Before I left for Ecuador, a friend of mine told me, “Now, Lizzie. Remember what I’ve always told you about Latin American men. The will harass you on the street. They will harass you in the clubs. Don’t go anywhere with one by yourself. Buy your own drinks. And above all, don’t trust any of them.”
Indeed, after arriving in Ecuador I have been catcalled at more in three months than I have in the entire rest of my life. The initial warning was reinforced by subsequent ones: when I told friends I was going to the beach for Carnaval, they said, “Watch out for the sketchy men.” When I said I was going to the jungle, they said, “Watch out for sketchy men.”
How do you balance staying safe while not perpetuating stereotypes?
Let’s look at their advice carefully: basically, what they were warning me against was standard “Stranger Danger.” As a young woman, I have to be cautious in pretty much any location, and so the advice is applicable anywhere. If I were in the States, I certainly wouldn’t go anywhere alone with a strange man. And when it comes to drinks in clubs, I might let someone buy one for me but I would definitely not put it down or leave it unattended or uncovered.
Interestingly, however, my friends’ advice was not offered simply in the spirit of “offering help for a young female traveler.” There was always a pejorative edge to their words, a sense that on some level Latin American men were either too “macho” or, as a result of being macho, too hopelessly backward in their thinking, to even be worth interacting with. Their advice was always saturated with cultural judgment. In an extreme sense, my friends were implying that every overly friendly Latin American man is stuck in the Stone Ages, believes women are objects, and is secretly a potential rapist.
Yes, there are men who think like that. But there are also women who are trapped by misogynist mindsets. And men and women who aren’t. In that sense, Latin America is no different than anywhere else in the world. But, unfortunately for Latin America, the stereotype of macho culture has attached a stigma to this region in the minds of women I know.
Fighting that stereotype isn’t simply a matter of acting like it doesn’t exist, or taking every opportunity to lecture every Ecuadorian man I meet on how bad I think macho culture is. As a visitor, there are only two things I can really do. First, navigate it to the best of my ability and hope that social forces in Ecuador improve attitudes towards women so that at least outright harassment isn’t tolerated. And second, when it is my turn to give advice to young female travelers, I will tell them: Watch out for the sketchy men—but also keep your eyes out for the good ones.
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Great post. I’m traveling in Ecuador, and while I write this from a male perspective, from what I’ve seen machismo is alive and well– far more so in rural settings than in your typical Quito club scenario. I’ve actually read about “neo-machismo” in Ecuador as a rising response to the growing feminist movement in this country. Have you heard of that? I don’t know if it’s a widely-accepted term.