I heard that line a lot growing up, and now, trying to break into this whole travel writing scene, it seems to be the one parental rule I absolutely cannot follow if I’m going to get anywhere. The thing is, I’m having a lot of trouble getting past it.

As a female solo traveler most of the time (well, female all the time – and mostly solo) I often find myself moving through a seemingly endless global sausage party, where I can’t shake off the gender issue. It’s particularly bad in cultures where wandering around alone as a woman is the social equivalent of standing on a street corner back home in six-inch heels, a leopard-print halter, and a neon pink micro-mini.

I’ve had encounters ranging from the charmingly benign to the vaguely shady and, occasionally, the downright sinister.

Charmingly benign: The carpet touts in Istanbul nearly always got a laugh out of me. “Hello Miss World! Let me help you spend your money!” or “I saw you in my dreams last night! Please come in and have a look…” and “If you don’t smile more often, you’ll never find a boyfriend.”

Vaguely shady: A middle-aged man in Reno insisted that I couldn’t leave without a tour of the city’s strip clubs. “I can find you someplace to sleep, too… You just need the right person to show you around.”

Downright sinister: I’d been laid up with food poisoning for three days in India, too weak to walk or do much besides feel sorry for myself, when the hotel owner used a master key to let himself into my room and told me that his “village guru” had taught him a special massage technique that would get me healthy again...

And straight-up dangerous: In December I had a knife pulled on me outside a nightclub in Madrid after telling a guy that I had no intention of going home with him.

Now, obviously the knife-wielding Spaniard is not someone I’m going to try and interview. But even the milder encounters just make me shut down – am I really going to strike up a conversation with some Malaysian guy who’s been following me for two blocks heckling me? Even though I know he’s harmless? As soon as the male-female dynamic comes into play, my walls go up, and I’m really not sure how to change that.

The obvious answer is to talk to other women, but often they’re hard to find – especially in those same places where the men treat me like a cheap whore – and not keen to talk to outsiders. The conversations I had with women in India were among my most memorable in the country (“My mother won’t even send me to the market alone, and your mother sent you to India!”) but they were few (two, to be precise) and far between.

So what’s a girl to do? Any tips or advice on getting past this? Because “Don’t talk to strangers” just won’t cut it for me anymore.