New Desires, New Selves

Sex, Love, and Piety among Turkish Youth

Gul Ozyegin

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781479852086
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

As Turkey pushes for its place in the global pecking order and embraces neoliberal capitalism, the nation has seen a period of unprecedented shifts in political, religious, and gender and sexual identities for its citizens. In New Desires, New Selves, Gul Ozyegin shows how this social transformation in Turkey is felt most strongly among its young people, eager to surrender to the seduction of sexual modernity, but also longing to remain attached to traditional social relations, identities and histories. Engaging a wide array of upwardly-mobile young adults at a major Turkish university, Ozyegin links the biographies of individuals with the biography of a nation, revealing their creation of conflicted identities in a country which has existed uneasily between West and East, modern and traditional, and secular and Islamic. For these young people, sexuality, gender expression, and intimate relationships in particular serve as key sites for reproducing and challenging patriarchy and paternalism that was hallmark of earlier generations. As Ozyegin evocatively shows, the quest for sexual freedom and an escape from patriarchal constructions of selfless femininity and protective masculinity promise both personal transformations and profound sexual guilt and anxiety. A poignant and original study, New Desires, New Selves presents a snapshot of cultural change on the eve of rapid globalization in the Muslim world.

1

Virginal Façades

Sonay’s mother raised her to believe that “sex is something men want and that good girls don’t give.”1 Although Sonay thinks that in the past her sexual assertiveness was repressed, she no longer has difficulty defining or initiating what she wants sexually. Yet, she cannot get rid of her mother’s views on virginity. A “technical” virgin, she has been in an exclusive relationship with a man for three and half years, but she hasn’t had sexual intercourse:

People would do it after such a long relationship, and they do. People around me are very comfortable in this regard. I am certainly not against it; I have many friends who are not virgins, and I never changed my mind about them because of it. I do think it is something to be experienced, but I cannot practice it myself. Directly, I think of my mother, as if staying virgin is my responsibility to her.

Charged with personal, societal, and legal significance, the hymen, a fold of flesh, has the power to rule the sexual selves of unmarried women in Turkey. The classification of women into two categories of “kadın” and “kız” on the basis of the status of their hymen is still pervasive in Turkish culture and clearly reflected in Turkish vernacular. When an unmarried woman is described or addressed, the word “kız” (girl, intact hymen) is used. The kız becomes a kadın (woman, nonvirgin) when she is married and her hymen is broken. Explicit in the notion of kız is not only sexual purity and innocence but also, particularly importantly, the desexualization of unmarried women and the normative expectation that the transition from girlhood/nonsexual to womanhood/sexual should occur within the institution of marriage. In short, a nonvirgin unmarried woman has no place in the societal classification.

It is important to emphasize here that it would be wrong to assume that virginity norms remained an unquestioned conundrum or were not violated—openly or clandestinely—by the earlier generations of women in Turkey. I examine the strategic responses the young, upwardly mobile women I studied have to the tensions and disjunctures they face when their quest for sexual autonomy and freedom conflicts with the expectations of significant others. In probing the significance of virginity as a charged site of control over women’s sexuality, I aim to illuminate the violation or preservation of virginity norms within the context of the multilayered societal transformations of the recent two decades, marked by the emergence of public discursivity—the proliferation of the production of “knowledge” and “talk”—about and on women’s sexuality and virginity. Indeed, in recent years, the term “bayan” (“Ms.” or “lady” in English) has gained currency as a form of address for women in both professional and social contexts in Turkey, a reflection of the increasing presence of professional young women in the public sphere and business circles. Although American feminists claimed “Ms.” in the early 1970s against the sexist terms “Miss” and “Mrs.,” which identify and divide women in relation to men and their marital status, the adoption of the title “bayan” in the Turkish context is quite different. In fact, there has been an ongoing feminist campaign against “bayan.” As Turkish feminists maintain, this polite term, devoid of any sexual connotation, is deployed to avoid using “woman” and is thus a form of societal refusal to recognize the existence of women who are sexual but unmarried.2

In considering the violation or preservation of virginity norms in the contemporary context, I draw upon the narratives of a particular group of young women who, more than any other group of women in Turkish society, are likely to denounce virginity norms and forsake virgin identities. They are the upwardly mobile young women3 whose investment in an elite education and a professional identity stands in stark contrast with virginity norms dictating chastity throughout schooling, including postgraduate education (thus considerably extending “girlhood”). The study of these young women thus sheds light on the degree, effect, and meanings of women’s challenges to the dominant norms of virginity and patriarchal constructions of women’s sexuality in Turkey. In forsaking virgin identities, women reveal the capacity to destabilize the resilient societal classification of two distinct categories based on hymen status.

