On Solo Travel and the Feminist Problem

When I told my friends, family, and coworkers about my decision to leave my job and travel for four months on my own, I got a wide range of reactions, but one of the most common was: how will you stay safe?

I am relatively new to solo travel, having undertaken just three international solo trips before my big Asian adventure. But I am not new to travel, or to life, and this question was both expected and frustrating on a number of levels.

I get it. If you haven’t traveled solo before, the concept is daunting. I felt that way too before I started traveling on my own. But as I trot out my prepared answer for the millionth time (I research lodging carefully, I don’t party hard on my own, I carry flashlights, locks, and doorstops), I can never shake the little voice in my head reminding me that if I were a man, folks probably wouldn’t be worrying about my safety.

Worse than that, they aren’t wrong. I recently had a conversation with a man who couldn’t quite understand why women are so up in arms about catcalling. And I couldn’t quite articulate how it feels to walk down a public street in silence while a complete stranger shouts out what he likes about your body parts, keeping your mouth shut because you can’t be certain of how things would escalate if you tried to defend yourself verbally.

I don’t have the words to describe how I felt in a mostly-empty Sumatran town, listening to the rain pound down on the roof of my bungalow in a thunderstorm, acutely aware that if I had a partner, the situation would be romantic, but as a woman solo in the jungle, I was keeping my ears open instead of my heart.

There’s a strange dichotomy going on in the feminist discourse and its backlash today. I see anger against feminists, claiming that women are making up these troubles, that equality is already here, that we are just complaining. At the same time, these very words of hate against women prove to me that we just aren’t there yet. And if a woman’s big news happens to be that she’s taking on the difficult and often dangerous adventure of pregnancy, that is celebrated, whereas the act of getting on a plane alone is feared.

The sad reality is that as women we do need to take more precautions than men when traveling. But the happy reality is this: I have met so many other women, expats and travelers, living outside society’s prescribed boxes. Young women, older women, married women, single women, all taking time for themselves and all of us looking out for each other. And I met so many guardian angels on my journey. Alex, in her 60s from England, who offered to help me get my train ticket in a seedy Vietnamese town. Vitaly, in his 30s from Belarus, who drove me around rural Laos on his motorbike. A young German couple who made sure I got into a tuktuk safely late at night in Phnom Penh. Every week I was grateful for a small act of kindness from a near stranger. If anything, travel has made me trust in people more than ever before.

I have been sexually assaulted by a stranger, and it didn’t happen in the chaos of Cambodia or the Islamic nation of Indonesia or the vast madness of Vietnam. It happened in America, in broad daylight in my leafy Capitol Hill neighborhood in DC. I was on my way to work, it was 9 am, and I was on a normally busy street. For all the precautions and self defense classes we take, for every night we excuse ourselves early from the party and wear sensible clothing and pass up the extra drinks, sometimes we just get overpowered and unlucky. And sometimes, it happens right in our own backyards.

So when people ask me how I stay safe, I grit my teeth and respond. Not because I have all the answers. Because I want to prove that solo travel isn’t reckless, and I really want a world where someday, a young woman announces that she is traveling alone, and the response is simply: “Where??”