That One Look: A Recollection on Women’s Problems in Turkey
When I was young, I had this card game. All players would be given several yellow cards, each holding some characteristics of wild animals with correlating numbers indicating the level of that animal’s suitability for that trait. One of the cards read human, and it held the picture of a middle-aged man with a rifle on top of it. Under danger the number 10 was written, a maximum score.
As a child I couldn’t understand how a person could cause more harm than a hunting lion or a gigantic bear. Recently, I changed my mind.
Unlike the rifle in the man’s hand on the picture suggests, people don’t usually hurt and make each other bleed by physical means. They simply give their five-year-old daughter with beautiful brown locks a look when they announce they want to be a firefighter like their older brother. And that look is all it takes for the little girl to understand her parents don’t believe she could succeed.
The same look continues following her when she asks to buy a doctor’s kit instead of a Barbie house at seven, when she declares she wants to get a hundred on her math test so everyone in the house needs to stay quiet for the night at fifteen, when she wants to study engineering at eighteen, and when she decides to become a professor at twenty five.
Every time she dreams, she’s met with the same look filled with disapproval and skepticism. So, she stops dreaming. How could she believe in herself when all her parents think she could (and should) do is be a housewife and take care of her children?
Sometimes it’s scare tactics she’s met with instead. You can’t move into a big city like Istanbul for university because it’s not safe for a young woman like you, her parents declare. When that is said, for the sake of protection, there is one message to the young girl and her brother watching from his comfortable seat on the sofa: young girls can’t be trusted to make decisions about her life. It’s because of that belief that her brother takes away his wife’s credit card one day, thinking she can’t be trusted with that kind of money. Disbelief that a woman can accomplish something on her own can turn quickly into a disbelief women can act or think at all into the minds of young, impressionable men and women.
Disbelief a woman can choose to say no to participating in sexual acts with someone else, or she can go out with her female friends and talk about saving the world instead of makeup and manicures.
We close women into boxes, call that protection or support or realism. We are wrong. There is no support for women out there.
No support means no women CEOs, no women judges, no women journalists actually writing about something other than celebrity news, no women writers or engineers. It means no women in the parliament, which makes decisions on women’s bodies without their opinions represented. It means no women writes for television, one of the biggest part of culture today. Women: separated and thrown aside.
Change, as it often is, will be complex. Because this has become the backbone of Turkey’s society: these restrictions are not only pressed upon my men to women, but women also grab each other with hatred and violent spirit. First, we have to show people these dreams are possible. There are women CEOs out there, young women can study mathematics and yes, a girl can move to Istanbul and live there by herself, completely safe.
Then, education must follow. Only education can break the tightening ropes of insecurity. Parents, grandparents, siblings, teachers, everyone must realize what their look is doing to the future of this country. They must be taught a woman is no less capable than a man. Only then, this problem will slowly start to disintegrate by itself.
That one look a girl is given is all it takes to separate a huge part of the population from the rest of the people. That one look creates a damage so much bigger than any rifle could ever cause. And it is that one look; we must stand against to demolish, to be the shore against the tidal wave. Yes, the wave is big and it has been constantly coming for the last centuries. But, it can never strip the shore away.