This chapter draws upon interview data from thirty-seven young women between the ages of nineteen and twenty-three born amid the social transformations of the 1980s. The young women whose narratives are the focus of this chapter are homogenous in terms of their identities as secular Turks and share a commonality in their general embracement of feminist ideas, although they vary in claiming or refuting the feminist label. Class is a major source of difference among this group of young women, which includes privileged young women who come from well-to-do families with a range of resources and cultural capital as well as disadvantaged women with limited parental economic and cultural resources. This diversity allows us to explore the role of class-based permissive and prohibitive family environments in the formation of sexual subjectivities.

Do these educationally advantaged women emerge as active violators of the virginity norm? What are some of contradictions and tensions they face when their sexual autonomy and freedom conflicts with the expectations of significant others, such as parents? To what extent is resistance or conformity to virginity codes shaped by other sources of identity, such as family class origins?

Conceptualizing the Hymen

How can we conceptualize the hymen sociologically, this fold of flesh that rules the sexual lives of unmarried women? What does this social/collective investment in the hymen signify? As Mary Douglas (1989) formulated and analyzed with great clarity, “what is carved in human flesh is the image of society.” Douglas conceptualizes that what delineates the confines of the body, its surface and skin, is systematically used to signify the other boundaries informed by social taboos and anticipated transgression. Indeed, within her analysis, the boundaries of the body parallel the confines of the social world. From Douglas’s perspective, the hymen as a part of the body becomes a medium for societal classification. The hymen represents the line that demarcates women (kadın) from girls (kız), dividing two social statuses. The law, which codifies the image of a society, exposes these demarcations. Notably, while an attack on the male body is conceptualized as a violation of individual rights, an attack on a female body constitutes a violation of the family order. The virgin or nonvirgin status of a woman, combined with her marital status, frequently defines the nature of crime and its punishment. In Turkey, up until recent changes in the penal code, the preservation of the family’s honor and public decency took precedence at the expense of the victim. For example, a rapist was not held accountable if he consented to marry the woman he raped. Also, a man who abducted an unmarried woman would receive only three years in prison, as opposed to seven if the woman was married. Virginity examinations performed on “political detainees, women suspected of prostitution, and on girls in state orphanages, dormitories, and high schools” (Parla 2001, 168) were state sanctioned in Turkey until 1999. Because of extensive campaigns by feminist and human rights organizations and in order to harmonize the Turkish civil and penal law with those of the European Union, Turkey reformed its civil and penal codes in 2001 and 2004, including the ones pertaining to sexuality and gender relations.

The cultural significance of virginity in societies like Turkey has been explained in terms of the Mediterranean honor and shame complex (Goddard 1987; Lindisfarne 1994). Preoccupation with women’s chastity/sexual purity appears in the code of honor. In its classical conceptualization, the code of honor refers to the honor or moral purity of a group—that is, the group defined as family, lineage, caste, class, region, and nation—and this honor is determined by the behavior of its womenfolk. Honor is lost as a result of female misconduct. Women thus carry the burden of safeguarding group identity and group honor. The female body symbolizes the social boundaries of cultural identities, and virginity ultimately represents the demarcation between in-group and out-group mores. Moroccan immigrants in the Netherlands, for example, attempt to strategically assert moral superiority by controlling female sexuality, actively enforcing the moral order of their own marginalized community in relation to the dominant majority group (Buitelaar 2002).

