‘On the Road’ - the Unbearable Maleness of Traveler Culture
I'm sitting in a hostel in Mexico and the birds are singing while the men are musing. I’ve been travelling alone as a woman for three months now, so this scene is all too familiar for me. A group of late 20 to early 30 year old semi-enlightened-emotionally-detached-zen -birkenstocked-eckhart tolle-males sit around in a spiritual soul searcher stoner circle jerk, discussing the(ir) meaning of life and how they can totally get you the best weed you will ever smoke, man. My experience of the new age movement is that it has become synonymous with man’s journey to self. I recently picked up a tattered copy of Jack Kerouac’s traveller’s rite of passage cult classic ‘On the Road’, and now I can’t help but see Kerouac’s protagonists everywhere I travel - ghosts of the past floating from hostel to commune to farm to campsite, journeying down the road (once less, now more, due to Mexico becoming an anti-vax and gap year haven) travelled. As I sit and write this article, I think of the book’s legacy, sixty-six years later, and I wonder who this road is for.
On the Road' is a story about Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, two young men navigating the open road of a hedonistic 1950s North America, the road from East to West and everything in between. The story is told by Paradise, but Moriarty is the one who captures all our attention. Moriarty is a traveller’s wet dream, he floats around the world doing everything and everyone, he is larger than life itself. For any traveller, or those longing to travel, the words send electric shocks through your system, as you experience maybe for the first time, what it is truly like to be free.
But here’s the catch - it's nearly impossible to imagine the travellers in 'On the Road' as women. And not just the protagonists, but all the waifs and strays they pick up on the way. The female characters that do exist are interchangeable wives/lovers/mistresses- Moriarty ends up with three wives and constantly switches between them. In one chapter between Paradise and a female lover, he asks her “What do you want out of life?" I asked, and I used to ask that all the time of girls. I don't know," she said. "Just wait on tables and try to get along." She yawned. I put my hand over her mouth and told her not to yawn. I tried to tell her how excited I was about life and the things we could do together... she turned away wearily.”
In Kerouac’s world, men are frantic whilst women are static, men are searching whilst women are yawning. It seems that the women have given up on their lives before they even began.
In truth, I can’t help feeling intensely jealous of Moriarty (and all his predecessors). I want to float around Mexico, jump into strangers’ trucks and sleep alone under starlit skies. But every day since my arrival, I’ve been reminded that I am a young woman travelling alone, that I am not entirely safe. On the Mexico City metro, I wait for the next train if I can’t make it to the women’s only carriage in time. I'd rather be late than be subjected to the unwavering stares of men that follow me from carriage to street. At least the carriage smells nicer, a female commuter once joked. Well-meaning old women ask me why I am travelling alone - ¿Estas loca? One day in Oaxaca City, I was pushed, grabbed, and accosted by three separate men on the street. The other night, an older male hippie ‘friend’ offered to give me a lift home from a beach party at 4am, but when I refused to sleep at his, he dropped me off on the pitch-black dirt track because I was no longer worth his time. A fellow traveller reminisced over how he jumped into a stranger’s van on the highway who offered to take him to a party in the mountains, then seemed confused and even judgmental when I replied that I would be wary of doing the same alone.
When poet Sylvia Plath wrote ‘…my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars--to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording... I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night’, it feels like she epitomises the frustratingly gendered experience of travelling, of the desire to be a fly-on-the-wall, anonymous, but of the reality that women are object to the omnipresent male gaze wherever they go. And of course, times have changed since Plath wrote this note, but with campaigns such as ‘Our Streets Now’, or the question ‘women - what would you do if there were no men on earth for 24 hours?’ going viral on TikTok, we can see that year’s pass, and the same fraught relationship plays out between women and space, whether walking to the local corner shop or down the Mexican highway.
My intention isn’t to victimise women travellers or to put women (or any people who don’t fit that aforementioned traveller demographic) off travelling- quite the opposite. I’ve met so many eccentric, wonderful, brave and vulnerable women on my travels. They very much exist but have the burden of navigating the maleness of traveller culture. The culture, not the act.
I want women travellers to take up space from generations of Moriarty carbon copies. I want men travellers to make that space, to acknowledge that the Road narrative was written for them, and that their oblivion and detachment is not only annoying but also harmful. I want the road to be repaved so that I, and all women, can walk down it, and keep walking until we can’t go any further.
