When I told my group of friends that I was planning on studying abroad this summer, their initial reaction was, “You can’t wear that in Ecuador.” I looked down at my sports bra and short shorts and burst out laughing, recognizing that modesty has never been one of my virtues. But the laughing stopped when one of my friends gently told me, “You don’t want to get sexually assaulted.” Shocked, I thought I misheard her: such a broad assertion held such racist and colonial roots that it couldn’t possibly have been what she said. Yet, I soon realized that I heard what she said exactly as the majority of my liberal and feminist friends echoed similar concerns.
These friends, my family back home, and guidebooks warned me that Quito, Ecuador’s capital, had a much more conservative reputation than that of D.C., or even my native Southern Illinois. I was told not to trust the police to keep me safe, not to go to places where I would “surely be hit on,” and to never go anywhere by myself. While women make up nearly 40% of Ecuador’s National Assembly, compared to only slightly over a quarter of the United States Congress, women by no means have equal rights here. Over half of Ecuadorian women experience some kind of violence—physical, psychological, or sexual—at some point in their lives. Moreover, indigenous women are at a greater risk of sexual violence compared to biracial women of European and indigenous descent due to colonization and systemic racism. And Afro-Ecuadorian women have only received Ecuadorian citizenship in the last sixteen years, let alone the resources needed as survivors of sexual violence. As atrocious as these crimes against women are, I found it horrifying that instead of approaching this vast issue of gender violence by seeking to aid and support these women, my loved ones were hyper focusing on broad generalizations that minimized and normalized these traumas, demonizing an entire nation’s men—as if colonization didn’t preach this very same sermon.
The more warnings I received, the more I began wondering why people were suddenly so worried about my safety, as if I didn’t have to keep vigilant and protect myself whenever I ventured out in the States. I began having flashbacks of my first runs after moving to Georgetown that were littered with everything from barks and howls to men following and attempting to grab me. I have never been able to run in the Georgetown neighborhood without at least one instance of sexual harassment, for to be a woman is to constantly have your body threatened and endangered, no matter how many precautions you may take or how much skin you may be showing. Thus, it seemed odd to me that so many individuals in Georgetown were more than willing to point out the misogyny in Ecuador, yet failed to acknowledge the sexism we live in in the U.S.
Between my intense but enjoyable classes and my quiet nights at home with my host parents, I had yet to witness the infamous machismo until one day, after a fun-filled outing of museum hunting and city strolling, I called an Uber and sat paralyzed as my male driver began flirting with me and asking me to sit in the front seat next to him. Conventional U.S. wisdom led me to believe I was in danger, and I clutched my pepper spray from inside of my purse the entire ride home, just waiting to run inside. After he dropped me off at my block, I attempted to wait for him to drive away before entering my apartment. Minutes passed, but he didn’t leave. In fact, he kept staring at me as a cold sweat began creeping down my back, unsure who to call or what to do. After ten minutes of waiting on the sidewalk, I pretended to walk into the wrong house so that he couldn’t see exactly where I lived, something I’d picked up from other white, American female friends, and dashed into my apartment as soon as he turned the block. I brought up the interaction to one of my professors, sure she would be panicked and concerned for my safety. Instead, she gently informed me that although the flirtatious remarks were more of a custom than anything in Quito, what my Uber driver had done by waiting for me to enter my house was culturally correct: it was seen as disrespectful and dangerous to drop a woman off without making sure she entered her destination.
Despite my professor’s calmness, my gut still felt twisted in outrage and judgment: But I was uncomfortable; but I felt threatened. It wasn’t until time passed and I began reflecting on the event that I realized that I had fallen prey to the same ethnocentrism that my friends and family had, as well as my own white woman’s tears. Not only did my defensiveness create unnecessary stress over a culturally normal interaction, it led me to develop the same stereotypes I’d been so uncomfortable with before coming to Quito: that Ecuadorian men were all dangerous, and that I had to be constantly wary rather than enjoying my time there. Although it was painful to address my prejudiced fear, this acknowledgment allowed me to explore Quito’s culture like I could have never imagined before. I went downtown by myself and got lost talking to locals, having wonderful conversations with everyone from museum guides to police officers. I went hiking with another female friend and laughed so hard, looking out over the city situated between emerald hills and ultramarine skies. I celebrated at the Quito Pride Parade with my friends, crowds cheering as couples kissed and we salsa danced alongside locals. I almost missed out on all of this because I had listened to the liberal, American feminism that refused to acknowledge the cultural relativism of Ecuador, that held a nation so very different from itself to a limited view of women’s rights and only saw the experiences of predominantly white, wealthy American women.
U.S. feminists have often mistakenly believed that our western definition of women’s rights is universal across every culture and every country, as if the rest of the world shares our cultural norms, values, and sociopolitical systems. To judge another city, let alone an entire country, by liberal feminist values is a grave error on the part of the feminist community. Not only does it lead to inaccurate conclusions, it is a dangerous nod to the notion that women of color need white people to save them from men of color. Consequently, this mistake undermines a culture’s own autonomy and mimics white supremacist ideologies from colonial roots to our globalized present. I challenge us in the Georgetown community to examine our own ethnocentrism when it comes to countries we have deemed as the Global South—or any global “other”—and seek to understand what those women would like in their fights for equality and justice. Instead of telling them what they need and how we can fix their people to resemble our own, we can listen, learn, and advocate for them, giving their ideas their rightful space in our feminist spheres.
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