Are we ready?

 

Safety First:

Some ground rules: First, like any experience involving sex, let’s have a safety word. A word that if you get uncomfortable at any time, you can say it out loud and drop this magazine, and everything will be OK again. This word should have nothing to do with sex. Maybe it should pay homage to a climbing icon, like El Cap. Something totally non-sexual. How about, “Big Stone?” No. “Hard Grit?” Not quite. I got it, “Ball Nut.”

 

Second, if it’s not obvious, the very nature of our discussion of sex in the climbing industry will be biased. Three in four of us are guys, so how can we possibly have any sort of balanced conversation about this? Sorry, we can’t. Odds are that even if we start out on a good note, this conversation won’t end up on the high road for very long. So Rule #2: We will accept this and move on. Apologies in advance if somewhere along the line a dick joke slips in (errr, out). Also, we will accept the very basis of who we are – Humans. We will not wonder why we’re talking about sex in climbing, because we are sexual creatures and climbing is, therefore, occasionally sexual. End of story. Rule #3: No griping about what got you here in the first place.

 

It is my unscientific opinion that the climbing world treats sex and sexuality a little different than I see in other industries. And, while it’s fun to take up the pages of the nation’s newest climbing rag with a titillating discussion of why climbers really like crack climbing . . . shape up people, that’s not why we’re here. We’re here to talk about sex in the climbing industry: and while the climbing media has been around for better than forty years, why hasn’t this article already been written? I mean . . . Sex. Dur?

 

 

Sex Sells?

So let’s start by talking about sex in the climbing industry. When I started this article, not wanting to put down my copy of the Stone Nudes calendar, I assigned a crack team of NE2C interns to do a little research (I work in an office where such things are possible). The interns were able to put down the water bong (They call it Barack Obonga) for long enough to gather some juicy tidbits. According to the interns, in the United States of America, highly successful companies regularly use sex (particularly images of attractive young women) to sell everything from power tools, to cars. Now, I’m not a trained expert or anything, but I can’t think of anything I’d like to do with power tools in the bedroom. And I guess I’ve had sex in a car, but it hardly seems like a deciding factor for why I’d buy my next one. The Point is, in this great United States of America, you don’t need your product to have anything at all to do with sex in order to use sex to sell it.

 

Armed with this knowledge, I assigned the interns to research the climbing industry, and the motivations of the top climbing companies. The interns were able to stop posting drunk pictures of themselves on Facebook long enough to find out that, unsurprisingly, most of the top companies out there sell products with the ultimate goal of making money. But beneath the surface, things got a little strange. You see, while Americans in general are happy to make money by using sex to make the sale, in climbing almost none of the top companies out there use overtly sexual imagery in any of their marketing materials. Not in ads, not in videos, not even in the one place that was invented for people to look at sex, the internet.

 

In fact, many of the top climbing companies seem downright opposed to the idea that they might use sex to sell product. Case in point: I heard a story from a top photographer in the industry about a shoot in the mountains last winter for one of the top alpine gear companies. My source continues, “After a cold night, we got up to shoot at sunrise, and it was just so gorgeous. One of the girls got out of the tent, just with a sports bra on top. I snapped away, and the photos looked so cool. They never ended up running though because the client thought they were too ‘sexy’.” Whoa, “Too sexy”? Good thing these people aren’t selling automobiles…

 

So why aren’t the top companies interested in using sex to make a buck? While the interns left the office to go find someone to buy them booze, I reached out to Clark Shelk, El Presidente of Revolution Climbing. Clark was around for the climbing boom of the 90’s and saw companies that took those risks go down in flames. I figured he’d give me the straight talk, so I asked Clark if it would make sense to use pictures of nubile young hotties to sell more gear, given the fact that 3 in 4 climbers are dudes, and dudes tend to think about sex every 43 seconds or something like that. Now, the last time I saw Clark, we were at a party that could charitably be described as, uh, innovative in its contents and activities, so I expected a righteous, ‘pissed off at the establishment’ answer, but that’s not what I got: “It’s true that the vast majority of people climbing are guys Clark said. “But the intended use of climbing products being sold is not to impress women. If we all made hair-care products, cologne, sports cars, etc., then using sex in advertising would be a good idea. But I don’t think anyone ever got laid because of what belay device they use.” Taken aback, I pressed the issue . . . Shouldn’t sex play at least a small role?

 

“Well, most of the products being sold in the climbing industry are safety-related (ropes, pads, camming units, etc.), so the sexiness is a little irrelevant.” Clark continued, “I’ll support a sexier look in climbing, as long as it does not become posing.” Strangely enough, I found that Clark’s sentiment was echoed across the industry. Climbing companies are more interested in whether or not gear is any good than if it will help them get some . . . Meanwhile, the team of interns emailed me a link to a video of a monkey fucking a coconut.

 

 

Blame it on the Media?

Whoa! No sex and no posing! Clark must hate freedom or something. I tasked the interns to dig deeper to find out what’s wrong with our industry, but they just scurried around Googling “Climbing boobs” and “Clucking Video.” I figured that if industry isn’t willing to exploit the female form for profit, the media must be. After all, to this day, the best selling issue of any climbing publication didn’t have Chris Sharma or Dave Graham on it. It was an issue from Spring 1997 with the cover featuring nothing more impressive than Rikki Ishoy climbing a V4 in the Happy Boulders. Big deal you say? I’ve got two words for you: Blue Bikini.

