Thread by @Scholars_Stage

I have asked this question on this platform several times over the last two years—usually not in reference to vibes but hard statistics, which support the idea that women have become the main (American) world travelers.

I am dissatisfied with the Twitterati answers.

Thread.

Before I get into these answers a preliminary note. This topic makes many men defensive. It probably should. Decline in willingness to travel is a decline in appetite for adventure. I think that’s bad. We can do better.

A lot of men feel the weight of a culture that berates and demeans them—that sees both their success and their failures as a problem. In this context any argument that we should widen male horizons is taken as an attack on the American man.

(A side issue here is that many people don’t like travel, and are triggered by those who talk about traveling as some sort of moral virtue. It isn’t, and it is fine if that sort of thing does not appeal to you. It has never appealed to a certain portion of men.

My larger concern is with the men who probably would have been drawn to travel, historical tourism, or foreign adventure had they been born in an earlier era, but are not as drawn today).

So here are a few of the common answers. I think they are all seriously flawed.

1. Travel is no longer adventurous anymore, there is no danger and hardship, thus men do not do it.

2. Women do what Instagram tells them, and Instagram says travel.

3. Globalization has removed much of the intrinsic interest in travel; places are all the same. This does not bother women, who mostly want to go shopping and eat when they travel.

4. Men are under greater financial pressure. They can’t afford to take semesters off for study abroad; they can’t afford to derail a career with a few months journeying across the world, and so forth. Women have more disposable income for less demanding careers.

You will notice that all of these answers are suggested in the QT and comment thread of the original post that started this round of discourse.

Here is why I think all of these answers are implausible.

1. Danger and hardship:

On the one hand, most travel in the world before was perfectly safe. “The grand tour” was not a trip through a war zone. People sought adventure and found it, but the vast majority of tourists in both 1950 and 1900 were never seriously threatened by disease or physical danger.

On the other hand, if you want to rough it the world still has plenty of places where you can do so. Danger and adventure are not hard to find if that is your goal. You can ride a coal train across the Sahara; you can travel malarial swamps; there are war zones to traverse, unexplored ruins in the Amazon to ferret out; slums to explore.

And the most damning thing about that last fact is that if and when you do visit such places you inevitably find that most of the Americans there are women! The majority of aid workers are women; there are about equal female and male missionaries and war reporters; if you come across someone backpacking some dangerous height they are just as likely to be a woman as a man. Even in the Muay Thai fight camp I went to in Cambodia about fourth of the students were women.

So not only does danger and physical hardship still exist if you want to find it, but more American women than American men seek it as travelers.

This explanation does not convince.

What about the social media explanation—women travel more than men because they are more influenced by Instagram travel influencers?

This one has its own problems.

First, it begs the question. Why do female influencers care so much about travel in the first place? (And why do their male counterparts—on Instagram but more importantly perhaps, on podcasts—care so little?)

influencers are business people. They create content to meet demand. Why do their female followers demand and reward travel content? Who came first, the influencer living the dream of millions, or the dream itself?

The other problem is that it does not seem to match the data. The turn towards female travel began in the 1990s. You can find many media reports about how it was changing the tourism industry in the early aughts (like the one linked to below)

spokesman.com/stories/2005/s…

Instagram of course did not exist in the early aughts.

(Btw the same trend holds true for study abroads as well).

3. What about the globalization argument—travel no longer appeals because every place in the world is just another American shopping mall, and this sucks if you don’t like shopping?

I have trouble taking this one seriously. On the one hand all the stuff I said about dangerous and difficult places existing holds true here too. On the other hand, it just is not true?

There are castles in Europe. We don’t have those here. There are pyramids in Egypt. We don’t have those here. There is a Great Barrier Reef in Australia and elephants to ride in Thailand and jungle covered mountains in Uganda. We don’t have any of that here. We don’t have night markets and old ladies trying to sell you pigs blood on a stick or little towns nestled against the Mediterranean sea coast that you can only get to by boat or vending machines that give you underwear. We don’t have a city full of Japanese people or Tamils or Greeks or Argentinians.

And if none of that sounds interesting or appealing to you fine, that is completely fine—but let’s not pretend that if you travel the world and never see anything but the inside of a mall the fault does not lie with “globalization” but with you.

I DO think that the ease of buying things abroad has made some women into travelers who would not otherwise be. But it travel as a whole has become so female coded, and why you encounter more (US) female solo travelers in weird and dangerous places than you do men in the same.

4. So what of the final common explanation: that men have financial and career burdens that keep them from wasting time or money on frivolity like world travel?

I think this comes closest to the true source, but it has its own troubles.

The first and most important objection here: men spend money on all sorts of frivolities. Money spent on video games or gambling or landscaping or sports tickets or DoorDash or his new
big screen TV could be spent traveling.

