A few years back, I would have been the first person to talk trash about an “all-girl action sports” magazine such as this one.

This is what happens when the culture you come up in includes women from the beginning. There have always been girls in snowboarding. A woman was on the cover of a snowboard magazine shortly after someone decided it’d be wise to make one. Our first companies had chicks on their pro rosters. Women competed in the first contests, rode the first halfpipes, and conquered peaks in Alaska right alongside the men.

In snowboarding, there was never any question over whether or not girls belonged. So when the first “all-girl” snowboarding magazine came out, I felt physically ill. Pages of pink, filled with photos of girls with the bootiest style, doing wack grabs three feet off the ground. And we were all supposed to applaud because…why? Because they were girls?

I didn’t understand it. I had no shortage of heroes. Sure, there weren’t as many photos of girls published as there were of boys, but what you could count on—what we can still count on—was that the photos that made it into the magazines deserved to be there. There is no “pretty good for a girl” scale in the big snowboard, surf, or skate mags. A photo is either good or it gets sent back to the photographer. What I never understood about chick mags was why they pushed a double standard that said that having boobs gave you license to suck. Now that I’m standing on the other side of the editorial fence, I see things a bit more clearly. Good photos are hard to come by. That’s a situation we’re working on changing. But even though many obstacles stand in the way of women getting consistently good action photos, I still believe having weak standards to begin with shouldn’t be one of them.

1 2 Next Page