The beach has long been a privileged site in Australian culture, and surfers have become icons of it. These men are often referred to as straight as steel, strong as granite, austere and inviolate. Drawing on over three decades worth of surfing I unpack this hegemonic understanding of men who surf, and reveal in its place the importance of feelings and bodies to their lives. Through an analysis of going surfing I articulate the role feelings and bodies play in how men belong, how they bond with their ‘turf’, come to understand themselves as masculine, and how they learn to do masculinity.

In today's media environment, information is not simply passed from producers to consumers, but is mediated by participants of new media cultures, including information on sexual health. In focus groups held in Sydney and regional Australia in 2011, we asked young people aged 16-22 about the potential for sexual health promotion via Facebook and other social media. Our findings point to the complex ways in which young people use social media, and the unlikelihood of traditional take-home sexual health messages having traction in social media spaces. Five key aspects which emerged were: the participatory culture of social network sites; the stigma of sexual health, especially sexually transmitted infections (STIs); young people's careful presentations of self; privacy concerns; and the importance of humour in sexual health messaging. Fears of bullying and gossip (or 'drama') were also likely to prevent the dissemination of sexual health messages in this environment. However, humorous online videos were noted by participants as a significant way to avoid stigma and enable the sharing of sexual health information. The young people in our study were interested in sexual health information, but did not want to access it at the cost of their own sense of comfort and belonging in their social networks. Any sexual health promotion within these sites must be understood as a site-specific intervention.

This article explores the sensual world of men who surf. Self-reflexive and fictocritical in tone, it meditates on how many studies of masculinity tend to separate the social and bodily. The article maps a way to pull bodies and feelings back into such studies in a productive manner. Affect theory is used to evidence how doing masculinity is built on feelings and intimacy. In turn, the article grounds gender in the activities of everyday life that function to bring together the sociological, psychological, and biological. Furthermore, the article argues that by researching through bodies, it is possible to complicate traditional tropes of masculinity that position it as stable and unemotional. Most important, the researcher's body is shown to be integral to any imagination of how the surfing culture works.

Leisure now involves becoming-with pollution. In this article, I work with the concept of “polluted leisure” to better understand and respond to the enmeshment of pollution and leisure in late capitalist societies. Pollution and leisure are argued to be mutually shaping. Evidence for the argument is provided through a pilot study of “intoxicated” surfers at a postindustrial site. The study proceeds through a more-than-human paradigm. Nonhuman and material agencies are fused with socio-economic (specifically capitalism) and human subjectivity issues, for example, gender (specifically masculinity). A “wet ethnography,” an experimental multimedia transdisciplinary methodology, is employed to notice and articulate the dynamic complexity. It is concluded that the busyness of pollution complicates leisure discourses that bifurcate nature and society, natural and artificial, subject and object that shape environmental politics, sustainability efforts, and notions of wellbeing achieved through encounters with Blue Spaces.

Sport as a mechanism to build relationships across cultural boundaries and to build positive interactions among young people has often been promoted in the literature. However, robust evaluation of sport-for-development program impacts is limited. This study reports on an impact evaluation of a sport-for-development program in Australia, Football United®.