Has #MeToo changed how women experience travel?

That’s certainly the opinion of a New Zealand woman in her early 60s who interrupts me when I tell the story that night. “It just sounds like travel to me,” she scoffs. “If you can’t handle it, don’t travel.” Yet here I am, lady. Both traveling and not handling it.

I look online. “I won’t sugarcoat it,” writes Kiki from California. “I heard expletives of all kinds shouted at me, from ‘you’re a whore!’ to ‘suck my dick, Miley Cyrus!’” And Kiki was only in Morocco for a holiday. The BBC reports that “many [Moroccan women] simply mould their lives around [harassment], avoiding friction.” It uses an example of one woman, Gitana, who travels everywhere by car to avoid men’s comments and their attempts to touch her.

In the medina, a man yells, “Oh yeah, I want to kiss those lips” accompanied by gross noises. My first reaction? Shame and regret.

In February, the Moroccan parliament passed a law criminalizing the harassment, aggression, sexual exploitation or ill treatment of women. To be effective, it needs women to report and authorities to act—not easy when more than half of the Moroccan men surveyed by UN Women admitted to having sexually harassed a woman or girl.

When I raise it with one Moroccan man I meet, he agrees it must stop. When pressed, he also says “some women like it” and find such “compliments” flattering. Later, he introduces me to the work of late Islamic feminist, author and sociologist, Fatema Mernissi, who he admires. Morocco, like everywhere, is a contradiction soup.

As I travel around—Chefchaouen, Fes, Midelt, Dades Valley, Sahara Desert, Essaouira, Marrakech—I notice the harassment more in cities. In devout Fes, it grates terribly with the city’s boast to be Morocco’s spiritual and intellectual capital. It happens rarely if I’m with a man, regularly with other women, and constantly if I’m alone.

Sick with a stomach bug one day, I haul my floppy, aching body to an appointment at the hammam (bathhouse) that I’d paid for in advance. Pale and sullen, still the comments come (how flattering!) but I’m too weak to care. It gets easier after that; my body’s taught me how to let it slide.

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I dress conservatively though one night I wear bright pink lipstick. Local women wear make-up so I figure it’s OK. In the medina, a man yells, “Oh yeah, I want to kiss those lips” accompanied by gross noises. My first reaction? Shame and regret for wearing the lipstick. I was asking for it. Etcetera. Swiftly followed by an even sharper shame for being such a cliché and bad feminist.

I’ve been traveling for two decades! What was wrong with me? Worse had happened that I’d coped with better. Or was ‘coped’ a euphemism for ‘normalized it while swallowing a lot of confusion and resentment which was now back to haunt me’?

In Istanbul, it had been “how many camels do you want for her?” In Venice, traveling alone, it had been running the gauntlet of leery locals all day to be cornered by my waiter one night who grabbed my arm, pressed his name and number into my hand, releasing it only when I promised to call. More, and stickier, situations in France, Poland and Croatia.

For other women, my home country of Australia is the site of their troubles. The Hotel Coolgardie documentary tells the story of two Finnish backpackers who came to pull beers in a mining town where things go terribly wrong. A well-documented harassment problem exists for female backpackers who fruit-pick in Australia too.

Travel is the hard wall into which assertions that men need to change their behavior slam—and slide limply to the ground. When you’re off home turf, you don’t get to reframe how safety is perceived. Your priority is to stay safe.

These situations intersect with the vulnerability inherent in unregulated work environments and financial insecurity. In the San Francisco restaurant I worked at (with no Green Card) in 2002, the Mexican chef got so mad I’d stopped laughing at his ‘jokes’ that he dipped a rag in a vat of boiling olive oil and whipped me on the butt, leaving a painful red welt. I left that night for good; he stayed on.

Last year’s #MeToo movement saw a critical mass of women become rapidly less tolerant of harassment and abuse. It follows that we took our diminished tolerance abroad. The movement also caused us to re-think (or painfully dredge up) past incidents. So not only were the Moroccan men harder to brush off than before, they reminded me of all the years, and all the trips, I’d spent doing just that.

This year, US-based marketing agency, Mower, surveyed 400 women about sexual harassment on the road. While 54 per cent said #MeToo hadn’t influenced their attitudes to travel, one-third (mainly younger women) said it made them less comfortable traveling alone.

It seems odd a feminist movement that validated women’s experiences would make them less, not more, comfortable with travel. But that’s how I felt in Morocco. My response to the catcalls post-#MeToo was angrier and a lot less ambiguous, but my ability to make it stop remained the same: None. My literacy in issues of power and consent had soared while the realities of traveling-while-female were, more or less, the same.

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The conviction that you can “make it stop”, even at home, is a special kind of quicksand. In 2015, a girl was murdered in a Melbourne park and the head of Victoria’s homicide squad, Mick Hughes, said “females shouldn’t be alone in parks.”

The backlash was immediate. Yet similar comments were made this year when another woman, comedian Eurydice Dixon, was murdered. The Victorian premier Daniel Andrews despaired. “Go about your day exactly as you intend, on your terms,” he said. “Because women don’t need to change their behavior. Men do.”

Yet travel is the hard wall into which such assertions slam—and slide limply to the ground. When you’re off home turf, you don’t get to reframe how safety is perceived. Your priority is to stay safe. To this end, the Australian government’s advisory service, Smart Traveler, offers 2,000 words of advice; upwards of 50 tips for female travelers, specifically.

The tips are hard to flaw. It probably is smart to “act as if someone is expecting you” or “wear a wedding ring”. Smarter still to “avoid taking a room on the ground floor”, “make sure the telephone works”, check the “peephole, deadbolt or chain lock” and “use a door wedge”. And while you’re at it, “sit in train compartments with other women”, “check in using only your initial and surname”, “increase your privacy settings on social media” and avoid eye contact with men or sitting in the front seat because “it can be misinterpreted as a sexual advance”.

But such advice puts the exhausting onus on women to “avoid” being raped, groped, harassed, catcalled or even noticed, instead of on the perpetrators—usually, men. Implicit in each tip is that bad things happen because of something you have, or haven’t, done. Ah, the open road!

Running parallel to this story is another story: The Morocco I adored, wrote about rapturously and would visit again in a flash. My trip came at a pretty momentous time in history to be a woman and a feminist, causing me to reflect in a way that wasn’t always comfortable. Yet it also proved a maxim about travel I hold close: That sometimes it gives you what you need, not what you want.

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