A comment on my post about feeling safe in Mexico made me think that I should write about what it feels like to be a woman traveling solo in Mexico. I’d been warned about the macho culture here and that men are prone to harassment and cat calling.<\/p>\n
As a preface, let me just say that as an unattractive woman who has been overweight most of her life, I am unaccustomed to receiving any attention from men unless it’s negative. So I had no concerns about traveling solo to Mexico, believing myself to be fully immune to the kind of sexual harassment I’d been warned about.<\/p>\n
Well, within days of the U.S. part of my trip I discovered that the weight loss apparently counts for something because for the first time in my life, I was getting positive comments from random men on the street. I wouldn’t consider any of it threatening or harassing, although I suppose it is inappropriate. It was a little bewildering because I still look and dress the same.<\/p>\n
My first experience with Mexican men was walking down the main street in San Carlos every morning to get my coffee. Just about every single man I passed would say hello to me and smile. There was absolutely nothing inappropriate about the comments and so I would smile and sometimes say hi back. That was it. There was no catcalling, no sexual innuendo, nothing.<\/p>\n
It’s been much of the same on Isla and in Maz. Yesterday in Maz, a guy on a motorbike actually honked at me, turned back, did a double take, elected to do an illegal U-ey, and came back up along side me and tried to chat me up. I said, “I’m in a hurry and don’t have time to chat,” and off he went. That was as close as I’ve come so far to the harassment I was told to brace myself for…<\/p>\n
So all that to say, my experience so far as a single woman traveling in Mexico is positive. I feel respected, but am aware that I’m not invisible. Like anywhere else, I would be careful having too much to drink (and would watch my drinks), but I feel fine walking around Isla or Maz in a sundress.<\/p>\n
It will be interesting to see if the situation is any different the day I go deeper into Mexico.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A comment on my post about feeling safe in Mexico made me think that I should write about what it feels like to be a woman traveling solo in Mexico. I’d been warned about the macho culture here and that men are prone to harassment and cat calling. As a preface, let me just say […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[815,14,635,814,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mazatlan","category-mexico","category-north-america","category-sinaloa","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1382"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1382\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}