The sanctification of women is also the source of their oppression.
There’s a belief in the conservative segment of our society (i.e. the overwhelming majority) that 'Woman is sacred'. You’ll find that slogan expressed almost solely by men - most conspicuously by our very own prime minister who stated that 'motherhood is sacred' and urged his countrymen to procreate and have at least three children per family. Surely you would think the espousal of the sanctity of women must be a good thing, but it isn’t. In fact that mindset is precisely the reason they are still de facto (if not de juris) second-class citizens in our country.
Sanctified apartheid
By saying that women are sacred - rather than 'humans are sacred' - we’re effectively saying that the difference between women and men is sacred, i.e. their sexual difference. After all, the sexual difference is the only difference. By ascribing sanctity to that difference, we effectively state that what is the same between men and women (their intellectual capacity, their ability to work, study, learn, conduct business, have a career, create art, lead companies, rule nations) is secondary to their ability to give birth. And that in turn means that we’re saying that the primary importance of a woman is as a child-bearer before all else, and that her 'sacred duty' is motherhood. And once we (read: Men) have made that sacred, we have thereby stated that it is not only imperative but 'God’s will' that women forsake their multifaceted human potential and focus solely on the task of child-rearing, child-bearing and the home.
Therein lies the source of an ongoing sexual apartheid in our culture. The men’s domain is the public sphere (society, politics, business, the local coffeehouse, the street), the women’s is the private sphere (home). This segregation was particularly profound before republican times, when the average Ottoman household was divided between the men’s sanctum 'Selamlik' (literally 'the place of greeting', where guests would be brought into the house to interact with the paterfamilias) and the women’s private sanctum, the 'Haremlik' (Harem being from the same Arabic root as the word 'haram' which means 'forbidden', and even 'sinful'). Today, of course, this effectively institutionalized sexual apartheid has been legally abandoned, but in the large conservative segment of our population it still persists in some form.
Public/private dichotomy
The headscarf ('turban') which is essentially just an item of clothing, has today become a heavily signified symbolization of sexual apartheid. Today, wearing the headscarf is a sign of religiosity, piousness and virtue. But beneath that, it is also an affirmation (and in many cases, the imposition) of the 'privateness' of women. The rationale behind it is the need to cover up the sexually defining parts of the female body when in the public sphere, which is deemed dangerous because it excites the male - who is master of the public sphere. In other words, the headscarf is the public manifestation of the woman’s privateness, her sanctity, her 'harem' (haram)-ness, her belonging in the home when not at home. When you consider that more than half of the population of women in our country wear a headscarf of some form, you’ll see how pervasive this sense of sexual division is.
So how could this symbolization of the sanctity of women also be considered a factor in the curtailing of women's freedom? After all, even though the headscarf can often be a male imposition on the part of fathers, brothers, husbands, and overall neighborhood pressure (in the form of surveiling eyes and gossip), it is also readily adopted by women themselves. In fact, ironically, it has become a symbol of freedom for many women in a country where aggressive secularism bans the wearing of the headscarf in public offices and universities. It is a backlash against Westernization, against the increase (or perceived increase) of sexual promiscuity in society, and especially against the exploitation and fetishization of female sexuality on the part of an unscrupulous media and entertainment sector (which itself takes advantage of a sexually repressed society by offering the public photos and clips in newspapers, magazines, and on TV that verge on soft porn). In such an environment, the wearing of the headscarf is like a declaration on the part of pious girls that says "I am a virgin" - an important thing to show in order to attract a potential husband in a conservative country like Turkey.*
Class and politics
There's also a political dimension to the headscarf that reflects shifting class dynamics in Turkish society. The headscarf has become the rallying symbol of a recently urbanized conservative Anatolian rural class who feel that they have been left out of the benefits and advantages of socio-economic development and political power that has for the most part been the exclusive domain of a Westernized secular Turkish elite. It's the symbol of a class that has felt alienated from that elite and has thus reaffirmed a more introverted "traditional" identification that more faithfully reflects their own lifestyle and values - which differ decidedly from that of the Westernized elites in terms of education, identity, and overall world-view. This new-found political manifestation of cultural identity has of course been bolstered by the fact that this vast segment of urbanized Anatolians have been moving up and out of the working class for the past 10-15 years and have now become not only a vibrant and prosperous part of the Turkish middle classes, but also an alternative kind of middle class - a pious, religious, outwardly and politically Islamic middle class - to what was once the exclusive domain of a secularized and westernized bourgeoisie. Now not only has a vibrant and prosperous alternative Islamic Economy emerged, with major corporations to its name, but this economic emergence has also been reflected in the political sphere: a fact that is manifest in the Islamic-oriented AKP which enjoys a huge 46% mandate from the 2007 elections and has been dominating the Turkish political scene for the past 7-8 years. Today, the president and the prime minister of Turkey are both members of this newly urbanized Anatolian strata, and both their wives - the first and second ladies of Turkey - wear Islamic headscarves.
