How Do You Make Them Let You Belong? - by Erin Hortle
ISLAND | ISSUE 151Winner of the University of Tasmania / Island Nonfiction Prize 2018
Through the casual sexism inherent in Australian surfing culture, Erin Hortle reflects on identity and inclusion
I want to begin by telling you about this time a guy was a dick wielding a phallus.
A film of cloud sheened the sun’s light silver. There was no wind. The bush, sprawled beyond the sand dunes, was still and quiet. The ocean was glossy, and heavy lines of swell rolled sluggishly across its expanse. Quicksilver, silverquick.
I was floating on my board beyond the breakers, my partner drifting beside me. I’d tucked my bloodless hands into the slight warmth of my armpits. My wrists flattened my breasts. The frosty sand had crunched beneath our neoprene boots when we stomped along the empty beach earlier. Woodsmoke, from the houses at the other end of the beach, sweetened the air. Some of that smoke was mine – I’d lit the fire before we left, to ready the house for our numb bodies when we returned.
A man emerged from the dunes, board tucked beneath his arm.
‘Geez,’ my partner said. ‘He’s got the whole beach and he’s coming out here?’ His mutter turned to steam as the man launched from the shore and into the rip and started stroking decisively towards us.
I turned from the man and gazed out to sea. Ridges of ocean stacked out towards the horizon: a set of waves fanning in, kicked up by the low-pressure system churning somewhere between Tasmania and Antarctica.
As the man reached where we were floating, my partner caught the first wave. I watched as he slipped down in front of it, etching a groove of wake in the green fold of its back. The next wave was too small to bother with – it wouldn’t break on the outside sandbar – so I turned to the man and smiled hello.
He was a modern-day Australian Adonis: blond, tanned, chiselled, shiny. His wetsuit was cerulean. Ours were plain black, to better absorb the weak winter sun.
He flashed his white teeth at me and said: ‘How’s it going?’ Then, before I could answer: ‘You a local? Dunno how you do it. It’s fucking freezing!’
‘You get used to it,’ I lied. ‘Where are you from?’
I was unsurprised when he told me: Lennox Head. Did I know it? he asked. I did. I’d surfed there once a few years earlier, and it was fine. Fun. A long right-hand point break; temperate water; but lots of people. Lots of people just like him.
As the next wave loomed it started dredging water up off the sandbar. I paddled in and across, towards the spot where it was drawing sheerest, and as I felt its energy catch me, I pushed myself to my feet, dropped into its bowl, drove my board around the shock of crashing spray and raced the curling green line to the beach, beating it only just. Adrenalin tore my lips into a grin.
By the time I got back out beyond the breakers, another set was already on its way. He caught the first wave; my partner, the second; me, the third.
Then there was a lull. We waited in sleepy silence. The cold will do that to you. So will the lack of crowd – you don’t have to constantly jostle for priority. Makes the cold worth it.
‘It’s fucking freezing,’ the man said again, to both or neither of us. His words stuttered through his chattering teeth and trembling lips.
I was going to ask him why he was holidaying in Tassie in winter, but another set arrived.
He caught the first wave; my partner, the second. As the third wave drew up, I began to paddle, stroking evenly, glancing over my shoulder every now and then to make sure that my tempo was right, that I was manoeuvring myself onto the peak. Right before taking off, I checked one last time and noticed a large, dark shape in the swell-line. Perhaps two metres long, perhaps more. Moving water can distort your depth perception. And then the wave pitched and I pushed myself to my feet and I was off, slicing down the line.
The wave tapered out into the rip and as I flicked off it, I bit my lip, wondering what to do. It could have been a dolphin, but I couldn’t see any more fins – the fins of either the others in the pod, or that dolphin, resurfacing.
Of course, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a dolphin, I told myself.
Somewhat apprehensively, I paddled back out as the man surfed past me, hacking at the wave, sending rooster tails of spray into the air.
‘I just saw something,’ I told my partner. ‘It was about two metres long, give or take. I’m not saying it was a shark, but it was that size and shape, and if it was a dolphin it hasn’t resurfaced.’
‘Ahh.’ He furrowed his brow. ‘Well, it’s kind of pumping,’ he said, meaning the surf. ‘And its probably gone, whatever it was. Plus, if it was a shark, it’s not like it was a really big one.’ He paused a moment, then, as he turned to paddle for the wave that was drawing up on the sandbank, added over his shoulder: ‘Maybe just wait and see?’
I wasn’t surprised by his reaction. But I wasn’t altogether reassured.
Wait to see what? I wondered.
The man paddled back out. I figured I should give him the heads up – if I were in his situation, I’d want to know. So I explained to him what I’d seen.
