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We’ve all certainly heard how much representation matters in the media, and here’s why. In the nature of our tight-knit team, even as a blog member, I’ve had a couple peeks into the process of our marking team. Who you advertise to decides who engages with your good or service. Seems simple. As a hobby, I enjoy rock climbing, and recently I was with a friend at a local climbing gym trying out new climbs. I typically work with a group of about thirty high schoolers, and we are impressively diverse considering the climbing work is not. I’d always known that we were outstanding in that regard, but it wasn’t until that day at the gym that I really took stock. Nine out of ten people there were white guys between the ages of sixteen and thirty, with long hair and man buns, in muscle tanks and sweatpants, decked out in expensive gear.
Now, if you start looking around at materials and advertising, it makes sense. Not much sense at all, in fact very little, but a cynical brain cell will tell you it does. Free Solo, a movie about a man who climbed the face of El Cap without any support or safety system, came out a couple years ago. Thus, Alex Honnold became the face of the climbing industry for a while. Now I’ve seen the movie, and it’s interesting. But, really, an emotionally unavailable, millennial white guy who doesn’t treat his girlfriend well and lives out of his campervan is not who’s coming into Earth Treks every Monday. All it took was one movie and the stereotypes around climbing took off at full force. But the stereotypes are true. If you walk up to a recreational park with good climbing walls or into an indoor gym, you will see these ripped white guys, embodying the crazed hipster that we’ve come to expect, challenging each other to see who can do finger hangs the longest. That still doesn’t mean there isn’t room for all types of people on the wall.
The faces of climbing magazines are generally white people (now, more women are appearing too), with designer gear, looking frustrated and confused at the face of nearly sheer rock in front of them. I’ve seen a few editions of Climbing, and the covers just make me snort and walk away. I am not that climber. Very few people I know actually are. My highschool group is lucky because we are allowed to borrow harnesses, shoes and helmets for free. So, automatically a whole new group of people wash into the office each year for orientation. Because climbing gear is Expensive. Go to REI and they’ll want to send you out the door with a full set of shiny doodads for hundreds of dollars. It’s getting better, most gyms will rent gear for a fee, but it still sucks that you have to pay extra to even try it for the first time. And thanks to our raging wealth gap, companies have decided that advertising to white consumers is a reliable way to get rich. So white people walk into a climbing gym and see all these other white people and go, I’m gonna be exactly like them if I want to be good. Because that’s what we’ve been told in movies and magazines and books and in the people staffing climbing gyms. Thankfully, more and more younger people are coming in and breaking these stereotypes. There are groups popping up led by and aimed at diverse climbers hoping to eradicate code-switching within their team. I walk into Earth Treks on the weekends and after school and I see a few groups of kids of color, a group of middle schoolers wandering around toting water bottles decked out in pride stickers. But it’s sadly still a competition to see who really owns the wall. Is it the man-bun army finding new ways to spread toxic masculinity, or the militia of middle and high schoolers trying something out and building confidence?
interesting!