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All incidents of violence that I remember from my childhood are either innocent like my mother throwing her slippers at me, or heroic like saving my sibling, or consoling like "everyone got a beating from that teacher anyways".
But I remember what came after very well, I mean my high school years under the attack of testosterone on one hand and worried about the university entrance exam on the other.
The state of being a high school boy sways back and forth between "I got in a punch too" and "I'd break his bones if they didn't hold me!", and at the same time it generates an inner voice screaming "look, a woman!".
I got lucky and the moral pressure of my puritan teacher family balanced the situation by mixing with my worries about entering the university, and I was saved from my inner voice which could have turned me into a full-fledged thug.
In fact, I was never oppressed during my high school years. I was never beaten on the streets. I was not scared into pretending that I didn't hear the yells of strange men shouting, "what the hell are you looking at!".
I didn't fear djinnis or fairies or memorize prayers not to be jinxed by them. I never ran from the attack of a bigger or more insolent person.
I never acted haughty towards people younger or weaker than me. I didn't insult people by believing that I was smarter or superior than them. I didn't have relatives who mocked me as the "girl of the house" when I helped out with simple domestic chores.
I didn't like cars, I didn't hope to become stronger by putting a machine in place of my weak body. I didn't come across bullies that much, and when I did I either beat them black and blue or watched them run away with fear.
Therefore, I never harassed anyone of the opposite sex. I didn't look at the thighs of girls whose skirts were lifted by the wind. I didn't hide behind the curtain and whistle at the women walking down the street.
I didn't round up people to intimidate someone just because he looked at the girl I was dating. I didn't believe that the neighbor's daughter was very curious about my penis, or that she could hardly contain herself from barging into our home when my folks were out and asking me to screw her. I didn't envy my rascal friends who would talk on and on about how they masturbated by thinking of my teacher's low-cut dress.
I did not join those who flipped out wanting to beat the newly appointed civil servant's son because the beautiful girl of the neighborhood was giving him the eye. I never believed that widowed women were hysterical or virgin girls were horny.
I didn't try to find a way to watch encrypted adult TV channels after midnight when everyone was safely tucked away in bed.
There was not a single moment when I believed women to be weak and in need of men.
I never swore or envy those who did. I didn't say "faggot" and talk behind the back of my coevals just because they were a bit more fragile and delicately built than us.
I didn't listen excitedly to the brothel stories of the elder boys. I didn't listen excitedly when uncle so-and-so told us how he screwed the neighbor's wife either, so of course I wasn't convinced that yet another uncle so-and-so, who was caught with some other neighbor's wife, had deserved to get stabbed in his leg.
I did not listen to the stories of my rural classmates about how they got intimate with a donkey or a dog. I did not find it normal to accuse the referees of being faggots, the women with a harsh character of being lesbians, or the men with long hair of being like women. I did not develop an interest in guns, I did not regard it as my right to shoot traitors or the people I do not like.
I am not familiar with the memories of big brothers, who made it through their military service without a single beating, about how they screwed the daughters of military officers in the lodgings while pretending to be on night duty. Years later during my 28-day military service, I was also not among the ones who were woken up each morning with shouts and head-counted seven times a day.
Even in my short military service, I was not denigrated and I certainly did not witness how the long-term private soldiers were denigrated, sworn at and beaten up. That curse word which was used as a comma throughout my military service did not ever come out of my mouth.
I was not among those five thousand men who burst into screams of joy just because they saw a civilian after being woken up at the break of dawn for the oath-taking ceremony, which was halfway through my short military service experience.
I was never afraid of those people whose self-confidence boosted when they started wearing a uniform and carrying a bayonet in their waistbands. Our training military officers also disdained neither us nor women by saying, "We have not given you guns, but even if a war breaks out, we will recruit nurses before we recruit you".
I did some of the things that I just said I did not. Some of them I witnessed. Some of them are my own unmediated experiences. And some of them I have compiled from the shared memory of manhood.
I am not sure whether there exists a man who has done none of them. Frankly, I do not think that doing none of them would make a big difference either. All in all, they all come together as a shared male mentality and fill our minds. That is why, we carry in our minds, as a sort of memory prosthesis, even those states of manhood that we have not experienced.
When it comes to memory, there always exists an angle between the reality and the story. The real stories and the states deemed worth telling are oftentimes not the same. Personal narratives are certainly not exempt from this, either. I live as a man and look at the reality through the window of manhood. If I am compiling my records from my male memory, then I am telling the male version of the story.
If you ask my official opinion, I have figured out this issue of manhood. I am already an educated man. I do not discriminate against people due to their genders. My mind is open when it comes to the issue of gender. I devote a sincere effort to avoid the masculine language. I check and balance my states of manhood.
But the truth of the matter is this: I have a sort of amnesia which is common among people who have come into the world as men and believe that they have completely come to terms with it over time.
In this way, I can create a sort of prosthetic consciousness which obscures the distance between the man I have come to be today and the man I am and convince myself that I have completely come to terms with manhood.
In his article featured in this series, Yekta Kopan wrote, "Apparently, a man's mind deletes those moments when he is 'defeated by' other men". Drawing on from that sentence, I can say that apparently the mind of a man who thinks that he has completely come to terms with manhood deletes those moments when he is defeated by the states of manhood. (RK/HK/EMİN/SD/TK/IG)
* Images: Kemal Gökhan Gürses