He chuckled, and then said, ‘You see, this is why I don’t bring my girlfriend surfing. She’s always getting paranoid about sharks and shit too.’
Before I could answer, another wave hit the bank and mechanically, I turned from him to stroke into it. The words I might have said to him clung to my tongue and throat, and tried to work their way out of my body and into the wave, channelling themselves in the slashing of my surfboard fins.
Let your surfing speak for itself. I’ve been told that by people when I’ve whinged about the way men sometimes treat me in the water. If I could have carved fuck you into the face of the wave I would have. The thing is, while it’s all well and good to let your surfing speak, the actual words – the things you’d like to say; the things you’d like heard – don’t completely disappear. Or mine don’t.
As I paddled back out, all I could think was: a mainlander thought I’d been brought to this beach I grew up on? This beach where I’ve lived my entire life?
He surfed past me again and, pettily, I hated the way he surfed with such power and poise.
‘You’ll never guess what that prick just said to me,’ my partner said, as I reached him. ‘He just said: “did your girlfriend tell you what she saw? It was probably just a bird or something.”’
‘Seriously?’
‘Yeah. So I told him I didn’t know what the birds were like where he was from, but down here, we don’t have any six-foot gannets.’
‘Ha!’ he pointed to the shore. ‘Check it out – he’s gone in!’ Sure enough, the man was retreating into the dunes.
I threw a handful of expletives at his back.
‘Forget it,’ my partner said. ‘He was just a dick.’
I knew my partner was right. I knew I should rise above it. But it bothered me. Really bothered me. Bothered me so much I completely forgot about the fact I might have seen something more threatening than a shiny man brandishing a phallus of glib words and condescending chuckles. So I kept surfing, channelling my irritation into the waves, hacking at them and hacking at them, until the whole petty encounter faded into my catalogue of memories.
*
I’m vain, and I’m also a touch parochial when it comes to surfing – I know this. I love being a local, maybe because I love the fleeting sense of belonging it brings: my community (mostly) recognises me as a surfer and I bask in this recognition, perhaps because I know it’s not mine – it’s only ever given, which means it can be taken back. I’m also a cis-woman-feminist, well-versed in cultural theory, and this is the lens through which I read the world. And so I knew straight away that because I didn’t have a penis, this man didn’t recognise my localism – my knowledge of that patch of coast and my ability to speak that knowledge with authority. Above all, that’s what was going on in his dismissal of me. It’s not a particularly unique story: while many men live in blissful (or wilful) ignorance, believing they’re coasting through a meritocratic world, most ambitious women know that in this post-patriarchal system a penis still all too often trumps experience (a six-inch head start is still a head start, that’s what it boils down to). In this case, to this man’s eyes, my lived experience of surfing that particular beach year in, year out, was trumped by Man who is apparently, comparatively, more local everywhere because Man is the universal surfer who universally belongs.
*
So, this is my first question: am I a surfer?
I can surf reasonably well. I love to surf. All I pretty much ever want to do is surf. But I have breasts and a vagina, so am I a surfer?
The answer is yes, when I’m surfing on my own – when it’s just me, drifting and racing between the heaving and shifting expanse of the ocean, and the foaming lap of the shore – or when they let me. Because sometimes they do.
*
This is my next question: can one belong on one’s own? Or to both extrapolate and rephrase: to what extent is belonging social? In a crowd of people who recognise your belonging as mitigated on some kind of fundamental yet arbitrary level by a marker of otherness (in this case, my womaness), is it enough for you to simply feel that you belong? Is it this feeling – of what? apparently genuine emplacedness? – that gives rise to your belonging, or is it other people reading your being wherever, whenever, as making sense in that specific context?
(That human with the sun-bleached hair, the tan skin, the white teeth, the barrel chest, the muscled arms and the penis, strolling along the beach is an Australian Surfer; listen to his nasally drawl: ‘It’s farken garn orf, ay bra?’)
My suspicion is it’s a combination of the individual and the social. That you belong when people, yourself included, don’t qualify your position in whatever space – be it physical, social or political – with a marking of your otherness, be it your womaness, your colouredness, your queerness, your level of ableness, or maybe your size or your nerdiness, whatever. You belong when people don’t even notice you’re there, because you being there makes perfect sense to them.
“You belong when people don’t even notice you’re there, because you being there makes perfect sense to them.”
So while belonging is highly personal – it is about you, about your experience of your position in space and your position in culture – it signifies a particular relinquishing of the self to the point of imperceptibility: it’s a type of cultural subsumption. In other words, to belong means to shed your qualifying markers; their meaning is peeled from your skin when you are folded into the cultural identity that binds itself to the space you seek to occupy, or belong in.
They have to let you in. That’s the first step. The second step is you have to believe that you belong there. You have to believe that you make sense. I say first and second, but really the order doesn’t matter. For you to truly belong, though, both need to happen.