Although this reaffirming of Islamic values has been a protest against a (well-founded) perception of having been considered inferior by the Turkish elites for so many decades, it has also now rivaled the accustomed righteousness of that secularized pro-Ataturkist elite with its own righteous and overbearing assumption that moral rectitude and superiority reside in being a pious practicing (and not just nominal) Muslim. That has meant that in this new Islamic middle class there has emerged a whole new range of social pressures to conform to, the headscarf being the most conspicuous of them. And so we are left with the inherent paradox of the Islamic headscarf in Turkey: it is both a symbol of defiant affirmation of one's own class identity **, while at the same time being the source of oppression and pressure on those women who might otherwise not want to wear it, but feel obliged to, because it is considered a religious exigency imposed upon them by the males who dominate their particular (Muslim middle class) social sphere. In a country where two schools of absolutist dogma face each other (Kemalism vs. Islamism) you get this strange situation where one side's freedom is another side's oppression, and where those two seemingly contradictory qualities end up forming two sides of the same coin.***
So, overall, the headscarf is, for the woman who has chosen to wear it, a reaffirming of "traditional" (i.e. religious)**** values and a protest against a dominant segment of society that she feels she is not a part of. But there-in lies an inner contradiction: by focusing on the sexual differences of women (through the need to cover up their breasts, figure, hair, and in extreme cases - as with the chador [charshaf] - the entire face, etc.) and basing an identity around the sanctity of those differences in the public/male sphere, one is essentially stating that woman only has value by what she is in the eye of the male, and that that difference (which is sexual) takes precedence over the woman’s quality as a fellow human being, one with the same (if not superior) capacity to be an equal member of the public sphere alongside men, and one with the same right to represent their nation in parliament, run a business, go as they please and wear what they like without being seen (or indeed, without seeing themselves) first and foremost as sexual objects who should refrain from exciting males, or as merely potential mothers and housewives who are expected to spend their lives doing back-breaking housework for no pay because 'it's a sacred duty'. And that's how the oppression becomes concrete: after all, how can you question and criticize - let alone change - that which is sacred and God-given? To do so - by its very definition - is sacrilege.
Muslims would interject here and say that it is precisely the veiling and covering of women which protects them from being considered sexual beings, and which guarantees that they are seen as something more than just 'sex objects'. But the logic is faulty because it already takes for granted the premise that women are primarily sexual beings in the eyes of males who must be protected from being considered sexual beings by those males. In other words, someone who believes that the veiling of women guarantees them respect already assumes that they are disreputable in the eyes of the world to begin with. It rests on the belief that when a man sees a woman, the first thing he thinks of is sex, not what she has to say or do or think. Therein lies the inherent degradation of women: the assumption that she is born 'sinful' and that only by altering and hiding her natural (ironically 'God-given') form she can become 'respectful' and 'virtuous'. But therein also lies the degradation of men: the assumption that men not only naturally consider women to be sex objects first and foremost, but that they also lack the power and self-control to master their own minds and temper their own impulses and urges, which thereby necessitates that women's rights and freedoms are curtailed to protect men from their own base urges, which in turn supposedly protects women themselves from being subjected to men acting on those base urges. In other words, the veil presumes that men are little better than chimpanzees.
Ladies don't use tampons
But beyond the issue of the headscarf, there are subtler examples of our tendency to perceive women first and foremost as sexual objects. One is the insistence in public to refer to women not as ‘kadin’ (woman) but as ‘bayan’ (lady), even though we don’t refer to men as ‘bay’ (gentleman) but simply as 'erkek' (man). Why is this strange? Because ‘kadin’ in Turkish also refers to a female who is no longer a ‘kiz’ - which means ‘girl’, but also ‘virgin’. In other words, even though we can refer to men as men, we consider it rude to refer to women as women, because ‘woman’ has the additional connotation of ‘sexual being who is no longer a virgin’. And yet ‘erkek’ in Turkish is also used as an adjective to signify male sexual prowess and power (erkeklik - i.e. manliness). Yet we don't consider it imperative to refer to men as ‘bay’. Following on from this, we can also cite tampons as an example. Until recently, you could only buy tampons at pharmacies. Even now they're only found in some big supermarkets. The mere mention of tampons in a store will draw leery glances. Why? Because a tampon user is (in a mistaken way) assumed to be a woman who has had sex and is no longer a virgin. Again, women's convenience takes second place to our consideration of them first and foremost as sexual beings, which means that selling tampons in any old store is rude and immoral. So even in situations where we think we're defending the honor of women (which is patronizing in itself), we are degrading them by thinking of them first and foremost (in fact often completely) as sexual beings.
