Dangers of traveling while female

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When I was younger, I wanted to travel like Patrick Leigh Fermor, who famously spent 1934 walking from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul. I envisioned myself sporting leather satchels and lace-up boots, doffing Panama hats, spouting demotic Greek. I fantasized about riding horses through the Caucasus and letting falcons loose upon the Black Sea, about “living up in the mountains, dressed as a shepherd,” as Fermor had done. It was a fantasy cobbled together from all the books of all the travel writers I loved the great writer-scholars of a certain generation, who saw the whole world as raw material: shifting, uncertain geography for them to shape and create anew in their words.

Then I turned 15, and traveled alone for the first time to Paris, a city I had once lived in, and which I knew well. I laid out maps. I made plans. I would bolt down every alleyway. I would say yes to every invitation. I would lay lilies at Oscar Wilde s grave. I would sit at cafes in Montmartre until some itinerant, velvet-trousered poets came to scoop me up out of my innocence; they would take me with them to secret courtyards, up the stairs to hidden salons, and there we would drink absinthe and I would scribble down my experiences and then, at last, I would know what it meant to have an adventure.

I never had an adventure.

I was skittish, awkward, hardly capable of forming words to boys my own age, let alone 40-something men well-practiced in the art of knocking gawkish girls out of their comfort zone. I spent my week in Paris squirming out of conversations, stuttering out fake phone numbers, learning all too quickly to avoid those places where I might be considered a target. Cafe terraces, park benches, crosswalks of city streets. My desire for experience, for openness, for adventure, had been overpowered by a stronger imperative, one I had internalized without realizing it: Don t get yourself raped .

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Even today, my male friends look at me with confusion when I try to explain how powerful, how completely prevalent is don t-get-yourself-raped in my everyday life. It s the reason I get my keys out a good 10 minutes before I reach my apartment, keeping them between my fingers in case I need to use them as a weapon against an assailant. It s the reason I take taxis instead of walking home alone late at night. It’s the reason I always walk in the middle of the road, steering well clear of alleyways or obscured corners.

But it s the reason, too, for more subtle variations in behavior. I m no longer 15, and I am far more capable of turning away aggressive strangers than I was that ill-fated summer, but as a travel writer, I am painfully conscious of how easy it is for a moment s lapse to turn me from an observer – an all-seeing eye, freely taking in a Tbilisi hilltop or a Turkish terrace – into a target.

It s the reason I turned down the recent invitation of a well-known Georgian writer to visit him at his winter home in the mountains. It s the reason my heart starts pounding when the waiter in Tbilisi brings me a complimentary plate of baklava when I ve only asked for a coffee. Not because I fear that this writer, or this waiter, will drag me into a darkened room and rape me. But rather because the social codes I have learned to fend off unwanted advances – abruptness, bordering on rudeness; the refusal of any special favors or gifts; the subtle avoidance of giving off the “wrong impression” – are diametrically opposed to the openness, the willingness to go anywhere and do anything, that form the genesis of every good travel story.

Of course, many of my decisions are instinctive, ritualistic rather than practical. I am statistically more likely to be raped on a night out with friends in England than by a stranger in Yerevan, after all, and I know that however tightly I hold my keys, however forcefully I refuse free baklava, the only thing that will determine whether or not I end up raped is whether or not I end up in the presence of someone who has decided that my consent is immaterial. Nevertheless I have internalized a series of rules – do not smile at a stranger, never follow a shopkeeper into a back room, never accept a ride, never tell a man where you re staying – that prevent me from following in Fermor s footsteps, from sleeping in haystacks or barns like, as he puts it, “a tramp, a pilgrim, a wandering scholar,” much as I might like to.

“Can t you just get over it?” a male friend asked me once, accusing me of clinging to cowardice in the guise of common sense. Certainly, it is possible to attribute some of my reluctance to skittishness: I have swallowed concepts of self-preservation over and beyond what I need to keep myself from ending up at the bottom of the Bosphorus. And I wonder, sometimes, whether women are too often taught to prioritize a nebulous idea of “safety” over adventure. My male friends laugh about the scrapes they have gotten into – arguments, fist fights, muggings – dangers that have left no lasting damage.

Can I not adopt the brisk attitude to danger of the Irish travel writer Dervla Murphy, who once fended off a would-be rapist with a .25 pistol?

Yet behavior taken as mere geniality in men – accepting rides or invitations, staying for a cup or tea or dinner, even engaging in idle conversation – is often taken in women to be a sign of sexual willingness. My male friend can accept a newfound friend s offer of a drink, of a meal, of a sofa bed, without being presumed to have given sexual consent; I have no such luxury. Once, after sustaining a bad fall in Tbilisi, I allowed a neighbor to give me a lift to the local pharmacy and help me buy bandages to stop the bleeding. Disoriented from my fall and the blood loss, and eager not to appear ungrateful, I gave him my phone number. Over the next few days, I fielded between five and seven phone calls a day, as my neighbor demanded a date with me in no uncertain terms. As far as he was concerned, my willingness to get in his car was not the result of a medical emergency, but rather a proclamation of sexual desire.

To be a Patrick Leigh Fermor, a Colin Thubron, a Norman Douglas or Paul Theroux, requires always saying yes. To not-get-raped, according to every lesson I – and so many other women – have been taught, so often requires saying no.

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A few months ago, I was sitting over tea with a much older travel writer whose works I admire. I mentioned to him that I was having trouble reconciling the idealistic notion of myself as a fearless lady adventurer with the safety imperatives demanded of a woman alone. I told him how the avenues open to Patrick Leigh Fermor, to Norman Douglas, to Richard Francis Burton, never fully felt open to me.

He considered. “Of course, I went to boarding school,” he said dryly, name-checking a famously posh English institution. “It never occurred to me that I wouldn t belong anywhere.”