Three modern pirates

They may not wear eye patches or have a parrot on their shoulder, but these modern-day she-pirates are making waves and shifting paradigms, in the same swashbuckling spirit as the pirates of yesteryear. Watch out, world!

“Let’s change the motherf**king world!” Sasha Velour shouted as she accepted her crown as the winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race in 2017. And so, she did. After stunning the world with her performance of Whitney Houston’s “So Emotional” – making rose petals appear like magic out of her gloved hands and wig – the gender-fluid drag artist has been tirelessly creating a universe where beauty is multifaceted and non-binary. With her unforgettable shows, Sasha, who often performs in bald drag as a tribute to her mother who died of cancer, wants to “expand the pinnacles of beauty beyond youngness, thinness, and whiteness.” And what better medium than transformative, shapeshifting drag? In Sasha’s own words: “Drag is freedom.” Channeling one of her muses, Pirate Jenny from ‘The Threepenny Opera’ – a lowly maid who sails away with pirates after killing all the people who humiliated her – she speaks up for anyone who has ever felt objectified or silenced. “Everyone is welcome in drag; everyone is important and valuable,” she said after a recent show. As her audience, which included Nicki Minaj and Whoopi Goldberg, started cheering ‘Yass queen!’, Sasha added: “Uniformity is not very interesting or sustainable. It’s f**king boring.”

When Brazilian big-wave surfer Maya Gabeira rode the biggest wave in history last year, she didn’t just break the world record, she also killed the stubborn macho notion women don’t belong in the surf. Seven years earlier, Maya had almost lost her life to the same monster wave. “That’s it, I’m going to die,” she had told herself, while the 20m-high wave crushed her with a mass of water weighing as much as a blue whale (144 ton). When they pulled the extreme surfer out of the water, she was barely alive. Her recovery took four years and three back surgeries. Not only did Maya lose all her sponsors, she was also scolded by prominent (male) surfers like big-wave legend Laird Hamilton who told CNN: ‘Maya doesn’t have the skills, she should never have been out there in that kind of surf.” Oh really, Laird? Maya came back with a vengeance, not only for herself, but for all women struggling in a male-dominated world. “I wanted to make the impossible seem possible,” Maya said after taming the tallest wave like a modern-day pirate queen. “So that it’s easier for the next woman; in surfing and all other areas of life.”

“Wanking to Obama, yes! I hear you, I hear you!” women in the street would yell at Phoebe Waller-Bridge after seeing ‘that’ scene in ‘Fleabag’, the BBC hit series which she created, wrote and starred in. In it, she masturbates to a video of Barack Obama giving a speech, while her boyfriend is sleeping next to her. Finally, a female character who says the unsayable, does the undoable and defies every stereotype of feminine behavior! Sick of the pressure to look and behave like ‘an ideal, sexualized version of a woman’, Phoebe created her own cultural paradigm by writing roles that showed women indulging their appetites and venting their anger. “‘I think you’re going to freak out a lot of men with this show,” her brother told her when he first saw ‘Fleabag’, to which Phoebe replied: ‘Fucking good, it’s about bloody time.’ (Yes, she curses like a pirate). Her next series, ‘Killing Eve’, a black comedy/spy thriller featuring two badass female protagonists who could at any moment ‘team up, have sex, or kill each other’ was also a huge success. And when Phoebe was asked to spice up the script for the latest James Bond film ‘No Time to Die’, it was official: everybody wants a piece of this modern she-pirate’s raw, swashbuckling swag.