Except it’s even safer than hitchhiking because you can look people up before you get anywhere near them.
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While he might not have gone all the way to rape, that guy’s creep factor was practically off the scale and the author was entirely justified in her discomfort. Starting off the entire exchange with a lie (the profile) really seals the deal.
The proper response upon seeing that there was no couch was go to LOLNOPE and suck it up with a real hotel for the night. And really, when you’re going to a place with no reviews and then there is a mysterious change shortly before you arrive, you really should be working out alternative plans. Hindsight is 20/20 though, and when you’re traveling in a foreign country it’s hard to change up your plans on the fly.
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I’m always surprised at how many people decide to wing it rather than plan even a few days in advance. On a busy weekend, we can get 10-15 general requests for that night with people who just randomly decided to show up in the city and only now remember that they need a place to stay for the night.
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As a traveler myself… The problem with planning in advance is that you create obligations that cause you to miss out on the amazing opportunities that the trip is often for. Or that you’ve seized one of those opportunities, and it was totally worth it, but you are now “off plan”.
I’m guessing that comes with a lot of the people who are into couch surfing. I’m sure there are a lot of free-spirited types who are willing to just go with the flow wherever their adventure takes them. They aren’t big on detailed planning to have every bit of their trip structured in advance to meet their exact specifications. If they find a couch in your city, great. If not, they keep on trucking to the next town where one’s available. If they don’t find one on the internet, they hit a bar or other gathering place where folks that will fit in with them might be and will try to strike up an opportunity to crash on a couch with one of those folks. Failing that, it’s a night in the car or a night under the stars.
I’m a little more set on things and a little pickier now as a middle aged lady than I was in my early 20’s, so I’m unlikely to take a trip, even a quick weekender, without a full itinerary planned that includes well-chosen accommodations already arranged and even a plan B in mind for if something goes wrong with those. But when I was a girl with a lot more flexibility and looser standards (and less money), I next to never planned a trip much more fully than maybe knowing the destination or sight or even that I was headed for.
In 1998, I was looking for an apartment in Boston while I lived seven hours away. I found some roommate classified ads page–all free, all HTML 1.0. But it was pretty well organized, and I didn’t have enough money to actually pay an agent to set me up with someone, as was the fashion at the time.
It worked preposterously well. I was completely spoiled for choice. And the level of trust was astonishing. It got so that I started worrying about all the people whose rooms I didn’t take: what was that 19-year-old BU sophomore living with her 16-year-old sister going to do when the next strange 20-something guy from out of town that she invited sight-unseen to live with them turned out to be… any of the things you’d worry that he’d be? How could all these nice people be so stupid?!
Needless to say, I was completely oblivious to the fact that I was being equally naïve and trusting. And I’m sure that within a few years that same site cost $100 to post on, was riddled with scammers and psychos, and was selling our personal data by the ton. But it was kind of an amazing experience.
Do I have a point? Hmm… “people (including me) eventually ruin everything.”
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My first attempt at couchsurfing was enough to ruin it for me forever. This one guy with good reviews didn’t bother to show up at his place at the appointed time, and after finally tracking down a pay phone to get in touch with him, he told me it was unlocked and just to head on in. While there wasn’t moldy food lying around or bugs crawling about, it had evidently been the site of a wild party and was pretty disgusting by any reasonable standards. I made alternative arrangements.
So next time I went with AirBNB – and my host neglected to inform me of the salient point that the sofa on which I was sleeping was in his uncurtained living room with big windows. Ugh.
As for hosting, the various horror stories out there are enough to put me off. The risk of winding up with someone who will quietly abscond in the night with some of my possessions seems too great.
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I wouldn’t want to come off as anti-spontaneity, just saying that people would be a lot less likely to get into risky situations if they asked early enough to be able to choose between a number of options. TBH though, I’m a complete hypocrite in that regard: one of my best traveling experiences was taking my bike from the city I lived in in Northeast China and cycling up to Inner Mongolia. Each evening I’d find a small town and stay with someone new. I only had to pay for one night, all of the other times I had a great experience meeting new people who were extremely welcoming.
It was stuck for me until I clicked through to… something, and then hit the back button. Scroll bar showed up just like normal.
Even the “dragging the cursor down” technique doesn’t work for me (OS X 10.9, Chrome latest). Can’t scroll what-so-ever. What a crappy design.
Edit: Going away from the site and coming back fixed it. I assume some fundamental piece of the UI is download asynchronously, but needs to be there at the start, so only works if you have it cached…
ANYWAY:
Do all Couchsurfing hosts post phone numbers? I would think that a good first screen would be to call them. At the very least this would help alleviate some of the gender-faking…
Also, aside from the rest of the guy’s 100% creepiness, as a Roman and a Vespa driver I can say that being held at the waist makes it significantly easier to drive, and is safer, than being held at the shoulders. This is difficult to explain to a first-time scared passenger who is giving you a death-grip on the arms. That said, all scooters with passenger seats also have extra handholds on either side of the seat, and so a driver should always tell their passengers that.
That and holding someone around the waist isn’t particularly sexual anyway. It’s not like he said “you need to reach around and hold my fully erect penis for stability around the corners”. I chalked up that bit of the story to the guy already being creepy and making her extra defensive.
Before The Internet, our band on tour would routinely ask the audience if there were any couches available. Not only did we almost invariably get a free place to stay, the accommodations usually included freely-offered drugs and sex.
I’m sure being four guys who were into that sort of thing instead of a single woman who is not helped.
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Being literally rock starts probably helped too.
