puedo sentarme contigo?

- man sitting alone at a table behind me at dinner today

After tossing my bag in my hostel dorm, I wander out looking for dinner. I sit down at the first place that could fix a good, cheap meal. Consome de pollo, pechuga asada, y arroz. Couldn´t go wrong. As I´m eating, a man sitting alone at the table behinds me asks if he could sit with me. Como? No, I say dismissively, and though he respectfully turns back to his meal, what I really want to ask is Why? What makes you think I would say yes? Do you always ask women eating by themselves if you can sit with them? Would you ask a Mexican woman? Is this how Mexican men approach Mexican women? If so, what makes you think that I, a foreign woman, would think it acceptable? Or do you think because I am alone and clearly not Mexican, that I would not think it´s not unusual for you to approach me with such an invasive request?

It´s not just here, though. I´ve been similarly approached in Morocco, and I recognize it more as a consequence of being a woman, traveling solo, really, than anything else, because I have no other explanation. It´s not that I´m naive about motivations, which I know that, although they can even be multi-faceted, are rarely mutual if I am the one being approached (or so goes my general rule), nor is it that I am necessarily offended. But I really want to know what they are thinking when they do approach me. Where do they get the idea that this would somehow be unrejectionable in my mind? Is it TV? Is it other Euro-American women? Does foreign automatically mean easy or naive? Do American men talk to solo foreign women this way?

These are questions I don´t know if I´ll ever get the answers to, because the lines between what are gender vs. nationality-based perceptions are blurry, not to mention the various backgrounds of my solicitors. At least, it reminded me that I´m not home.