Feb 17, 201210:13 AM

A Guide to the South Bay Surf and Action Sports Scene

Pass the Sex Wax, please.

I hope everyone had an oh-so romantic Valentine's Day filled with flowers, chocolates, and as many chuckling-inducing euphemisms (most of them involve baseball for some reason) as I can think of. With that said, let’s switch sports and focus on surfing for a moment.

It’s a common conception (no pun intended… kind of) that surfing and sex go hand in hand. Part of it has to do with the state of dress that’s usually involved when one surfs; generally, you’re not wearing all that much. In fact, the very first surfers tended to surf naked.

In ancient Hawaii, men and women surfed in the nude and considered surfing as a sort of foreplay. Prospective lovers would openly flirt in the line-up and show off to one another while surfing. If they “happened” to share a wave together, custom dictated that certain intimacies (i.e. waxing the stick) were expected to occur once they returned to shore.

When American missionaries arrived in Hawaii during the mid-1800s, they did their best to have the sport banned — promiscuous sex and Victorian squeamishness didn't really mix all that well. The sport floundered for decades until it was resurrected as a tourist attraction during the early 20^th century. Local “beach boys” were hired by hotels in the Waikiki area to teach visiting houles (Anglo tourists) how to surf. They were also encouraged to “entertain” lady tourists as well: the Encyclopedia of Surfing stated that, “The Waikiki beachboys… were known to be great seducers of visiting mainland women, and ‘surf lessons’ sometimes included a half-submerged ‘coupling’ out past the line up while using a surfboard as a floatation device.” Dinner and a phone call the following morning were probably not included in the lesson package.

It was around the same time that the great Duke Kahanamoku (himself a former beach boy) traveled around the world promoting the mighty sport of surfing. Advertisements in the US and Australia usually depicted him gleaming wet and flexing (no joke) while riding a surfboard—even in the early 1900s, ad execs were already pretty familiar with the idiom “sex sells.” And who would’ve thought that a one-piece, wool bathing suit could be sexy?

In the ‘50s and ‘60s, Hollywood jumped on the proverbial bikini bandwagon with a slew of surf exploitation flicks, like the overtly complicated Muscle Beach Party (as you can probably tell by the title), and in the ‘70s, several well-known professional surfers—like Mike Purpus and Angie Reno—posed in the nude for several magazines including Playgirl. That trend has continued in all its naked glory, as just recently a number of top female surfers, including world champ Stephanie Gilmore, posed in their birthday suits for ESPN’s body issue.

So, there you have it, surfing and sex go together like resin and fiberglass—they’re just made for each other.