Reddit travel talk observations: dudebros think being a “strapping white guy” = safe travel.

in my experience, large white men who haven’t traveled much are the least-safe travel companions - because they often think they can fight or privilege themselves out of *everything*

Largeish dudes who grew up in relatively safe places in the USA/Europe are accustomed to wafting through a relatively threat-free life: they often lack any ability to cope with threats that don’t care about their size, gender, or race. And they do *dumb stuff* as a result

Most people who aren’t white or male - even those from privilege - have had at some shitty or threatening experiences and have learnt some attendant survival behaviors.

Not so Bradley: HE is the guy who will start shouting abuse at the 5’4 dude who is *also* holding a AK-47.

I have seen or heard first-hand accounts of Bradleys starting fights (for no particular reason) with 5’3 local men - without realizing the local guy is a 1000 times tougher and quicker than he is, and also has like four of his buddies around the corner.

Bradley loses.

Bradley is the kind of baby-fawn-in-the-woods who 100% believes the guy with face tattoos standing by the bathroom will be willing to engage in a good-faith transacation for meth, if Bradley will just get into his car and drive to a second location.

Bradley thinks this is fine.

Bradley has no problem with paying a suspiciously low amount of cash for unmentionable sex acts with a local person in a creepy back-alley brothel: he is somehow always surprised the local person does not actually care about his sparkling personality or college-essay interests.

Bradley thinks that nothing could possibly go wrong if he decides to ride a motorcycle for the first time in his life on an unlit Southeast Asian beach road at 2:00 AM after he’s consumed a weed pizza and an entire plastic bucket full of mystery ethanol.

Bradley does not realize that the very serious men at the checkpoint don’t care that his dad is an executive VP at a Fortune 500 company: they do care that he has a badly-concealed bag of coke in his backpack.

While there’s very limited data breaking down travel risks by gender, it is certainly my anecdotal *observation* that confident young white men are more likely to get into trouble than anyone else, largely because they blunder, like dumb puppies, into every possible trap.

This is also why it’s so tiresome when these same confident white men lecture women and people of color on travel safety: fool, as if they haven’t been reading the room for threats every day of their lives, in ways you almost certainly haven’t been? Shut the fuck up, Bradley.

Bradleys also take totally undeserved pride in how “street-smart” they are and at how easy it is for them to move through the world - you can tell some of them legit enjoying lecturing others on how cruel the world is to THEM (but not to me, not to Bradley!)

Many white dudes do learn, as they age, that it is much wiser to navigate the world with tact - that running away or trying to talk it out is a much better way to stay safe and alive than trying to kick everything’s ass. But that learning period can be *very extended*.

In conclusion:

racial and gender privilege deprives white boys of basic coping mechanisms, leaving them akin to waddling, weirdly-aggro dodo birds when they leave their usual habitats

thank you for coming to my TED talk

postscript for the military folks out there: many of these scaredy-cat white dude travelers claim they “know about” rough travel because they deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. Am I correct in assuming these experiences do not actually map well onto one another