardship of getting into skating, if you're not a 'standard' boyish boy, and it is still very real.

So, despite the progession, I don't want to forget that.
And that is why I wanted to write this piece along with the sticker installation. 

The insecurities, the social norms and the body awareness are all just different during different certain stages of life, depending of your social status, of the local skate community, your sexuality and gender. I get a bit mad when I hear someone say "but the skate community is so open — everybody can be a skater!" without doing the effort of imagining being a young and feminine child trying to skate.