Think With Your Bigger Head
Male nomads aren't increasingly being kidnapped just because cities are "dangerous."
Morning Brew is a daily newsletter I often skim after lunch. It emails daily quick insights, mostly US-based, like elevator pitches for fully fleshed-out news from other news outlets.
On the Saving the Rhinos issue, reporter Molly Liebergall writes, "Tinder tells [Global North] users in Colombia to be careful...[Colombian] thieves consider robbing them [Americans] to be like a tax on wealthy gentrifiers." I hadn't heard of this kind of wealth tax, so I went to The Telegraph, the source of the quote:
"Some perpetrators see the robberies as a tax on wealthy tourists who they believe are visiting Colombia in order to prey on local women, according to local criminologists."
A catalyst for these muggings and kidnappings The Telegraph, Bloomberg, and the NYT ignore is possession by lust: guys thinking with their dicks.
There are nuances, but it is one cause I perceive as a 24-year-old Colombian man who lived in Medellín for five years, has worked with the US since 2019, and has been nomadic for three.
It's the same archetypical story of (novel, superior, wealthy) knights escaping life at brothels. The brothels of the modern (relative) upper-class men changed in scale–they are no longer establishments in dark alleys but entire cities. Many of these men go "monk mode" for nine months of the year, taking ice baths, meditating, and working 12-hour days, and then travel to Bangkok, Medellín, Jaco, Veracruz, and Rio to fulfill sexual fantasies they can't fulfill in the US.
These men can have sex worldwide, but they can't access it as easily in the US, where they are closer to the average Joe in every dimension: height, skin color, taste, wealth, culture, personality traits, and so on.
NomadList, a community of 32,669 remote workers, shares data about their average member, which matches what I have seen in Medellín. Most are 35-year-old white, single, heterosexual, progressive, and non-religious software engineers who work out by hiking. Many of them are the stereotypical introverted software engineers. Few partners. No game. Deceptible. They only talk to women via apps and video games. They are the nerds who didn't get the girl and spent their twenties doing everything they believed would make them irresistible. I can easily spot them because I was like this in my teens and early twenties.
Mix these lustful men, their history of rejection, a human need for love, and fragile confidence outside of work, and the tragic stories from American male Tinder users visiting Medellín sound equally horrendous but less unexpected. They resemble a Las Vegas story of a sex worker asking a man for half her fee and fleeing through the bathroom window. The difference is that these cases are outside the US, where the government is less capable of preventing them. It doesn't help that they are in Medellín, a city too many Americans associate with hot women and the violence they saw in Netflix's Narcos.
Infinite multifaceted nuances aside, put it all together, and we have horny, low-street-smart men whose confidence relies on their wealth flying for sex with women they see as objects and inferior. The statement's unquestionably judgemental tone discomforts me, but I think it's one most female and (coupled) male nomads would agree with.
In November 2023, I received a WhatsApp chain asking for the whereabouts of an American nomad who went missing around 3 am. His friend last saw him kissing a young woman wearing a tight polyester white dress at a club in Parque Lleras, a red-light district. The police released her pictures after catching her: she had dozens of perforations, dyed hair, and a dragon tattoo on her neck. She was also 6ft and had an abundant rear. I'm not saying women can't have these traits, but more often than not, the tattoos and face perforations would trigger a warning signal among many people. If Joker's Director, Todd Phillips, were to cast a woman for the role of a sex worker who kidnaps people, God bless this girl's soul, but she would likely fit the description of the girl who drugged this American. He sure wouldn't cast Taylor Swift. If Joji Fukunaga needed a Chechen kingpin to torment Daniel Craig's 007, he wouldn't cast Michael Cera, Kevin Hart, or me.
Could some average level of discernment avoid this?
Discernment doesn't equate to racism but respect towards instincts:
If my Uber driver keeps taking the wrong turn, I'm getting the fuck out.
If a guy grabs a head-sized rock and drums at the streetlight next to me, I'm, again, leaving the fuck out.
If a half-naked lady is caressing you and you aren't the type of guy who experiences this often, perhaps, consider getting the fuck out.
Your body sends alerts for a reason. Not all are rational, but as you learn about a culture, listen to the ones you attend in your country. It is better to be wrong once and pass as discriminatory than not be able to be wrong ever again.
As I did, you might wrongly assume Americans don't know about the potential danger of using Tinder for sex in Medellín. However, upon asking them, most American men I've met at bars, cafés, libraries, hotels, museums, and gyms say they have been warned. They shut down these signs because what if...I fuck.
By all means, buy a pack of Durex before boarding the plane for good luck. Take pride in your wealth, mental prowess, and sacrifices, but pay attention to what you deem common sense elsewhere. Be humble. You are visiting a culture you don't know, with dots you can't connect because you can't see. I immersed myself in American culture by playing video games when I was ten. I've gone to the US five times and have worked with US companies since 2019, and most of my close friends are from there. Still, I'm not American. I tread with care when I'm not warned and with thrice the care if I am. Friends in Texas warn me it is not impossible to get a warning shot if I piss off a guy at particular bars. I listen to their warning and don't piss off guys at bars or anywhere until I figure out how to do it without getting shot, even if it means that, for once, I won't live life under my terms.
Flimsy articles like the ones from Bloomberg, The Telegraph, and The New York Times don't bring light to any problem fueling this crisis. They tie the kidnappings to Medellín's history of violence instead of, for the first time, questioning if the humans we all wish to protect could be part of the cause.
These articles, however, do share an important message: be careful. Americans tell you to be careful, and so do locals, and so does your government, and so does our government, and so do the thousands of Airbnbs in Medellín with signs on the lobby and elevators that say, "We do not support sex work." The verbal and physical signs are there for a reason.
In the end, my message to these American men is the same I've raised to male nomad friends who mistreat locals, don't engage with the culture, and sneak drugs at clubs: If you wouldn't act a certain way in your country, why do so in ours?