52 MEN 52 WEEKS/ 36 ÖZCAN SAPAN
Look in the Mirror!
Click to read the article in Turkish/Kurdish
Are you really aware of the question you are asking? How many men can say "yes I committed violence against women"? Even if there were any, we are a society with a lot of "but"s.
Especially considering the caliber of this sentence you make: "to record the ideas, opinions and in fact the experiences of men, who are prominent in their respective fields, about masculinity and male violence", let us underline the word "experiences".
Most will content themselves with what they see. We as a society have been inured to contenting ourselves with what we see. The violence itself, the morality and respect itself have taught us to make do with how they seem, how they are presented to us.
There is more than one way to express yourself. Some express themselves better with beautiful words, others do that by writing.
Some consider it a virtue to beat by slapping and some by making innuendos. Some beat with love, some hit with respect. Violence is not merely physical beating.
Is a person's understanding based on age, experience or work? How far can we go by pushing aside cultural differences, traditional morality and family ties...
Everyone leaps up when it is a woman who is battered but what would you do if it were a man? Once, I had witnessed a man being beaten by his wife in a tavern. Everyone remained silent, including me; then, is my motive based on the notion that women are in need of protection?
What about my past examples, human rights, women's rights, left, politics, my mother, my grandmother...
Can I be objective?
It was the middle of the 80s... We used to meet with friends and go to a coffee shop in Beyoğlu to hang out. They didn't charge for tea because it was a place where you could play games for money. It was a comfortable place, and not very popular. I think it had a signboard reading something like bird lovers' association.
But no one talked about birds there, though sometimes people chatted about cars. Something like "this person has x car, that person has y car...". I remember clearly, once, someone had asked "how's it going" and people had laughed when they heard the response: "the engine seized up, it's laying...", I never understood what they were laughing at.
The engine had seized up and it was laying.
What's the problem!
One day, at one of the tables they were waiting for the fourth person to start a new game.
They asked me to join them until their friend came. I accepted it with pleasure since it was a game I knew. And I left the table when their friend came.
A friend of mine seeing this scene got very angry with me. "How dare you play with them", he scolded me. I didn't get it... I asked why, he first remained silent, then looked into my face and said, "don't you know that one owns a taxi and the other owns a public bus".
I was totally lost, I didn't understand anything, so what, I thought, what difference would it make if I knew.
I told him what I was thinking: "So what!". He said something like "don't be ridiculous", so I shut up. There was no meaning in discussing it any further. Later, much later, I learned why I was being "ridiculous".
Hear this out, evidently "owning a public bus" meant "he has a lover who works in a brothel in Karaköy", and taxi meant having a "lover who is a call girl".
Much later, years later, when I recalled this incident, I remembered the dominant language and the male-dominant discourse again. Isn't even talking about it a sort of violence and inequality?
When I thought back, first my childhood, then my youth, and my political memories kept coming to my mind. I thought of my mother, when I was in elementary school, I had witnessed her get beaten by my father many times.
I also remember the sound of my mother's crying coming through the doorways. I don't remember seeing other people since I was listening through the doorways, maybe there was no one else, but when she got very distressed my mother would talk aloud and tell her troubles even if there was no one around.
I never forget the line that followed such talks: "I would not stay not for a second if it weren't for my kids...". I grew up with such a burden. I was crushed under that burden, and my dear mom suffered. When I stood up against this violence, it was almost too late.
I was 17. I was running amok inside the house roaring like a bull: "If you hit my mother again, I'll beat your mom!"... I was making myself promises accompanied with swears. I don't remember who heard it, and it didn't matter... My father didn't need to hear it either. My voice ringing out in my own ears was enough for me.
One day, I again found my mother crying. She didn't want me to know or hear about it but I had already understood from the lack of telling. My mother was beaten again, furthermore, the reason was me.
And I fulfilled my promise: I walked up to my grandmother, the mother of my father, and I threw a couple of punches. First or second might have hit the mark. What I saw days later was a bruise where I had hit her. That bruise haunted me for years.
I was embarrassed, sad, devastated. I cried in secret a lot.
My decision was final, I left home. I started to stay with my friends. The end of my mother's sufferings became the start of mine because my father never again even attempted such a thing.