Feminist activism in Turkey today continues to pivot around the question of so-called honor crimes in southeastern Turkey—the murder by family or kin members of women suspected of having transgressed the limits of sexual behavior as imposed by traditions, for example, engaging in premarital relationships, flirting, or dressing “inappropriately.” While many human-rights and feminist interventions depend on a misguided vision of a modern nation-state and polity composed of sovereign, ungendered, autonomous subjects conceived of as explicitly transcendent of kinship, linked by the shared values embedded in the honor code, new feminist scholarship refuses to frame these “honor crimes” within the singular and narrow paradigm of an honor code. Instead, scholars suggest that we must turn our focus from solely examining particular “cultures” or “traditions” to an examination of the institutional, juridical, and legislative practices of the state, arguing that “what are defined as honor crimes and the ways of dealing with them are produced in relation to these institutional practices and discourses” (Kocacioglu 2004, 119). Outlining how the concept of honor is crucial to “the power regime of the modern nation-state in Turkey,” Sirman (2004) argues that delegating honor to the realm of tradition as simply a cultural relation is “to render invisible the modes through which it still regulates the identity and the life of all women” (53). Moreover, “the legal institution recognizes the key role played by kinship and the family in the political order and organizes the clauses of the Civil and Penal codes so as to protect the social and familial order rather than the rights of the individual” (51).

Similarly, Ayse Parla (2001) challenges the framing of virginity exams as an appalling and reactionary expression of lingering traditions constructed in diametrical opposition to the nationalist sacred policy of modernization in the making of the modern Turkish nation-state.4 By locating virginity exams in a very specific historical and political context, Parla elucidates how they function as a disciplinary tool of the modern state, which continues to inscribe the paradoxical nationalist ideologies of both “traditional” virginity and new modernity onto female bodies (modest yet publicly visible yet virtuous). In the post-1980s period, when women began reclaiming identities not endorsed by official ideology, the state increased the implementation of virginity exams to correct and to discipline female bodies in the name of the nation. Legal ambiguity and systematic gender discrimination continue to enable the state’s routinized intrusion into women’s bodies. Furthermore, the police are literally entrusted with protecting honor and chastity. Anyone who violates “public morality and the rules of modesty” may be detained. Such ambiguity has allowed police to threaten or force women to undergo virginity examinations, particularly in state institutions like orphanages and prisons. The threat strategically produces disciplined desexualized citizens, while the exam, as a corrective penalty, differentiates, classifies, and punishes deviants. This systematic regulation of female bodies in the name of the nation is most visible in the treatment of political detainees and prostitutes because their sexual behavior is perceived as an act against the state.

The increasing demand for artificial, surgically reconstructed virginity sheds intriguing light on the relationship between virginity and women’s own attempts to gain control over their sexualities as well as the powerful hold virginity retains in the social milieu. It is argued that this demand among unmarried women for fake virginity is a sign of the weakening of traditional patriarchal control over women’s bodies (Cindoglu 1997; Mernissi 1982). Cindoruk calls artificial virginity in Turkey a survival strategy for women, arguing that “a woman’s utilization of medicine for her own needs, that is, repairs, may be conceptualized as the manifestation of women’s demands for control over their own bodies” (260). Hymen repair, on the one hand, might be a helpful intervention for women in a climate that still values virginity. But, on the other hand, it also reifies virginity itself.

Despite the unquestionable significance virginity holds for the control and regulation of women’s sexuality in Turkey, the meanings girls and women attribute to virginity remains an understudied topic. During the early 1990s, the question of virginity acquired a prominent place in public discourses and became a focus of feminist activism. Extensive media attention around virginity in the 1990s emerged because of a tragic event: the suicide of two teenage girls. Suspected of having engaged in sexual misconduct, these girls were asked to undergo “virginity tests” to determine if their hymens were intact. The supposed “shame” of their “sexual misconduct,” or perhaps merely being subjects of such suspicions, drove them to suicide. As a result of national and international feminist activism to make this practice illegal, in 1999 a decree passed making it illegal for state officials to initiate/request virginity tests without the consent of the woman/girl in question.

Feminist scholars studying specific interpretations of virginity in other cultural contexts have applied Bourdieu’s notion of capital to virginity, conceptualizing virginity as a form of sexual capital that can be traded for social and economic advantage (Gonzalez-Lopez 2005). In the United States, Laura Carpenter (2002) discerned three distinct frames in her study of the experience of virginity lost: virginity as a gift to be reciprocated for love and commitment, as a shameful stigma to be gotten rid of, and as a process of gaining sexual experience and knowledge. The author found that the virginity-as-a-gift metaphor is used by and affects the sexual behavior of women, while the stigma metaphor is more commonly used by men. Although these studies raise important questions, my interest and approach to the study of virginity in Turkey requires me to deviate from a strict application of Bourdieu’s notion of capital. My intervention in this chapter has relevance to the premise of Bourdieu’s theory: whether virginity is regarded as a legitimate (perceived and recognized) form of symbolic capital to be capitalized upon.

