sex
May 7, 2024

Orgasm on the kitchen table

The evenings when the sexual revolution shook their land, Hülya Adak will never forget: On 8 March 2008, around 70 women were jostling in a small room in the conservative Kurdish city of Diyarbakir in the far southeast of Turkey. It was tight and stuffy, and yet everyone stayed spellbound until late into the night.

What happened that night was actually unthinkable: for ten hours, ten women from Diyarbakir were reading lyrics, in which Turkish women report too small breasts or of too stretchy hymen, one hears of orgasms on the kitchen table and of doctor plays with girlfriends, but also of rape, blows, honor killings.

It was the first time in Diyarbakir that women speak so bluntly about lust and love on the open stage. And four weeks later, at the repetition of the reading in Istanbul, the audience even began to tell themselves after the lectures: about Sex fantasies and masturbation techniques, infighting in bed and flirting on the street.

The women did not want to stop it.

"It was like suddenly realizing that sex is not something we need to be ashamed of or that we can not talk about," recalls Hülya Adak. "For a Muslim society like Turkey that was an absolute novelty!"

Hülya Adak is literature professor in Istanbul? and feminist. Together with three colleagues, she organized the two readings. It was the fiery test of a project the team had been working on for six years: Inspired by Eve Ensler's "Vagina Monologues" They asked 50 Turkish women in Turkey and Germany about their sex life. With the protocols, they now wanted to go on a reading tour and break one of the biggest taboos of Islamic societies: public speaking about sex - by women.

Today, a year later, they are still touring. The protocols have already been presented and discussed in eight Turkish cities, and the book on the project is published in the second edition. And the demand does not stop. Men also show interest, even make the confessions of women at some events themselves? in a macho society like the Turkish a daring venture.

But the audience is excited. It seems that Adak and her colleagues actually opened a lock: A society begins to discuss orgasms, hymen and gender rolesbut above all: understanding women as beings who, like men, have the right to decide for themselves when, how and with whom they go to bed. "It is," says Hülya Adak proudly, "like the beginning of a new approach to sex."

At the end of March, the book about the project will also be published in Germany ("That's how beautiful it is", Orlanda-Verlag, 12.90 euros). And it is only to be wished that it ripples as high in Turkey as in Turkey.

Not so much, because we have to learn to communicate with each other uninhibited about sex. But because the logs the most colorful, the most complex and the most authentic are what you get in Germany currently on the subject of sex and Islam in the hands, And by the way, these women with their humor and their openness push us even more energetically from the oh so comfortable cliché sofa.

Sure, the known downsides of Muslim sexual morality - Honor killings, virgin cult, forced marriage - are also here topic. For example, when the transsexual Sinem tells how his family chain him to the heater for days, causing him to almost die like an animal because of his sexual orientation, only to save the family's honor. Archaic sounds like a fairy tale from the penultimate century.

But only a few pages further tells the 35-year-old cleaning lady Irem from the drama of her first marriage, the man who beats her again and again, but still so passionately desired and loved that his early death almost kills her self. Although Irem's marriage is an arranged one, the two live in poverty that one hardly finds in this country. and yet: the Desires, complexes and conflicts, with whom the couple fights, one could recognize also in some German relationship.

Even if the women muses on virginity and female honor, this only seems exotic at first glance: For example, 21-year-old Gülfidan cheers defiantly over the premarital loss of her maidenhead? for strictly religious Muslims a serious sin, And yet, it does not just rebel against religious moral guardians: "I was angry with anyone who imposed rules only because of my wife," she explains. "I wanted to define my femininity myself!"

And the equally single student Hilda plague worries, as they are also discussed in some Western Internet forums under cover of anonymity: She will not let go of her virginity despite repeated attempts ? with 23. How embarrassing, finds Hilda, especially since her own sensuous mother even at 13 laid the first guys and even took the wrath of their strictly Muslim family on it!

It seems that sex and love are simply too universal for them to be permanently pressed into rigid ideas of East and West, tradition and modernity. As if one had to accept them instead, as they grab one again, carry away, take off. Whether in Ankara or Augsburg. "That's the way it is, my beauty," says one of the women in the book at some point. And so maybe it's good too.