BY SERA ULUSOY (MAN/IV) sera.ulusoy@ug.bilkent.edu.tr

Every day we wake up. We look forward to things. Things that we image will one day come true. We would like to believe that we have a long future ahead of us, or at least one long enough to fulfill some of the dreams that help keep us alive, happy and content.

You never think that one day a suppressed maniac may come and take that life of yours. Some person who feels that he has the right to take someone’s life just because his rage is “uncontrollable.” So he goes ahead and decides to commit an act from which there is no return.

This week I really wanted to write about this. I really wanted to write about how much pain the death of Özgecan Aslan has caused for so many—more than anyone, her parents. I wanted to write about how women in particular are under constant pressure to defend themselves against men or other women in this country. I did not, though, want to tell you that as a woman you are always going to struggle to find that peaceful society that accepts women and men as they are, a society that functions without these current “conflicts,” without oppression and suppression.

But as I started to write, I realized that what I was saying was turning into something political. And honestly, you cannot separate this particular incident and those like it from the current political dynamics in Turkey. You cannot deny that being told that you should not be going out and about when you are pregnant has no impact on the way men are forced to think and women are forced to live. You cannot deny that when a political leader makes statements that very obviously point to his supporting the idea that women should not participate in the workforce or that men and women are not equal, it has no impact on the way society perceives women’s place in life. And just to avoid sounding a little too political—though honestly, I do not believe that it has anything to do with politics but rather with the simple idea of being human enough to not murder someone or not feel that you have the right to rape someone—I decided to take a different route to analyze this particular incident and its repercussions. It is not that I don’t want to sound political (believe me, I have no problem with that)—it is because we live in a society in which freedom of speech is limited to the freedom granted to you by others; it is because opposing opinions, regardless of how you state them, are considered rude, blunt and in some cases redundant. It is because when you state your opinion, it is perceived not as an opinion but rather a threat—even though it is in fact merely an opinion, an expression of self. It is because we have little respect for others’ opinions, and we do not like listening to others or putting effort into understanding what they have to say. Interestingly enough, though, if it is a rumor that is going around, we love listening to that, but no, not to what a friend has to say about something significant. We take offense when we are confronted.

So you may wonder what the things I have mentioned above, e.g., not listening to others, have to do with the occurrence of such incidents as murders and rapes in our society. In fact, they have everything to do with it. In a society where half of the population is brought up in an environment in which women are never heard and even men are never fully understood, it is only natural that anger is expressed via physical violence and not via words. From the very beginning, men are raised believing that they are superior to women in every way, and when they are confronted with the fact that they are not, they feel emasculated and ashamed, for some reason I do not quite understand. But they are not allowed to feel this way, hence they express these “unnatural” feelings via anger, and anger leads to physical violence. This is by no means a defense of such behavior by men, but rather a protest against the parents who raise them the way they do, with no respect for themselves or for women. It is all about letting them have a conscience that will prevent them from hurting others. In a country where family means everything, it is absurd and even illogical for men to hurt women the way they do, when they are supposedly raised to respect their mothers.

I know that there are some people who have been saying, “Women are raped and killed every day in this country, so why now? Why are people protesting this particular incident so strongly?” The answer is very simple. Society, or at least a part of it, has reached a point where people have realized, “Enough is enough.”

One last thing before I sum up this week’s installment. Please do not let the likes of Nihat Doğan, the great philosopher of ignorance—how ironic, right?—get to you. He may tell you, tell the world that when a woman is wearing a short skirt, she’s asking for it. He may tell you that rapes are justified, that murder is ok. His reasoning lies solely in this: he and others like him have so little confidence in themselves that they do not even remotely believe that they have any control over their willpower, over what they do. He is not insulting you but rather insulting himself with such statements.

So I guess what I am trying to say is, let there be peace, among men, among women, and between them. Accept the reality that we are all different, and do not try to suppress these genuine differences. It is such a shame that on top of all the things we have to deal with—natural disasters, diseases, hunger, scarcity of resources and so on—we have to contend with the unkindness and hostility of our own kind as well.