Skating is for Girls
Cindy Whitehead is on a mission to explain why ‘girl’ isn’t a put-down
In the 1980s, pro skater Cindy Whitehead sat down with freestyler Michelle Kolar on television and asked: “Do they give you a lot of recognition for being a woman and being good?”
“Not at all,” Michelle responded.
Cindy now spends a significant portion of her time trying to change that answer for good.
She sits against a projected image of her front room — her actual front room is occupied during our call. It’s a space that simultaneously looks immaculately organised and bursting with life. Skateboarding souvenirs line the walls and shelves.
“I’m not everybody’s role model, to be quite honest with you,” Cindy says. “I am not your grandma’s role model or your mom who goes to church’s role model.”
Her movement and brand, Girl is NOT a 4 Letter Word (GN4LW), doesn’t pull punches in its mission to bring proper representation to women in skateboarding.
Cindy started it in 2013 after realising that female skateboarding hadn’t progressed enough.
“For years, I had been saying […] ‘Why aren’t we seeing girls skate? Why is this not progressing? What the f**k is happening here?’” Cindy says.
“Because 20 years later, there should be some upwards mobility here and I’m not seeing it. Why is that?”
She created GN4LW with the intention of promoting women who skate. One campaign saw billboards go up on Sunset Boulevard with no words — just pictures of girls skateboarding.
“I stood on a corner and listened to people walk by, and these guys were like ‘Dude, are those girls? They’re really young girls skateboarding’. I was just waiting for the remark and then the guy goes ‘That is so f*****g cool!’” Cindy says. “So we started doing projects like that, that would gain attention for girls skateboarding in a positive way.”
While representation has improved, women in skateboarding are still often underfunded and not given the recognition they deserve — and that’s something Cindy is all too familiar with.
She began skating seriously as a teenager, quickly establishing her talent in freestyle and vert. But despite the hard work, it was difficult to find exposure.
“Women’s skateboarding back then in the 70s, we didn’t have a lot of photographs taken of us,” Cindy says.
“If you put a picture of a girl skating vert really hard in a magazine, then the boys were like ‘Wait a minute — if she can do it, how come I can’t do it?’ It was weird.”
For Cindy, that changed when photographer Bruce Hazelton shot a now famous photo of her skating a plexiglass ramp in California.
The photo was published in Wild World of Skateboarding Magazine and Cindy became the first ever female skater to make the centrefold and have a two-page article in a skateboarding mag.
In the years that followed, the situation improved for women in skateboarding, but there is still much progress to be made.
“You know, I didn’t notice being a woman as much then as I do now,” Cindy says. “But now, being older, I actually see the differences and I hear the remarks to the girls.
“I see the DMs on my Instagram about the girl skateboarders, I see a lot of misogynistic behaviour,” she adds.
The internet has proven to be a double-edged sword when it comes to tackling sexism in the skate scene.
With anonymity, some people feel emboldened to say hurtful things without the fear of personal backlash.
If there’s anything those people want, it’s for women to be too scared to pick up a board — too disheartened to skate. But women belong at the skatepark, Cindy says, “Just like you belong walking down the street or anywhere else”.
And if you’re lacking in practice — or entirely new — that doesn’t change a thing, says Cindy. Nobody starts good.
“Everybody was new once. This is the thing that people forget: every single person at that skatepark was new at one time and didn’t know how to skate,” Cindy says. “If you can remember that, I think it’s really helpful. It takes the power away from the people who you think will make fun of you.”
In a sentence: “Get on a board and skate — we need more girls!”
Check out the GN4LW movement and brand here.
