I just finished Bill Bryson's "Notes From a Small Island" and I am left feeling jaded. Not just because of that air of entitlement in his belabored nostalgia. But because dammit, I totally want to do that! just go where the mood takes me, explore places on a whim. Britain is the perfect place to do that because it's actually really hard to get stranded with no hope of food or accommodation in sight, honestly.

1. I have the time.

2. I have the money to do this for a short amount of time, anyway, though probably not if I wanted to do proper train travel in there, on account of fares being ridiculous unless purchased far in advance.

But. But.

3. I don't feel safe. And I fucking hate that. But it's an irrevocable fact - when I travel on my own, I don't feel entirely safe. It takes me a while to settle into a place enough to lower my stress levels when I'm just, you know, out of the house. But it still absolutely sucks that I just constantly feel this (only sometimes background) anxiety for my personal safety, pretty much at all times.

And the thing is that there's not much I can do to change that. It's *not* necessarily merely an attitude change, upon weighing it up, I'm not willing to risk my personal safety on the possibility that I might just be neurotic. And this isn't a story or a tv show where you ought to step out and do something different to make a positive change. This is my freaking body and my life! I'm not willing to risk myself in order to make a point about how I think I shouldn't be frightened.

Sorry, I am sort of incoherent about it. That's how it feels, though. The threat of it isn't something that I can overtly point out, but regardless the anxiety of it is utterly pervasive. And I don't think it's just me - it's societally pervasive too. Everyone talks ominously about women travelling on their own. Shit like Wolf Creek is made as exemplary of that anxiety. Even every time my safe communities wind up talking about misogyny and personal safety and danger again it just lathers on how fragile any sense of a woman's personal safety really is, and ultimately how vulnerable we are in the face of the attitudes about the sanctity (or lack thereof) of our selves and bodies that are out there.

But it's not just about danger and violence, eh, I think in a more diffuse sense travelling is different for women and men. A man is allowed to be a flaneur, is revered for going on a quest. Television is full of men being global flaneurs, travelling the world and giving us their personal take on it (touching on the edge of the massive, problematic paternalism of the continuous background hum of colonialism, heh). Where are the women travellers, explorers, flaneuses (sp?) on TV?

Even in my personal experience of interacting with strangers while travelling I've noticed the difference. Travelling with a bloke, I've witnessed people (shop clerks, bar staff, random strangers) respond to and engage with him with more warmth and friendliness than I generally experience (even before opening my mouth and revealing with my accent that I'm from a different part of the world). Getting easy affability from a stranger in my travels is rare and cherished, I expect indifference and, on occasion, hostility. A bloke, however, gets a sense of indulgent praise. (Though, maybe this is a response to a man and a woman travelling together, rather than a single one of either?)

Anyway. It's just been stewing in my head for a while.


ETA: As I've just said to nixwilliams in an off-LJ conversation, I don't feel like I've made this post coherent enough. Though I intended this to be about what believe is a wider issue (thus posting this public rather than flocked with the inference that it's solely my neuroses), it's impossible for me to talk about this overall cultural/societal issue 'objectively', because it's not objective. The reason it's so important to me is because the affect of the issue is so personal.

On reflection, this post was mainly trying to get my thoughts in order on how the bigger picture is connecting to/influencing what I am personally experiencing. So, after doing that, here's what I'm trying to say:

There are pervasive societal attitudes when it comes to gender and travel - women are not supposed to travel alone. Being constantly told this through horror stories, real and fictional, both influences how *I* feel when I travel, but also how others behave towards me when I travel.

How much I let those responses affect me is also tied into a wider misogynistic attitude - where I'm constantly being reminded that violence etc towards women is pervasive (with victim blame etc), I'm not so willing to just "not let the travel anxiety affect me".