by JOHN CUSTODIO

As anyone who’s seen Dogtown and Z-Boys knows, Peggy Oki was one of the pioneers of the skateboarding renaissance and the only female member of the legendary Zephyr Skate Team. In the documentary, Oki’s story is given fair play. However, in Lords of Dogtown, the feature film based on the documentary, Oki all but disappears, as if her story doesn’t matter.

Mathilde Pigeon knows what that’s like. You might even say that everything she does, she does to defeat this Peggy Oki Syndrome. She runs a Web site called skirtboarders.com, dedicated entirely to grrrls on boards. She made one of the first all-female skateboarding videos (called, strangely enough, Boy Vidéo). She’s also one of the few women with a regular column in a skateboarding magazine (Exposé).

Pigeon first fell in love with the sport as a teenager. “There wasn’t a lot to do in Verchères, where I grew up,” she explains. “My brother was into it. All of the boys I hung out with were, so I started doing it too.” Did they give her flack for it? “Not at all. They were totally supportive. Whenever my brother learned a trick, he’d teach me how to do it too.”

It wasn’t until she moved to Montreal six years ago that Pigeon started hearing, as she calls it, “the bullshit”: It’s not feminine. It’s not attractive. Who’d want to marry a girl with all those scrapes and bruises?

Pigeon ignored the naysayers and kept a lookout for other women on boards. She has since recruited an impressive posse of “skate chicks” just as passionate about the sport as she is. The “Skirtboarders,” as they call themselves, get together as often as they can, to share skills, go on road trips, enter competitions, or just hang out.

The idea to make a video was a natural next step, according to Pigeon. “We watched skate videos all the time, but we rarely saw women in them.” So, camera in hand, the Skirtboarders took to the streets and parks to film themselves. “We started out doing it just for ourselves,” she recalls, “but people would see us filming and ask, ‘When is it coming out? When can we see it?’ Without even trying, we were generating hype.”

Two years, two cameras and several new lenses later, Pigeon is ready to make another video. Meanwhile, Boy Vidéo is being distributed in skateboarding shops all over the world as well as the Internet. Not everyone loves it, though.

“One guy actually wrote to tell us we sucked and shouldn’t take ourselves so seriously.” But Pigeon remains unfazed, heartened by what she sees on the streets. “More and more girls are skating, way more than 10 years ago, for example—and they’re starting younger.”

Soon, she hopes, boys will get over their insecurities so what happened on a recent Skirtboarders trip to Ottawa will never happen again. “We were in a fairly crowded park and suddenly, it was just us skating. The boys had all stopped. One of them came up to us and said, ‘Dude, you’re killing me. I fuckin’ quit.’ He couldn’t handle that some of us were better than him!”