I am so sick of men telling me how unsafe I am.
I've been travelling alone in South America since March of this year, with long stints in Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro. Throughout this time, there has regularly been a man at hand, ready to tell me how unsafe I am making myself by travelling without any companions. "Don't you know," they 'splain to me, "how dangerous it is for a woman to be alone; that you could be robbed, or bashed, or raped? Who would help you?"
I should be travelling with a friend, they inform me; anyway, "where is your boyfriend, your husband, your children?" Here, let me tell you how you should carry your bag, how you should sit, where you shouldn't go, so that you will be safer. Some men tell me how brave I am, considering this unsafety; and approve of my independence in voices tinged with curiosity and doubt.
Lest you engage the Australian reflex and blame this on men from 'other' cultures, be assured that I got it from male compatriots before I left Sydney too, especially when I told them the places that I intended to take my apparently lonely, vulnerable self. Don't you know how dangerous Mexico City is, an Australian male colleague gasped. (Nah mate, I don't know anything about the place I have planned to visit at all, I just spun the globe and put my finger on a spot, you know how ditzy us girls can be; why don't you 'splain Mexico City to me and I will cancel my ticket). And it has continued since I left the country. In a recent article where I wrote about Rio de Janeiro, whilst in Rio de Janeiro, men in the comments section tell me and each other about how I have misunderstood how dangerous Rio is. In another article, writing about safety in Mexico City, a man takes up three paragraphs of the comment section to tell us why women's safety is important.
In many instances of this 'safetysplaining', I am sure I am expected to show gratitude to my interlocutor, to be thankful to have met someone who can save me from my naive, pre-violently-crimed self. In others, the safety talk has been a precursor for making a pass at me (because probably I should go home with you, a stranger talking at me on the metro, instead of subjecting myself to all this DANGER, right bro?).
I have no doubt that most of these comments are well-meant - grounded in a sense of duty of care and awareness of the real risks of life in a large and unequal city. And it is only the most exemplary ones that tend to go into detail about precisely how wrong-headed my life choices about company are. Still, I am pretty sure safetysplaining is not something my 'fellow' solo traveller of the male variety has to deal with. A man travelling alone is abroad for work; an intrepid foreign correspondent perhaps, or earning money for the family back home. Or perhaps he is on a Boy's Own Adventure, a gap weekend, a sex tour.
At times, the relentless nature of safetysplaining has required me to check in with myself about whether my choices are indeed foolish or misinformed; whether I have just been lucky not to have ever been robbed or bashed or raped during this sojourn, yet; whether, to use Rebecca Solnit's words in her essay Men Explain Things to Me, I am "a reliable witness to my own life" or should instead rely on the profoundly self-assured witness of a parade of random dudes instead.
This is the damage that safetysplaining can do. Like so much misplaced discourse around keeping women safe from violence, men's fears about women's movement keeps us off the streets, keeps us from experiencing the new and different and exciting; has us doubting ourselves. Our steps falter and our bodies shrink. We become, perversely, more vulnerable. Indeed, as a 2009 study of travel risk perceptions, safety, and intentions by gender demonstrated, among women in the study, "intentions to travel internationally…were determined by anxiety," whereas in the male group, "they were determined by perceived safety". Men are just so sure of the facts, even as, in Australia for example, their own physical vulnerability to violence increases in the very same public spaces they warn me against entering unaccompanied.
Earlier this year, the #yoviajosola campaign provided a potent counterfoil to the fearmongering that attends a girl out alone in the world, showing the heavy weight of cultural prohibitions on women's movement; the way in which safetysplaining tells women they are responsible for whatever violence might befall them under such circumstances. Never mind that, as one of the campaign's leading voices, Ecuadorian writer María Fernanda Ampere, rhapsodies in her powerful essay, girls grow up with the disproportionate risk of sexual and physical violence from the very beginning, its weight just as likely to be felt in our own bedroom as in a faraway street. Never mind that, well, actually, "it is the murderer who kills me, not travelling alone".
Maybe that's the line I will take with the next safetysplainer.
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