Because one day when I realized that hitting my grandmother was not a solution, I had come home and shouted through the door: "If you hit my mother again, I'll shoot you!". This threat wouldn't scare my father, maybe he didn't even hear it, but this statement was important for me. It rang out throughout the house...
Private life; is it just a space preserved by walls, doors, windows and curtains? Is family a shield? Can't their problems concern anyone? Does it gain the right to harbor all sorts of negativities when it is clad in this shield of immunity?
One fact that I understand is this: It is always women who are subjected to violence in the privacy of private life. It's always they who suffer.
Name of a book came to my mind whilst I was writing these lines: Das Schicksal der Begabten Frau (The Destiny of the Gifted Woman).
This magnificent book penned by Inge Stephan includes real-life examples from the world. The expression "the pillar of the house", which is constantly used in the male-dominant culture, points at the woman. If a family is broken up, it is definitely broken up by the woman.
It is not for nothing that they have that saying: "Men make houses, women make homes".
Have you ever thought why? It means the woman provides for the management, livelihood of the house and ensures that the family lives happily. "Happiness" despite everything... If happiness is gone, then it's her fault. A woman who accepts to remain in the man's shadow also agrees to take shelter in the sovereignty of that man. This narrative contains a violence even if not physical violence...
The one in power is always the sovereign/Being in power is always the dominant drive. When masculinity is added to this power of always having one's way and calling the shots, then tragedy begins... How? It's exactly as Oscar Wilde says: "In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. The last is much the worst; the last is a real tragedy!"
It is the one thing that doesn't change at home, in school, in the military or life. There is a steadfast language that everyone is using; when listing examples of people who represent power, fearlessness and the manly stance, they cite Erdoğan, Putin, Trump or the present day favorite Macron.
But are these so strong because they are men or because they are in power? For instance, what do we say for Angela Merkel or where do we put Tansu Çiller or Margaret Thatcher, though they are older examples? Saying that the ruling power is male suffices. But it's everywhere. The latter state that Wilde talks about is both man and power.
Life itself is also politics. Like the never-changing truths, woman is also non-changing in every sense and sphere.
"And the women, our women" says Nazım Hikmet, "... who get fed at our tables after the oxen...". Let's ignore why he said it or to whom he said it... But this destiny is the same within the left as well.
Once upon a time, in 1976, during my high school years, I was in a responsible position at school. Politically, of course... One day, I was informed that one of our friends fell in love with a girlfriend of ours and they were together. I immediately put everything aside and took them to the school's sports hall for a talk.
I said, "Let me have it, what is happening?". I still clearly remember how the girl looked me in the eye and apologetically said, "We love each other". Then, the boy plead their case but to no avail... My decision was final and clear... "You can never live something like this" and so on and so forth... Some may know, that's how things were back then. When the girl insisted, I pushed her, the friends accompanying me took them away. And that love had ended then and there...
After some time, it became such a big lesson for me that I felt ashamed of the girl wherever I saw her... I was someone who is open to developments, I would read and research. I soon fixed myself up; I convinced myself that I had quickly reached the level of a flexible, democratic and modern person who is in a responsible position.
Exactly a year later, I experienced something similar in a different way. One of our girlfriends came to me and said that she wanted to talk to me about something important. I gladly accepted. We went off to a corner and started talking. After a short introduction, she said that somebody would come to ask her family for her hand in marriage once the school was over. Having learnt a lesson from the previous incident, I asked her, "Do you want it?". Without making eye contact, I said, "You can get married if you want".
Because if someone came to me and said, "Somebody wants to marry me", it meant they were asking for permission. Thinking that she was asking for my permission and in order to hide my past vulgar behavior and to behave in a modern way, I said, "Do you want it?". After a period of silence, she continued speaking with her head down: "You don't understand, do you? You will never understand, will you?".
And she flung the summary of the day at me, she said, "I love you". Believe me, without thinking, I said, "what, I don't understand, what are you saying, you what..." and explained to her that "such a thing can never happen".
