Brave New Turkey, non-coed

BELGİN AKALTAN - belgin.akaltan@hdn.com.tr

This winter youth camp at southeast province Hakkari has remained coed somehow for the moment. AA photo

Hello and welcome to our new country, the Brave New Turkey. Boys this way and girls that way please… It is a non-coed one. It is a Turkey where genders are separated and any potential social interaction is minimized - if possible starting from an early age… Well, they can socialize later on in life at book clubs.*

As you can well imagine, the best, the most healthy way of bringing up a girl or a boy is to separate them. Send them to all-male or all-female schools and activities; restrict all of their movements. Better still, force the girl to wear a headscarf, preferably from an early age. For your boys, there is no need for a headscarf. BAM! Here is your formula for a happy life, a happy marriage and a happy society.

Our Youth and Sports Minister Suat Kılıç must have mastered this magical formula. Earlier in the week, he was answering the opposition’s questions in a parliamentary session about teenage summer camps that employed gender segregation last summer. He also responded to opposition queries as to why a “Youth Train” was split into separate all-boys and all-girls trips. He told the parliamentary deputies the following: “In the Youth Train project, over 200 teenagers board the train simultaneously. The train leaves İzmir and goes to Ankara, stopping at every national and spiritual venue on the route. The kids spend the night on the train, because it is an overnight train. Passage through the compartments in the train is easy and possible. I cannot ensure the safety of teenagers who spend nights on board youth trains when boys and girls can move through the compartments easily.” BAM! What a wise man.

God forbid, unless barbed wire is installed inside the “Youth Train” before it leaves İzmir, (Did you say İzmir? Every evil seems to start in İzmir), in its co-ed trips, then all the boys might attack and rape all the girls on the train. Remind me to write a letter to the Youth and Sports Ministry congratulating them on this most competent and early warning approach to youth issues.

It is true that our beautiful and lonely country, which we love passionately**, is undergoing a change.

How that change will affect our future, let’s make a projection. I see a Brave New World here in Turkey, as in Aldous Huxley’s novel where there is no natural reproduction. Kids are born in laboratories. How nice! (small bam)

Imams are happy

Why do I go that far? Because, our dear international readers, (I say international readers, because my Turkish readers and my international readers who are residing in Turkey know very well where we are heading), we are heading toward a Brave New World order in Turkey.

The mentality of this conservative government, now that they have been elected three times, each time increasing their votes, which is unprecedented in Turkish political history, (Well, thanks to you, the “our boys” team*** - now, I need three asterisks to explain this. I don’t know if I have that much space), is now out in the open, intoxicated by its own success. They do not feel the need to soften or moderate their true opinions anymore.

Kılıç said families appreciated the new gender segregation, saying, “Families are very happy with this.”
Oh, I’m sure they are. I’m sure imams are also very happy.

His supporting argument is this: “The previous co-ed camps hosted about 10,000 participants between the ages of 13 and 22, 35 percent of them were girls, 65 percent were boys. After segregation, this increased to 200,000 participants, 51 percent girls, 49 percent boys. I think this is a correct practice.”

What’s more, Turkish Airlines executives said that the number of passengers was boosted on those routes where they have banned alcoholic drinks. BAM!

This is how you run a country.

* I don’t know, I’m not sure, but some news stories suggested that the closest that girls and boys could get in conservative societies was at book clubs or literary discussion groups.

** Turkish film director Nuri Bilge Ceylan won the Best Director award at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival for his film “Three Monkeys.” In his speech he said, “I dedicate this award to my beautiful and lonely country, which I love passionately.” I love this sentence. Get used to it, I will use it frequently.

*** Google “Our boys did it.”

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