I was chatting to a friend about imposter syndrome the other day. She told me she’s developed a technique for mitigating the complex. She calls it ‘infiltrator syndrome’. When she feels like she doesn’t belong, rather than waiting in a state of mild panic for people to identify her as an imposter, she congratulates herself on having infiltrated: Well done. You did it. You got in and no one noticed. Aren’t they all morons?
‘Does it help you feel like you belong?’ I asked her.
‘Maybe a little bit,’ she replied. ‘If only for the agency it gives me in the way I occupy the space. It’s like I didn’t just happen to find myself there; I got there. I did it.’
It’s hard to change your thinking in order to deal with your anxiety. To make you see yourself the way you need to be seen in order to believe that you belong.
It’s also hard to change culture. To make it (or them) recognise you as equal or same. To make it (or them) open itself (or themselves) to you so that you can get in. And this is my problem.
My problem is the opposite of imposter syndrome. My problem is that I truly, and maybe vainly, believe that I belong, but the dominant culture doesn’t always recognise this and it drives me up the fucking wall.
“My problem is the opposite of imposter syndrome. My problem is that I truly, and maybe vainly, believe that I belong, but the dominant culture doesn’t always recognise this and it drives me up the fucking wall.”
I know surf culture is changing. It’s now socially acceptable for women to surf and some advertisements for women’s surfwear picture professional women surfers actually surfing, rather than sand-dusted models pouting on the beach. But we women are still marked by our gender in a whole host of ways; we are not yet imperceptible in the line-up. Most of the time we are qualified. Most of the time, we are women surfers. They are always just surfers.
My other problem is that I’m impatient and I’m bossy and I’m idealistic. Yes, surf culture – and indeed on a broader level, Australian culture and its investment in a specific type of racialised (white) masculinity – is changing; but I want to make it change now.
And so these are my final questions, and they’re practical ones at that: if you already believe that you belong, how do you make them let you belong? How do you become imperceptible?
*
The year was 2011 the day I might have seen something and then that guy was a dick about it, and in 2015 I thought about him again. I wondered if he would have taken me more seriously – if he would have been less condescending – if our encounter had happened that year. Because that year, a shark attacked professional surfer Mick Fanning during an ASP World Tour event at Jeffreys Bay in South Africa; that year a spate of shark attacks plagued surfers on the north coast of New South Wales; that year the call for a shark cull rang through Lennox Head, the guy’s home town. As I sifted through the news articles, which reported that the residents of Lennox Head, Ballina and Evans Head had voted in favour of a shark cull in a community meeting, I thought about him. Surfers were too afraid to go in the water, I read. Everyone agrees that something has to give, I read. ‘The sharks are causing the problem and they need to go,’ Ballina Shire Council mayor David Wright said after the meeting.
As I read, I pictured the man at the meeting, nodding his agreement. I pictured him voting in favour of the cull. I imagined him running a square-cut hand through his blond hair and saying loudly, to anyone who would listen: ‘Something needs to happen.’ It fit with the kind of man he seemed to be. It made sense to me that a man who could so easily dismiss a woman who perceived a potential threat as hysterical, and who would assume that the same woman had been ‘brought’ by her male companion to the beach, would channel his own threat-perception – his own anxiety – into a violent crusade against animals. It seemed to me that they were two expressions of the same breed of Australian masculinity, of the same hubris.
“It seemed to me that they were two expressions of the same breed of Australian masculinity, of the same hubris.”
‘This is the reason I don’t bring my girlfriend surfing,’ he had said to me. The clear implication his words carried was that my access to the surf had been allowed, as much as his girlfriend’s had been denied. I wasn’t there as my own person, but as an accessory, brought along on some manly whim. It’s a short leap of the imagination – in fact, it’s no leap of the imagination at all – to associate passive femininity with hysteria. It’s an association so well trodden the carpet is threadbare. It’s a silencing tool, a sidelining tool. ‘She gets paranoid about sharks and shit too,’ he had said to me. And through this, his sexism sought to shore up not only the domination of women’s bodies and voices, but also the domination of that ever-shifting space that curls and boils, of those liquid walls of crystal and turbulence. The conversation was as much about him wielding his gender as it was about him dismissing mine. Because what he was really saying was: Be quiet, silly girl; it’s not you but men who have the capacity to decide – and to voice – what a threat is; it is men who determine who, or what, can be here; thus it is men who determine who is allowed to belong; and, I am a Man.
*
I said as much to a friend of mine. He told me that, sure, the guy was a dick, but all my speculating made me sound a little like I had a chip on my shoulder.