In other words, what matters here is not the cost of frivolities so much as the rank one assigns them. Clearly American men tend to value global travel less than the other goods they gladly pay for.

(As a side point here: travel costs are not fixed. The main exception here is airfare, but accommodations, in country travel, etc vary widely in cost—the more rough you are willing to make it the cheaper it will be. If you travel to a very cheap region, like SE Asia you can make a few hundred bucks go very far).

Sometimes this is framed a different way. “Oh the engineering major cannot afford to do a semester abroad, and once his career starts he can’t afford to derail his career by taking a year off to backpack around Vietnam.”

This is a revealing framing that I think hews close to one of the deeper reasons for what it happening. I think many men do tell themselves this story.

I don’t really think the story is an accurate one, however.

It is not accurate because first of all most men are do not even go to college, much less engineering school; most men really wouldn’t lose much beyond wages if they decided to pack up and leave the country for a season.

Some men, a small but prestigious minority of men, are on very tight career paths that don’t allow that sort of devotion, but that simply is not the case for the majority of American men.

And even those engineers….

IMHO there is a risk aversion completely out of proportion to reality here, a real fear that the man in question cannot make things work if he even once leaves the departed track. If he is smart and capable the track is wider than he imagines it.

So what explanations do seem convincing to me?

I can think of three. They are hypotheses that I am not completely wedded to, but all seem sounder to me than these common explanations.

1. Male flight.

There are many fields of activity where, once a certain number of women start doing something men stop doing it. You see this most dramatically in the gender ratio of certain college majors.

Why this pattern exists is a thread for a different day. I’ll simply note here that it is a real phenomenon. You only need something to reach about 50-50 for an activity to become female coded, at which point men often flee from it.

This may be part of the story here.

(Another way to say this, more sympathetic to the men, is that women feel comfortable colonizing male spaces but men do not feel at ease colonizing female spaces. The general result is one long male retreat).

2. If you are Hanson-esque type who believes that most human behavior is signaling, you might consider what travel signaled in 1950 vs now. In the 1950s travel was more expensive and more difficult than today. The person who traveled was either rich or extremely committed.

Being well traveled in 1950 this made a man either look rich or richly experienced, mysterious, or otherwise extraordinary. This might really be what men are saying when they complain that travel is no longer dangerous, that globalization has reduced its allure—

The problem is not that there is no danger left in the world, or all that all the world is a mall, but that the *image associated with travel* is no longest prestigious when so many travelers simply go mall-to-mall.

This explanation (a world in which travel can be easy and cheap, and Instagram has removed all the mystery) fails if we assume men are interested in travel for its own sake. But if they are interested mostly for reputational and honor based reasons then this makes more sense.

I think this explanation makes some sense but it also has a major weakness: why doesnt this effect women’s status games? Shouldn’t the ease and cheapness of travel also make it less prestigious a signaling device for them too?

3. Video games. Really, that simple. The man who itches to see or do something novel can turn on his console. It might be that simple.

4. There is a fourth explanation, the one I think is probably most important but also most difficult to define.

Return again to our discussion of the engineer too risk averse to throw his career with a yer backpacking across Southeast Asia.

There is an unfortunate risk aversion in the 21st century American man—a sense that he will fail at life he does not do everything just right. A siege mentality. The world is against him. It is dangerous. It does not incline towards his happiness nor towards his success.

The realities behind this subjective vision of the world have been much discussed—some have to do with romantic prospects, some with the falling number of male friendships, some with economic difficulties, some with the culture of beratement I mentioned at the very beginning of this thread.

And some of those things directly play into this issue: who will the man with few friends and no girlfriend travel with?

Some of these problems are problems with Americans as a whole. I mentioned my time in Cambodia—there were more American women than American men there, but fewer of both combined than Brits, Germans, Japanese.

Americans invariably believe that the world is a much more dangerous place than it really is. You should be a careful traveler, of course—but you can safely travel in more places than you might expect.

But in some ways I feel like the contemporary American man has made the American siege mentality own.

The traveler is not a more moral person, but they are a more optimistic person. They believe there are things out there in the world to be seen, and that he or she will better off for having seen them.

The traveler looks at the wider world with excitement. It is a thing to be seized, to be experienced, to be savored.

You could say that the traveler believes that the world is their oyster.

Most men in America no longer believe the world is their oyster.

They fear if they leave the settled path they will not be able to return to it; they fear danger; they do not think they can afford experiences.

I am not going to debate why they have this feeling—it is enough to say that they do. And this feeling explains a lot about what is happening in this country. It is a feeling that has implications far beyond the frivolities of foreign travel.

/FIN

P.S. Some hard data:

P.S.S. British data that points to a similar phenomenon happening there: research.birmingham.ac.uk/en/publication…