KEBABBLE All the
nudes fit to print By Fazile
Zahir
FETHIYE, Turkey - There are some
things that happen so often that we become almost
inured to them until someone points out the
obvious. Yavuz Semerci, a leading Turkish
columnist and former editor of Vatan daily
newspaper, did just that this month when he
launched Gazeteport.com.tr.
Semerci said
this new Internet newspaper would differ from its
rivals because unlike Hurriyet's and Milliyet's
online editions, he
wouldn't use sex to sell it;
photographs of naked ladies not relevant to the
stories they precede wouldn't be the driving force
behind his news. In the United Kingdom, sexual
exploitation of the female form is commonplace,
from the infamous fellatio in a Flake [1]
advertisement to the unhinged grins of girls with
their breasts on display on Page 3, and rarely
challenged directly.
In Turkey, while
there are no actual rules banning full frontal
nudity on the Internet, television, advertisements
and the cinema, it is much less prevalent than in
Europe, and where it is used, it is much more
likely to cause offense. Since the religiously
inclined Justice and Development Party (AKP, for
Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi) came to power in 2003,
conservatives have felt freer to challenge the
increasingly liberal attitudes that have been
spreading across the country, often with
interesting results.
In May 2005, the
Turkish broadcasting authority, the Radio and
Television High Council, banned four erotica
channels on Digiturk, Turkey's only satellite
television provider. The decision-makers on the
council, regarded as a conservative body, deemed
the Adult Channel, Exotica TV, Rouge TV and
Playboy TV as broadcasting material that violated
Turkish values.
Under the council's
licensing regulations, Turkish television must be
in the "public service", and the soft porn
available only at night on the four channels was
deemed to offend "the Turkish nation's national,
ethical, humanitarian, spiritual and cultural
values". The ban seemed especially harsh to the
producers of Playboy TV, which, like its magazine
namesake, is well known for sticking to softcore
programming while other networks have grown
increasingly explicit.
Similar attitudes
among some of the public have led to the
vandalization of nude female statues. In September
2003, a marble statue titled The Thin Woman
by Greek sculptor Gelas Kessidis on display at
Trakya University in Edirne was knocked over and
broken from its pedestal at foot level. It was
never clear whether the vandalism was prompted by
hostility to the nationality of the sculptor, an
attack of public prudery, or the same kind of
student hijinks that lead to cow-pushing [2] in
rural English universities.
A similar
incident occurred last December, also in Edirne,
when a nude female bronze put up by the Turkish
Women's Union to celebrate the 80th year of the
republic was lassoed and toppled. The incident was
taken seriously by the local council, which was
appalled that such an event should take place in a
large town in the European section of western
Turkey and quickly made repairs.
In a
similar vein was the Ministry of Education's
removal from seventh-grade schoolbooks of the
world-famous French Revolution picture by Eugene
Delacroix of Liberty Leading the People, in
which Liberty's dress has become ripped during the
fighting and her breasts exposed. While the nudity
in the painting is gratuitous - all the men, bar
one poor chap in the foreground who has had the
trousers stolen from his corpse, seem to have made
it through the civil-war zone fully clothed - the
picture had been included in Turkish textbooks on
citizenship and human rights for five years. The
ministry's decision was interpreted by teachers'
unions and liberals as an example of how the AKP
was using its position as the current ruling party
to try to change the moral tone of what is
acceptable in art and literature in Turkey.
Separate to the issue of Islam and nudity,
Turkey does have one especial hang-up about the
female nude, and that is its proximity to the
national flag. Filmmaker Andres Vicente Gomez has
tried for years to have his film La Pasion
turca, the story of a Spanish tourist who
falls in love with her Turkish tour guide,
distributed in Turkey but has yet to have any
success. Publicity materials for the film feature
a Turkish flag with a naked woman lying face down
just to the left of the crescent moon. The film
was recently shown at the Berlin Film Festival and
is critically acclaimed, but distributors in
Turkey refuse to have anything to do with it even
if the publicity materials are changed as they
claim it still disrespects the venerated and
seemingly sacrosanct flag.
Despite these
incidents, Turkey is still undoubtedly the Muslim
country with the most relaxed attitude to female
nudity. In Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran and Yemen,
all forms of public nudity are banned, and those
who try even something as innocent as
skinny-dipping can be fined up to US$2,000,
imprisoned for up to 12 months and beaten up by
the authorities. In Iran in 2001, the government
even tried to ban naked mannequins in shop
windows. Indonesia has a long-running scandal
concerning Playboy magazine, which despite being
very tame and not featuring nudes has still found
its editor regularly in court for violating the
indecency provisions of the criminal code.
In Turkey, by contrast, there are
nudist-friendly beaches in Dalyan (Iztuzu beach),
Bitez beach in Bodrum, and Patara in Antalya. The
worst that is likely to happen to the naked
sunbathing tourist is that the Turk passing by may
take a good long look if he is a red-blooded young
man or avert his (or her) eyes in sudden
embarrassment if he/she is not.
In Italy,
nudity in public is banned, and in the United
States, the defender of freedom, all nudity and
sex are banned from public television and age
requirements are placed on printed material of
that nature. Turkey is also famous for its habit
of communal bathing, and Turkish baths encourage
one to get naked or nearly naked, although they
are (except in tourist areas) almost always
single-sex.
Turks seem to have
contradictory but parallel attitudes to nude
females. Nude and nearly nude foreign women are
fine, but not scantily clad Turkish women - most
Turkish actresses would never do a nude or
explicitly sexual scene. The real problem seems to
lie not with the naked woman herself but with the
amount of arousal she is likely to provoke - the
more enticing the image, the more hostility it is
likely to generate.
Yavuz Semerci may be
correct that Hurriyet and Milliyet exploit naked
women to improve their readership figures, but the
conservative mindset of their readers means they
don't really get to exploit them all that much.
Notes 1. Flake is a
chocolate bar marketed in the UK and elsewhere by
Cadbury-Schweppes. Its four decades of "Flake
girl" ads were famous for their suggestiveness,
but were dropped in 2004. According to Wikipedia, however, in
2005 the Flake girl "was found to have a 19%
recall in the UK population, leading to a revival
... The new advert features reversed film of
[supermodel] Alyssa Sutherland eating a Flake in a
convertible during a shower of rain." 2.
According to Wikipedia, cow-pushing,
also known as cow-tipping, "often considered an
urban legend, is an abusive pastime allegedly
common in rural areas. Participants sneak up on an
upright, sleeping cow and push it over for
amusement."
Fazile Zahir is of
Turkish descent, born and brought up in London.
She moved to Turkey in 2005 and has been writing
full-time since then.
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