It gets worse
But if we leave the relatively modern urban scene to delve into the semi-feudal southeastern and eastern regions of Turkey, the situation of women goes from a subtle kind of apartheid to one that becomes downright appalling, to the point where they are generally considered commodities - like cattle or a bucket - that can be exchanged at a price (the bride price, or bonnet money, which is paid by the potential husband to the prospective bride's family). They are often not considered worthy of education, nor of being in any way equals of men in society. They are basically the possession of men (first the father, then the husband, and in case of death of either of them, the eldest brother or brother-in-law respectively). They must be delivered untainted (virgins) to a man, otherwise it is often considered acceptable - indeed 'honorable' - to kill them. Hence the phenomenon of 'honor killings'. In some cases, men who lack the resources to pay a bride price, kidnap a girl, and even - in extreme cases - rape them, knowing that no other man would want her once she's lost her virginity. The real atrocity is that often their tactic works, and the family of the rape victim often have no choice but to consent to her marrying her rapist.
Woman has labor value, not human value
So why are we men so zealous about maintaining our grip over women, of controlling their movements, their appearance, their behavior, their freedom, their sexuality? Just like other commodities like land or gold or arms or oil, we always have a hard time letting go of something precious, something that is valuable and profitable to us. And that's what women are - especially in a semi-feudal area. Where wage-labor doesn't exist, the labor itself is what is valuable. Woman produces: offspring (more notably male offspring), food, agricultural work/tilling, and sex. When you control a woman's sexuality, you control who she can be given to, who you can form an alliance with, how much you can make from her sale (in terms of a bride price) and whether you can't give her to a family that is already part of your own extended family so as to use her services for the common good, and also keep the bride price within the extended family. All of this explains why endogamy is so common in Turkey, since the marriage of first cousins keeps the bride price from going to 'strangers'. Therefore, letting a woman be the master of her own destiny (i.e. choosing her own spouse, or choosing not to marry at all, giving her the freedom to travel, work, in short: choose) means relinquishing a valuable commodity which the man has ownership and power over. And as we know from the history of other valuable commodities, we are not immediately willing to let go of that which is profitable and lucrative that easily. In other words, the ongoing oppression and slavery of women is as much an economic issue as it is a 'cultural' one.*****
In the relatively modern urban environment, especially among the former rural migrants from Anatolia who now form a large swathe of the overall urban population, we find a continuation of this control over women in new forms. Women no longer till fields, obviously, but men still control who they can and can't marry, if/where they can work, and also what they can/should wear, do, and how they should act, with religiosity and piousness (or at least the outward signs of this, in the form of the headscarf) being synonymous with 'virtue'. While the economic factors have softened out, the cultural stigma persists, to the detriment of women in Turkey. The statistics speak for themselves. The cases of abuse, beatings, outright torture, and murder of women from husbands (and also fathers and brothers) is among the highest in the OECD, while the number of women representing their fellow citizens in political office is not only the lowest in the OECD, but lower than even many other predominantly Muslim Middle Eastern countries.
But enough ranting about women from yet another Turkish male. It's time to let women speak for themselves.
* To demonstrate the level of paranoia and stress on girls regarding the virginity issue, non-virgin girls often have their hymen stitched back up by a doctor before marriage.
** The political symbolism of the headscarf is now so powerful that its original utility value has in many cases almost disappeared. After all, what was once an item of clothing that was intended to cover-up a woman's beauty is now often worn with no such function in mind. It's now common to see headscarved girls wearing tight clothes that reveal - indeed show off - their figures, along with the fashionable big bulge of tied up hair bunched inside the headscarf that is suggestive of long, flowing, seductive locks. This shows how the headscarf has evolved to become more of an expression of identity than something merely functional - or even merely religious.
*** The headscarf (on the Islamist side) is a good case in point: what is essentially a symbol of subservience and the woman's not belonging to the public domain on an equal footing as men, is paradoxically also a symbol of freedom and defiance in the face of secular bans against the wearing of the headscarf in public offices and universities. On the other hand, a secular, pro-Western system that supposedly stands up for freedoms in the name of progress and women's equality ends up seeming like a form of oppression because it bans tens of thousands of headscarf-wearing women from going to university, effectively depriving them of a tertiary education, all of which paradoxically has the opposite effect of safeguarding women's equality.
**** We generally confuse "religious" with "traditional", as if religious dogma is a more natural part of our culture than, say, democracy or brimmed hats, and that it has been corrupted by a "foreign-imposed" and "unnatural" process of Westernization. But more on this in another essay.
***** This isn't a problem of just backwardness or Easternness or religiousness. Even among the modern Westernized classes of Turkey -- indeed even in the most developed, modern and Western countries of the world -- women are expected to raise children, cook, clean and do housework for no pay, relying only on their husbands' handouts.