 

So I called my good friend, Andrew Bisharat of Rock and Ice Magazine. I asked Andrew why it is that the industry isn’t interested in using sex to sell things, and he got all “liberal-elite media” on me by turning the tables on my question. “The real question isn’t, ‘Why isn’t the industry interested in using sex to sell product,’” he said. “But rather, ‘Why don’t climbers automatically respond to sex?”

 

“Part of it is that it’s truly hard, photographically, to make a person look sexy while climbing.” Andrew said “Climbing photos often capture a person looking scared, gripped and making a face of exertion like they’re lifting weights. It doesn’t matter how “hot” you are, if your expression makes it look like you’re taking a crap, it’s not sexy.” After talking to Andrew, Clark, and several others, it became clear to me that the climbing industry doesn’t focus on sex for two main reasons: First, it’s hard to produce climbing imagery that is simultaneously engaging, sexy and authentic. Second, even when you do, it doesn’t seem to move product.

 

Sex Sells! (ish)

Now just because sex doesn’t seem to sell climbing gear, doesn’t mean several companies haven’t tried anyways. Two of the most obvious efforts in the last five years have come from a Canadian soft goods company called Blurr, and a German climbing shoe company called Red Chili. Blurr launched in 2004 with a series of high fashion and (for climbing) highly sexual ads that had no climbing imagery at all. One Blurr ad went so far as to have lesbian chic overtones with a top climber in a bra standing next to a motorcycle with a model draped over her shoulder.

 

Red Chili’s most famous ad did have climbing in it (the famous Buckston dyno at Stanage in England), but it also had a random attractive girl in a bikini standing just at the finishing jug of the problem. There was no clear reason why the girl in the bikini would be standing there, but the ad left a pretty clear message: Do the dyno, get the girl. If only it were so easy.

 

Interestingly, since their launch, both Blurr and Red Chili have taken a more conservative turn in their imagery. On the more drastic side, Blurr has apparently abandoned the sexy, high-fashion look altogether in favor of more organic, climbing-based imagery. For Red Chili’s part, while there are still attractive women in Red Chili’s ads, the most recent batch of images feature Deep Water Soloing, which, conveniently allows for Red Chili’s product to be positioned next to a woman with a really nice ass whilst still being “Authentic”. We assume that the women in the ads are now climbers, but that’s not the focus. Personally I dig these ads better than the Buckstone Dyno ads, not because they’re less sexy, but because they’re less contrived. Sure, the women are sexy, but the context of deep water soloing, like surfing, is a sexy setting, and it’s not forced to have women in swimsuits. Of course, that seems like a fine line, but the climbing community sends the message that it’s the way we want it. So why do companies that start out willing to use sexual imagery tone things down for the American climbing audience? Obviously, if it’s not working for the marketplace, then that’s one good reason. Another answer may be that the industry feels pressure from retailers over what to sell and when to sell it. Therefore, any re tail chain out there that wants things to look a certain way has enormous sway over what the industry is willing to do to sell its product. That can be bad when Walt-Mart forces companies to manufacture below cost to get shit on shelves, but in our little industry there seems to be a more progressive political agenda from the top. It’s hard to say what effect that has, if any, but the potential for the agenda of an industry to be guided by a small handful of companies is there. The industry folks that I talked to tended to all say more or less the same pragmatic thing . . . It’s just not what people are interested in seeing.

 

You’re all a bunch of liars?

Back to the “Three in four climbers are dudes” thing . . . If climbers aren’t interested in sex mixed with their climbing, that means that there are dudes out there thinking about things other than sex. Whoa, is that possible? Again, two possibilities emerge: First, that we do indeed live in a little pool of society that is evolving and progressive, and treats women closer to how they should actually be treated. Or conversely, everyone I spoke to on this subject was lying to me and are actually total irretrievable perverts unwilling to admit the truth to someone who calls up and says, “Hey I’m writing this article for a magazine and I wanted to talk to you about sex, on the record.” Wimps! Just when I thought I was coming to terms with a world not ruled by sex, I got two text messages from the interns, one right after the other. The first wanted to know where you buy massage oil in bulk. The second asked if I knew of any place in town that sells kiddie pools.

 

Realizing at last that I was unlikely to get anything useful from asking interns, I thought about what it all meant. How do we live in a community where the best climber in the world climbs sea cliffs half naked, has named the hardest route in the world “Jumbo Love”, but nobody has thought to oil him up and stand him next to a bunch of equally attractive women in the name of commerce? Moreover, if they did, we’d either think it was funny, or we would burn Chris Sharma at the stake for being a sexist.

 

Safe from sex?

For better and worse, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that maybe this, in a microcosm, is why climbing has never really taken root in the American mainstream. For whatever reason, we’re not wired the same way as “Normal people” and have chosen different values for our community than most. There are plenty of other corners of the world where sex is the only thing that matters, and if we end up being a little prudish in the name of also being respectable, that’s fine with me. And while it seems to me that someday there ought to be a healthy middle ground, maybe it’s good enough to at least start the conversation. Rational, respectful adults should sit down for a chat about climbing and feel like it’s OK if sometimes the topic of sex slips in . . . (errr, out).