You need not even be rock “stars” for that scenario to be a common way of handling accommodations. Just about any out-of-town band can play a show and make it known they’d appreciate a place to crash and they’ll likely receive an invitation to hang out and party and crash somewhere after the show. But typically where I’m from, the most common way of handling that is to make connections with the other bands on the bill or in the scene that are helping arrange/promote/support your show and let them know ahead of time that you’d like to crash someplace. Those local musicians/scene folk usually will pull together and happily host the after-party and a place to sleep.
The drawback is that, like Maggie mentioned, is the payment is in being sociable. If you’re up for the after-party/after-show hangout, it’s an added bonus. Free booze, or drugs, or sex, or just in general fun camaraderie with fellow music lovers. But if you’re exhausted from the road and the show or a little hung over from the previous night’s fun or have to be rested for the next day, it may not be an optimal arrangement. You get worn out sometimes and might rather spend a soberer night in the van in a parking lot to get some sleep even if you have to do it sitting up while your bass player snores like a freight train and leans on you, than spend a couple more hours playing “rock star” party people with your local hosts.
That waist-holding actually raised my eyebrows, but for a somewhat different reason.
I’ve ridden on the pillion of plenty of two-wheeled motorised vehicles, and one thing most motorcyclists have had in common has been their almost universal desire for the passenger to keep their hands off the driver and on the pillion handles, regardless of the amount of sexual attraction between the person on the pillion and the driver.
I suppose YMM very much V, and there are plenty of drivers (possibly people who take riding a bit less seriously than the people I’ve been associating with) who like the passenger to hold onto their waist. (Though I agree that that is probably significantly better than someone hanging onto some other part of your anatomy, e.g. shoulders.)
It could be that predators have a finely honed ability to find the most vulnerable targets, or it could be that the most vulnerable are least able to filter out predators.
But either way, the data is compelling. Sites like craigslist and ABNB and couchsurfing ought to be thinking about joining the trauma-informed movement.
source: http://acestoohigh.com/got-your-ace-score/
@maggiek this is definitely a science beat that you could dive deeper into, and it overlaps with the abuse topics covered by @xeni and the anti-sexist stances that @frauenfelder, @doctorow, and @beschizza often espouse.
links of relevance
– http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=9824
– http://acestoohigh.com/2012/02/13/tarpon-springs-may-be-first-trauma-informed-city-in-u-s/
– http://www.thenationalcouncil.org/topics/trauma-informed-care/
Yeah… if being in a slightly dingy places or a less than awesome sofa is going to put you off, these services really are not for you. Personally, I am pretty content so long as the rats don’t chitter too loudly while I am trying to sleep, and even then, I tend to sleep pretty hard, so they are going to have to be loud or scurry over my face or something before I get really annoyed. A large part of the fun of couchsurfing is spinning the big roulette wheel of experiences and seeing what kind of story you are going to get, and some of those experience might be along the lines of “that place was nasty, those guys were crazy partiers, and I got no sleep!” If you wander in with the attitude that even if shit goes completely south, you are walking away with a great story, couchsurfing makes a lot of sense.
A “couchsurfing style” vacation is a different type of vacation. It isn’t good or bad, just different. It is a different experience from staying in a hotel and planning out what attractions you are going to see each day. It isn’t for everyone, but I personally think everyone should give it a shot at least a couple of times.
More importantly, when you travel (or have any life experience for that matter) and you do run into a shit show, turn on your zen and consider that the shittier the experience, within reason (we don’t want permanent physical or psychic harm), the better the story. No one cares that you went and saw the Eiffel Tower like a few hundred million other tourist. Having your wallet stolen, getting held by French police, and bumming a couch from a guy who turns out to be a mad artist who paints in the nude, while all horrifying and uncomfortable at the time, makes a vastly better story and make you more interesting person.
Honestly, as long as the damage isn’t permanent, I prefer a shitty time to a mundane time. I’ll take a horrible date, trip, or vacation over a boring one any day of the week. Boring things fade into gray. Horrible times that don’t do lasting harm are things you get to laugh about for the rest of your life.
I suspect the difference may strongly come down to European vs North American here. In Italy I would have no problem holding onto the waist on and male or female friend, or having them hold on to mine. Much like these blokes, but perhaps a little less English-looking:
but then again, in Italy I kiss my male friends on the cheeks every time we say goodbye. Here in the US it’s considered a little odd.
Edit: I realize your post suggests that the drivers don’t want hands on them even if both parties are happy with touching. In that case it could be more about the different geometry and speed of a Vespa vs a motorcycle?
Edit edit: In case anyone’s reading this and didn’t see my first post – this is just musing about the customs of waist-holding on a Vespa, not defending the guy in the story. The actual guy in the story was a creep for plenty of other reasons.
I’m actually also from Europe (just slightly insomniac), and I am talking about people who aren’t opposed to touching per se (in fact we’re pretty touchy-feely in general), just when riding a bike (e.g. my cousin who’s more like an older brother to me and my then boyfriend - I’m of the female persuasion, btw). Holding onto them is apparently “distracting” and “inhibiting their movements”, and the passengers who cling onto them will be getting less rides than the ones who don’t.
All in all, the expectation of the pillion passenger is to be as much a part of the bike as they can, and not disturb the driver. What can I say, I’m starting to suspect that they take bike riding a bit more seriously than most people. Now that I think of it, I’ve only ever gotten that instruction from the people I first started riding with, and have just acted the same way ever since. Nobody has ever told me to hold onto them, and I’ve always assumed that the way I learned it in the beginning is what riders prefer in general, and that some people are just more tolerant of things when riding with e.g. their SO.
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