From the Guardian: Traveling While Female.

I ran into this article yesterday. It’s about traveling the world as a woman, either alone or with others. I loved it.

“Apart from formal restrictions, if you travel as a woman you’ll be treated to strong suggestions about places you should or should not go.”

This is true. My boss, for example, instructed me to only get into women-only cars in Tokyo if I had to travel at night. This was a valuable bit of wisdom, though one that I never had to use since I only traveled alone during the day. There are many narratives in the world about a woman’s vulnerability, some true and some exaggerated. How accurate they are depends on the situation, and the author of the article works through some of the smoke and mirrors to provide some very good advice, both empowering and cautionary.

Two things that jumped out to me:

Being a privileged stranger

“It can be especially difficult to traverse across layers of power and privilege when you feel very small and exposed, but know intellectually that your nationality, your skin color, your income or your ability to travel for pleasure put you in a wildly advantageous position over many people on the planet.”

I know as I walk through new places that I am not only an obvious foreigner, but potentially an unusual one, depending on where I’m going and how I look. You feel a bit strange and self conscious, even if it’s all just in your head and no one else is paying attention to you. (I was surprised at how I didn’t feel this in Tokyo at all. I felt more foreign at the cross-fit competition I watched with Travis late last year.) And while you are, in a sense, at the mercy of the country and people you visit, you also have resources and connections that separate you from them in a completely opposite way. It’s a hard mix to explain, and I’m not content with how I’m articulating it here.

Matters of safety

“It’s also true that the world outside your front door is far less scary than you might think; it’s alternately comforting and terrifying to realize that there’s very little you can do to ensure you won’t be harmed, and that women around the world are much more at risk in their own homes and communities than they are on the streets of even an unfamiliar locale. There’s something to be said for doing things that feel scary, for going places where you’re a little uncomfortable and for trying things that are new and challenging.

That doesn’t mean ignoring your own legitimate fear responses; fear is one of the most important tools in your self-protection arsenal. It does mean differentiating from feeling afraid or uneasy about a situation you’re in or a person you’re facing, from a more generalized discomfort at the prospect of doing something far outside of where you feel most at ease.”

I like this differentiation she makes here and the need to discern between the two kinds of fears: the one that really tells you to haul ass and get to a safer place, and the one that is a speed bump on the way to doing something new. They literally feel different to me: I feel the first more in my upper body and arms, and it overrides all else, and the second I feel in my head.

It is disconcerting and enlightening to realize that you can be safer traveling to other places than you can be at home. Home is supposed to be safe, right? But the crime rate here in the US is far, far higher than in Tokyo. I never felt the first kind of fear in Japan, in part probably because I was with Travis almost 100% of the time but also because I did my homework before I left. I infrequently feel that first, instinctive fear here in the US, but I am far more conscious of my surroundings day in and day out — and I live in a pretty safe city. Other international trips may require higher levels of awareness and caution. I’m not saying I’m not careful (hi mom) but that you think of home as being the standard for safety and that places outside of it are less safe. This isn’t actually true, which recalibrates your scale a bit. As an American, you already deal with a level of violence higher than in some countries.

As the author of the article summarizes at the end:

“Know too that danger is relative – and some people, by virtue of skin color or location or appearance or sexual orientation or religion or economics, are far more exposed. So trust yourself and your instincts; don’t trust your assumptions or your expectations.

Go places.”