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The Sisters of Shred: How Women are Radicalizing Skateboarding

Everyone at the skatepark has their eyes fixed on 15-year-old Lara Botto as she plants her skateboard at the edge of the park’s steepest ramp.

Hesitating for just a moment, she wheels forward and descends into the bowl, a deep, kidney-shaped cement pit meant to resemble an empty backyard swimming pool.

Within seconds, she’s gracefully launched out of the bowl’s smooth walls and gently contorted her body into an epic aerial.

A nearby male skater mutters to his friend, ”does she really have to be cute and shred at skating? I don’t know if I could handle that,” he says as his friend, whose mouth is stuffed into a cloudy glass bong, nods in stony agreement.

The point was unmistakably misogynist. In two pithy, rhetorical sentences he managed to objectify and patronize one of the two women at a skatepark that is 98% guys aged roughly 10 - 25 while wallowing in his own insecurity.

Later, without revealing who said what, I mentioned the comment to Botto, who rolled her eyes.

“It’s a bummer, but I’ve heard that before from some guys. If they think I’m cute, they’re either threatened or weirdly turned on,” she says with the jaded wisdom of someone thrice her age.

Botto hops back on her board and rolls into a gentle section of the concrete pit stained with faded blood and black wheel marks. 

The guy’s comment was partly true: Botto does ”shred,” to use skateboarding parlance to mean ”really, really good.” Generating an inexplicable amount of momentum, Botto, who stands a hair over 5 feet, is taut and light-footed, with a strong upper body from years of gymnastics, all of which helps her speed and glide through lengthy, acrobatic grinds on the coping, or edge, of the concrete bowl.

Botto’s jaw-dropping skill, though impressive, is hardly unusual— least of all for the growing number of female skateboarders finally emerging in the historically male-dominated sport. 

With more professional female skateboarders than ever before, and brands and events like Nike and the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo — which for the first time in history will feature male and female skateboarding events — taking notice, skateboarding appears to embrace a more inclusive future.

As one of the few sports where men and women can earn the same amount of money in competitions and sponsors place both genders on the same team, skateboarding is a paragon of progressiveness.

In spite of their strides, female skateboarders, including 11-year-old skater and Olympic hopeful Sky Brown, are still hitting potholes as they skate into the spotlight on the world’s biggest competitive stage.

For Botto, the sport wasn’t immediately welcoming. 

”When I first started going to skateparks by myself, I could sense that I wasn’t really wanted there,” she explains.

”Skateboarding culture has this big stigma around what it means to be a ”real skater” so beginners are sometimes looked down upon,” she says.

Initially, Botto was written off as yet another female ”poser,” or phony — skateboarding’s most devastating insult — by the skaters who would later become her best friends.

Intent on proving them wrong, she came back. And never stopped.

”I began enjoying the adrenaline rush of going fast, trying tricks, falling, and getting back up to try it again,” she says.

As the University of New Mexico sociologist John N. Carr noted in his paper ”Skateboarding in Dude Space: The Roles of Space and Sports in Constructing Gender Among Adult Skateboarders,” female skaters face many physical and psychological barriers which ”male expectations and framings place upon their participation, self-presentation, and performance while skateboarding.”

After Botto gets up from a brutal slam after hanging up, or getting her rear wheels stuck on the coping, coming in from a lofty air, I notice a group of female skaters clapping. 

One of them is 20-year-old Zainab Alkenany, a regular at the skatepark. 

“I’m stoked because there are so many of us now and we finally have a community. Before it was something we — and sometimes just me — would do alone where none of the boys could see or heckle us. Now we’re good enough to heckle them if we want. Or if they deserve it!” Alkenany says with a laugh.

“They almost always deserve it,” she reflects, this time without a smile.

For the most part, the boys at the skatepark appear encouraging, oftentimes commiserating about the complicated particulars of a certain trick, or skateboarding maneuver.

Alkenany typically skates with a group of boys, including her boyfriend. 

”My little crew is really protective of me, but it’s not so much their protection I need — it’s the support and camaraderie,” she says.

A latchkey kid whose parents divorced when she was still in elementary school, Alkenany moved frequently and felt like an outsider wherever she went.

”I wasn’t your traditional American kid: I was a Middle Eastern girl and an only child who spent most of her time indoors drawing weird shit,” she says with a laugh.

But when she started skateboarding, those differences melted away.

”Suddenly I went from hearing ’oh, who’s the brown chick with the unpronounceable name and crazy taste in clothes?” to ”you skate? That’s awesome!”

It’s a comment that resonates with me, an Indian-American who found traditional learning and team sports — despite my aptitude for both — tedious and conventional. 