“Virginity Is Not between the Legs; It Resides in the Brain”: The Making of “Modern” Sexualities

In addition to the thirty-seven women whose narratives make up the exploration of virginity attitudes in this chapter, I spoke to twenty-two men about their experiences and attitudes on sexuality, which is the subject of the next chapter. The narratives I collected reveal an overall strong gender convergence on ideas of sexuality in general, and virginity in particular.

First, both the women and the men viewed societal insistence on female virginity as a mark of traditionalism. They strongly rejected the idealization of female chastity and the symbolic value of virginity, its equation with honor and female purity. The intact hymen is not seen as the property of “others,” family, parents, nation, culture.

Second, the women and men shared a common narrative in rejecting what they called “societal sexual restraint and repression.” They promoted heterosexual desire experienced in premarital relations as a positive force—something important to individual happiness and successful future marriages. They also emphasized that the greatest obstacles to the sexual liberation of young Turks are anachronistic notions of virginity and sexual honor.

Third, both the women and men subscribed to an emerging code of sexual ethics that promotes premarital sex within the context of emotionality (duygusallık) and love.

Fourth, a vocabulary of gender equality dominated both the women’s and the men’s narratives. Four of the men I interviewed agreed with a conservative single standard that supports the concept of virginity for both men and women; sixteen of the men embraced a liberal single standard of virginity for neither; and one man I interviewed supported a blatantly sexist double standard of virginity for only women. None of the women I interviewed supported the traditional norm of virginity until marriage.

Fifth, the lived experiences of the tension between embracing a liberal sexual ideology and one’s actual sexual practices brought to light another important gender commonality. The representation of “technical virgins” (those who engage in various sexual activities but avoid penile-vaginal intercourse) as a large middle category (nine) between virgins (ten) and nonvirgins (eighteen) among the young women I interviewed highlights this tension.

Finally, but not surprisingly, the men and women both drew contrasts between their own values concerning virginity and sexuality and those of their parents’ generation. This contrast is sharpest among those participants who were raised in sexually restrictive small towns where mixed-gender interaction among youth and dating practices were limited.

In short, the values held by this group of young Turks mark an important transition to what they consider sexual modernity. As tradition-free agents, they subscribe to the principle that losing or preserving one’s virginity should be a personal matter or choice. The concept of personal responsibility and ownership of the hymen is the key to this shift from external to internal authority. Power located external to the individual (a mark of tradition) is rejected and restraint from within is emphasized (a mark of modernity) (Adam 1996, 138). The changing emphasis from the physical reality of virginity to the morality of virginity is central to this sexual modernity: “virginity is not between the legs; it resides in the brain” is the way this idea was expressed colloquially by some young women and men I interviewed.

Irrespective of their actual sexual experiences and privately held views, both the men and the women stated that expressing a desire for a virgin bride or wanting to be a virgin bride was no longer an acceptable public narrative. This ideological resistance to the preservation of virginity is a prerequisite to the making of modern femininities and masculinities among the educated young secular Turks I studied. For young men, it is neither entirely advantageous nor practical to desire a virgin, because the status of virgin by definition signals inaccessibility and unavailability, a situation that is at odds with new definitions of masculinity aligned with the values of sexual modernity. Engaging in premarital sex is not only a means of expressing modern, liberated masculinity but also a strategy of social distinction from other “traditional,” sexually repressed men.5 Similarly, for young women, a man who wants a virgin as his bride is seen as backward and therefore not a desirable partner.

It is important to note that these young men’s and women’s shifting notions of sexuality are couched in the language of the tradition/modernity opposition, revealing the centrality of this dualism to the constitution of their subjectivities. The tradition/modernity opposition exercises a special potency in organizing experience and consciousness, giving rise to a self-reflexivity in which the conduct and feelings of the self are continuously assessed for their modernity or traditionality. I concur with those who argue for the abandonment of the tradition/modernity opposition. However, I believe the centrality of this dualism in people’s understanding poses a serious challenge to theoretical attempts to abandon it. Failure to acknowledge the tradition/modernity opposition in interpretation risks a misconstruing of the terms most central to the self-understanding and worldview of its subjects. I preserve the language of my subjects while critically analyzing the binary with regard to virginal...