The meeting and the short talk and the love of the girl all ended then and there. As for me, I couldn't stop talking about how I had done the right thing. I used this example to embellish my narrative about the rightness of my behavior towards my friend a year back. I explained it with this example, I was proud of myself. What was it about that level I had reached, the ways in which I had improved myself, evidently more effort was needed, reading was not enough, it was a question of mentality and culture. I understood that much later.
When somebody hits you, you hit back. When somebody swears at you, you swear back. When somebody inflicts violence on you, you respond with violence. What do you do when somebody says, "I love you"?
I was tongue-tied; I tied it to the burden upon me.
Since time out of mind, when someone says criticism, we choose the easy way and say self-criticism. When they say violence, we talk about peace and quiet. In fact, we have not yet comprehended how great a violence it is for a father to tell his child, "You, stop talking, you wouldn't understand". Moreover, we do not consider statements like "Don't meddle in this with your woman's mind" or "You are a woman, you should know when to keep silent" as violence.
If we were to test the left, which is very sensitive, knowledgeable, advising and highly cultured especially on the subject of woman, it would flunk three years in a row. In general terms, Marxist left's view of women is problematic, and the problem has been relegated to socialism.
But, until socialism arrives, with which approach are we to address this problem? Of course, everyone will point at what they have learnt from their families. That is why in the history of the left, if there is a high-ranking woman friend, there is always her comrade, her husband above her.
The history of our left starts with the international aunt-in-law Krupskaya and, albeit wrongly informed, continues with Tanya and goes on with the local and national ones. Unfortunately, we are right in the middle of the circle as well. We are right in the center of the spiral.
And it is such a fertile geography that while the Muslims' view of women adheres strongly to the story of being "created from the rib of man" and it is not enough for women to perform the five daily prayers, give alms and even fast, it is still said that "When a woman observes the five times of prayer, fasts during Ramadan, preserves her chastity and obeys her husband, she may enter by any of the gates of Paradise she wishes". One of her religious devotions is to "preserve her chastity and obey her husband".
That being the case, it should not have been so difficult to go beyond the traditional morality in a society that grows up with the idiom, "Buy the field on flat land, take the woman who is a virgin."
Otherwise, that is, if we also sigh saying "our women... who get fed at our tables after the oxen", and shout at the top of our lungs in a chorus trying to sing the song whose words we could never say looking into her eyes: "My room is painted with lime, my face is full of smile, take off your clothes and come to bed with me, my skin is medicine", then wouldn't our difference from the others be in name only?
Growing up in a geography, where folk songs, songs, idioms are so sinful, living on with a repressed sexuality... it doesn't make any difference whether you are politically or professionally competent.
Woman is sinful in all religions, all books, all political terminologies. She breaks up families. She makes sheep's eyes. That you and I are different does not suffice to change it.
Because in all male-dominated societies past and present, men have played the leading role in arts and literature just as in all other occupational groups.
Woman has been merely a sort of instrument nourishing all these fields. As Bilge Karasu says in his work titled Ode to the Pomegranate and the Fig, she often becomes a useful instrument of reaching sexual pleasure.
"The official legend of the fig associated with the female and its secret literature associated with manhood has spread to all parts of the Mediterranean and turned the fig into an almost shameful word. When I asked him about the price of the fig, even the fruit seller from Erzurum insistently said 'the fruit'..."
Woman is often imprisoned inside an innocence surrounded with the walls erected by the male sovereign.
When Eve ate the forbidden fruit and seduced Adam to do the same, innocence became tainted. What has been happening in the world ever since is the aftermath of this contamination. In a world polluted by the woman, it should naturally be the male sovereign who protects innocence and honor.
Ever since the blood of two brothers were spilled, honor is restored with blood; the male sovereign supposedly protects the woman.
Didn't Helen of Troy leaving Menelaus of Sparta turn into a matter of honor and lead to one of the bloodiest wars of the Archaic Age?
Woman is beaten for honor, she is killed for honor.
Look in the mirror... Did you miss your father...
Look in the mirror... This is what is taught, but it is in your hands to change it. Start with your tongue. Your conscience that you have accumulated is what directs both your hand and your tongue...
It is your morals. (ÖS/ŞA/APA/SD/TK/IG)
* Images: Kemal Gökhan Gürses