They Can Make It . . . but No One Says You Have to Buy It

Battles with parents over clothing, as any therapist can tell you, are probably one of the hallmarks of healthy adolescence. Santa Monica psychotherapist Stephanie Book Koehler calls these clashes “style over substance,” and since she’s “an old hippie,” she doesn’t tend to have these problems with her two children.

“Why get upset over green hair?” she asks. “I am interested in the substance.”

So when she took her 13-year-old son, Ben, to a skateboarding shop, she waited for him outside while he picked out some clothes. In a little bit, Ben asked her to come into the store to look at the pants he had selected.

“He said, ‘These are these pants I want. And I think you’re gonna be upset. They are the only ones that fit me really well, but the logo says ‘Bitch.’ But I can wear my shirt over it so it won’t show.’ ”

Looking closer, Koehler said, “What is this?”

The logo of the company features two figures, male and female, in the geometrical style of figures on restroom doors. In this rendering, the male figure is pointing a gun at the head of the female figure. Last year, the owner of Bitch Skateboards told a Times reporter that the image is an inside joke aimed at a rival company called Girl.

For Koehler, this was a substance issue. She refused to buy the pants and says she registered her objections with the owner of the store, who told her that while other parents had objected, part of the skater attitude involves giving offense to parents.

“So would you find it funny,” she says she asked, “if you had a cartoon figure of a woman cutting off a man’s (penis)?”

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A company called Bitch.

A man pointing a gun at a woman’s head.

This is what passes for “edge” in the male-dominated skateboard business, an industry dedicated to the notion that its adherents operate on the fringe of society (parents suck, anti-skateboard laws sucks, uncool people suck, etc.) even as it engages in the time-honored tradition of exploitation for dollars. These companies, whose fortunes rise and fall as the popularity of skateboarding ebbs and flows, sponsor professional riders who confer the all-important and intangible quality of cool.

When it comes to skaters, cool is a cocktail of achievements and attitudes--extraordinary skill combined with reviling authority, a casual approach to sexism and drug humor. (Yes, even after all these years, the concentration of marijuana humor on skateboard paraphernalia probably rivals that found at a Grateful Dead concert concession.)

After an afternoon spent immersed in several skateboard magazines, notably Thrasher and Snap, you can’t help but feel a sense of admiration for the dedication of these young athletes. They have indeed honed incredible skills in a hostile world. (Skate parks buckled years ago under the weight of liability premiums, and many locales have virtually outlawed skateboarding.)

While supportive moms are lauded here and there in the pages, you get an overwhelming sense that girls are neither encouraged nor particularly welcome in the skateboard world, except as accessories. For instance, in a Thrasher piece about seven people “whose lives involve skateboarding,” the lone girl was interviewed because her boyfriend is a pro skater. “I don’t care about the girls or anything,” she says. “I’m not worried.”

Maybe it’s an adolescent pose, but the antisocial quotient is pretty high among skaters. Mothers and fathers of serious skating boys who want to raise respectful men have their work cut out for them.

When Koehler got back in the car with her son after refusing to buy the Bitch pants, she put her head on the steering wheel and wept.

Her son tried to comfort her. “He said, ‘Mom, it’s not against women, it’s just what they’ve got on the pants.’ I said, ‘Ben, this is about me, about your sister, about your grandmothers. Something is wrong when your mom takes you shopping and she ends up in tears.’ ”

The next day, Koehler decided to return to the skateboard store some other clothes she had allowed Ben to buy. She brought her 10-year-old daughter, Zoe, who had recently stuck up for herself at school after what her mom describes as a “crummy anti-woman situation” in which a boy had made an obscene request of her.

Zoe wanted to tag along, as Koehler put it, “to see her mom stand up for herself.”

So Koehler returned the clothes, she said, registered her objections once more and had an unpleasant conversation with the store owner.

But, she said, “I was totally stoked that my voice wasn’t shaking and that I didn’t hesitate for one minute. This was a man holding a gun to a woman’s head! I am a big First Amendment person and I think they can write whatever they want on their pants, but I think it’s outrageous that people would buy it.”