“I said as much to a friend of mine. He told me that, sure, the guy was a dick, but all my speculating made me sound a little like I had a chip on my shoulder.”
‘If I have a chip it’s because you1 placed it there with your male gaze and your catcalls and your dismissive condescensions,’ I wanted to say to him. ‘I didn’t start it. I was born into this system. It marked me.’
[1] Here I mean ‘you’ as plural, not ‘you’ as singular: I’m talking about trends within a gendered system, not the specific acts of my friend.
But I didn’t say this, because I thought that maybe he was right. Maybe my speculation was unfair. It’s certainly petty, born as it is from a bruised and indignant ego. And I didn’t, because the system isn’t my friend’s fault; he and his white penis are just unwitting beneficiaries of it. He wasn’t even there the day I might have seen something but don’t know what.
‘Sometimes it seems like you have a catalogue of gripes against men, and you can draw upon them to bolster any argument,’ he said.
‘It’s not a catalogue of gripes. It’s just my memories,’ I said.
‘And they’re just pricks,’ he countered. ‘Don’t let them get to you. Don’t let them tarnish your memories. Rise above it. Let your surfing do the talking.’
Whether they’re a catalogue of gripes, or a catalogue of memories, he’s right. I do have them. I suspect most women do. When writing this, I sifted through them, trying to find the one that would best demonstrate my point. It was a depressing task. There are so many.
“Whether they’re a catalogue of gripes, or a catalogue of memories, he’s right. I do have them. I suspect most women do. When writing this, I sifted through them, trying to find the one that would best demonstrate my point. It was a depressing task. There are so many.”
There are so many times my belonging has been, if not denied, then diminished through casual, everyday sexism. But still, when I’m in the water, it feels right. Every time, I feel like I belong up until the moment they remind me I don’t, quite.
*
To return to my earlier question: if you already believe that you belong, how do you make them let you belong? Do you simply let your surfing – or whatever it is that you do – do the talking, and hope that they’ll be blinded by your sheer brilliance and not notice that you’re a woman, or whatever it is you are? Is your silent presence really all that’s required to make them let you belong?
Here are two scenarios:
1
You say nothing. You let your surfing do the talking. Maybe you chuckle along with sexist jokes. Definitely, you turn a blind eye to the fact that while the websites of most mainstream surf magazines include a page titled ‘girls’ or some variation thereof (because we’re not surfers, we’re a subset), these aren’t even pages devoted to professional women’s surfing but rather boobs and bronzed be-g-stringed arses. You make yourself into one of the fellas and, through this, you become imperceptible to a degree – you become imperceptible when they let you. And maybe, one day, a critical mass of women surfers will be reached, and women will no longer be noticeably other, and you will belong fully.
2
You say many things. Your surfing speaks, sure, but so does your mouth. You are both seen and heard and so you don’t belong most of the time. You do some of the time, though. You infiltrate often, but only momentarily. It’s when they let you, sure. But when you’re in, you hold your head high and you wear your critical idealism on your sleeve. Over time, if you and enough other others are noisy enough, the norm of the cultural identity and its seemingly ironclad association with its space is rattled and rattled, and weakened and weakened. Suddenly, cultural subsumption requires less relinquishing of otherness, because sameness has less stake. Maybe, one day, you will be able to become imperceptible by virtue of the fact that the logic of making sense in a place itself no longer makes sense, and so you belong because everyone belongs.
*
This is what I think: you can’t make them let you belong. But if you’re there enough, every now and then they will let you in, if only by sheer virtue of your competence and your monotonous presence. (I am a surfer in my community because they see me surfing all the time. At first, I was a woman surfer, and now I’m just there. It’s only when new men arrive that I am qualified again, by their gaze and snide or condescending comments, which they use to mark me and thus make me perceptible. Then I am a woman surfer until they forget, or leave. Whichever comes first.) The power you have is over the self you are when you are enfolded.
This is what I say: let that be a critical and idealistic self. A self that gets pissy because it believes things can be better, and says so. A self that dreams, a self that believes things can change. Because every time a new self is absorbed into it, even if only momentarily, a cultural identity shifts and changes ever so slightly, since the identity category is only the sum of those who compose it.
“This is what I say: let that be a critical and idealistic self. A self that gets pissy because it believes things can be better, and says so. A self that dreams, a self that believes things can change.”
I want to be subsumed. I want other others to be subsumed. Because I want to see what that cultural identity will look like. And I’m impatient because I know it’s emergent. Surely it is.
So for now sometimes I will belong, when I am alone in the water, or when they let me. And other times I will be longing. ▼
Image: Tabbi Fasnacht on snow-covered beach, 2016,
South Coast Surf School, Clifton Beach, Tasmania 0400489895
This article appeared in Island 151 in 2017. Order a print issue here.
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