Skateboarding was a vehicle both figuratively and literally to explore and gain access into subterranean worlds brimming with counterculture, rebellion and artistic expression.

And, best of all, it was accepting.

”It might seem singleminded, but as far as skateboarding goes, skaters are just looking for people like them — people who love to skate and are generally openminded about most things,” says Alkenany.

”It’s been a brotherhood for so long and now we’re trying to turn it into a sisterhood too,” she adds.

Acceptance hasn’t come easy.

”I’ve definitely heard my fair share of bizarre comments,” Botto tells me, including the time an older male skater informed her that ”girls aren’t built for skating” and that she had ”good style for a girl.”

”It was technically a compliment, but made me question if I was built in a way that made me look bad when I was skating,” she says.

Chauvinism can take many forms. When guys aren’t being condescending, they’re prone to outright sexism. 

Ali recalls being made to feel as though she was at the park prowling for skater boys when ”in reality I was just trying to do my own thing and skate just like everyone else.”

Despite the persistence of such hostility, female skateboarders are not new to the sport. In the 1970s, skaters like Peggy Oki, Kim Cespedes and Laura Thornhill dominated contests throughout California and were lauded for their surfer-like grace and technical skill.

By the 1980s, just a few years after the introduction of the urethane wheel, skateboarding abandoned its surfing roots and turned into an aggressive, acrobatic sport that was promoted by everyone from MTV to Coca-Cola.

In short, skating went mainstream — and girls, for whatever reason, weren’t part of the picture.

”I can remember how popular skateboarding was back then and wanting to be a part of it,” says 39-year-old Giselle Heredia. 

At 7, Heredia, now a Stanford-educated psychologist, was constantly ”borrowing” her older brother’s skateboard. 

”At first I used to just sit on the board and push myself down the driveway,” she recalls. ”Then I started seeing people do tricks and my head practically exploded with possibility.”

Growing up near the beach, Heredia was drawn to surfing. But skateboarding offered her something to do when the waves were bad.

”Even though it's regarded as aggressively masculine, skateboarding is pretty feminine. It’s a creative, artistic form of self-expression more than a sport, and the best skaters are so observant and nimble, even delicate,” she says.

The distinction between skateboarding as a sport versus an art does seem to partly explain the ladies' interest. 

”I don’t view it as a sport. It’s an individual act and I’m competing against myself,” says Heredia.

While skateboarding is sure to attract legions of new fans when it debuts at the Olympics, the lack of competitiveness — or rather the competition with one’s own self — stands in direct contrast to more traditional team sports.

All of the women cited a need to inhabit their own space without feeling marginalized, or ”strategic visibility,” a concept articulated in ”Skateboarding beyond the limits of gender,” a 2018 study about Swedish female skateboarders.

The study found that while female skaters throughout Sweden didn’t lack places to skate, they did feel segregated.

In certain situations — all-female contests at skateparks, for example — many women felt singled out or objectified, trapped in a ”paradoxical space” where the intense focus on them felt oppressive and, ironically, sexist.

For Botto, it’s part of the tradeoff.

”Skateboarding is designed to put you in vulnerable positions where you are constantly falling and that discourages most people from trying it,” she says.

”Anything we can do to encourage girls to get out there is a good thing, I think, even if it makes them feel different from the guys,” she continues. ”I mean, we are all so different. We shouldn’t pretend otherwise.”

A quick glance around the skatepark reveals the sheer truth, at least superficially, behind Botto’s words. 

Acne-scarred Asian teenagers, grizzled older Hispanic men barking in Spanish, perspiring blonde twenty-something boys skating after their transgender partners — the skatepark reflects a diverse human cornucopia in which everyone is linked by their shared passion for this plank on wheels.

”I always think about how I want to feel whenever I’m doing anything,” Botto says. ”I often feel like I don’t have control of my feelings and I end up just feeling...helpless,” she elaborates.

”But with skateboarding, I’m always in a positive mind state and constantly learning and growing, both as a skater and a person — and it feels like a gift,” she says.

It’s hard to view any of this as a trend, but rather the next step in the evolution of our country. 

Skateboarding, as with almost anything so quintessentially American, is merely a lens that might reveal subtle truths about our national identity.

”I’ve never really felt proud of anything I’ve done until I started to skate. It was the first time I could physically see my improvement,” says Alkenany. ”I love the feeling of freedom. It teaches me confidence and makes me feel good about myself but also makes me fight for it. There was a time in my life where I didn't try at anything. Skating taught me how to try again,” she says.

Here, the figure of the persistent American woman prevails.