The Portrayal of Solo Female Travelers in Modern Media

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From an early age, women are ingrained with the idea that traveling presents a danger to them; they risk their safety, their morality, and their purity. The traditional fairy tale “Little Red Riding Hood” imparts a wise piece of advice to young women who wish to travel alone: “As long as I live, I will never leave the path and run off into the woods by myself if mother tells me not to” (Grimm). The general consensus among the population is that female travel is very different from male travel. There is a strongly held belief that women who travel without a man are more susceptible to attacks, while solo men travelers are at far less risk. Furthermore, women have more romantic motives for traveling, while men do it for the sake of adventure. In many films ranging from classic action films with heroes such as Indiana Jones and James bond to recent biographical films like The Motorcycle Diaries, men are allowed to travel the continent with relatively little romantic attachments or safety risks that they are unable to overcome themselves. In a contemporary female counterpart, Eat, Pray, Love, the main character’s entire journey is concerned with romance and male presence from start to finish. These stereotypes have so deeply permeated society’s perceptions of travel that, even though they have little basis in fact, modern cinema continues to perpetuate them even in films supposedly advocating women’s independence.

With male-based cinema, there is an inherent air of adventure. What would the adventure genre be without Indiana Jones traversing the continents in search of treasure and battling enemies or James Bond traveling the world as a British Intelligence agent, only briefly stopping to utter a witty one-liner as the situat...

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...nal tourism." Annals of Tourism Research 30.3 (2003): 606-624. ScienceDirect.com. Web. 10 Apr. 2012. .

Jonsson, Cristina, and Dwayne Devonish. "Does Nationality, Gender, and Age Affect Travel Motivation? A Case of Visitors to the Caribbean Island of Barbados." Jounal of Travel and Tourism Marketing 25.3-4 (2008): 398-408. OneCaribbean.org. Web. 4 Apr. 2012. .

Motorcycle Diaries. Walter Salles. 2004.

"Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)." International Movie Database. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 Apr. 2012. .

Siegel, Kristi. "Women's Travel and the Rhetoric of Peril: It Is Suicide to Be Abroad." Gender, Genre, and Identity in Women's Travel Writing. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. 55-72. Print.

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