The secret sex life of Turks

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

Enis Tosun was killed for allegedly witnessing a love affair

Turks must have an extraordinary, wild sex life - especially in rural areas and in low-income conservative neighborhoods. But we only come to learn about it when tragedies happen. 

The latest example involves six-year-old Enes, who was murdered in a yard in a remote village in the eastern province of Iğdır, near the Armenian border. After Enes went missing for five days, the head of the Iğdır security department asked for trained teams and dogs from Ankara. 

The dogs sniffed and found the boy’s body buried in the yard of a neighboring house. It turns out that the wife of a cousin of his family was having an affair with an elderly relative of the same family and little Enes saw them in bed. The man then strangled the child and left the body to his lover to “finish the job.” She dug a hole and buried him in the yard.

The worst part of the incident is the murder of an innocent child. There have been many reactions to this murder in social media. But one common reaction of conservative posts is the display of shock about “How these two adulterers could have sex during the daytime in the month of Ramadan?” This is a snapshot of Turkey. A child is murdered, but a substantial segment of society is obsessed with two people having sex during the day in Ramadan. This is so typical of our country. Most probably the murderer and his accomplice refrained from eating and drinking until fast-breaking time (iftar), acted as if they were pious people on that day (even though they just had sex), committed adultery, cheated on their spouses, killed/helped to kill a small boy, and buried his body. But at least they were fasting - or seemed to be fasting. 

Another violent incident with the same theme took place in the southern province of Adana. It was back in 2003, but because of the cruelty involved I can still remember it. Three people and two babies died during a picnic in the forest. Three were killed by gunshot and the unattended babies then died of starvation.   

The Adana picnic story is complicated because it involved numerous cases of adultery. There were three couples, and although you might think that the maximum number of cases of adultery would be three, there were actually about five. Don’t get confused; this was because one of the men was a lover to two of the people and a husband to another. He was doing the business with his wife and two of the other wives. In pictures, these people looked like ordinary, conservative, probably religious, fasting and mosque-going Turks, with then women wearing headscarves.  

What is really happening in the beds of couples in Turkey? Does Turkey have a hardcore porn level that we don’t know about? We thought family values and the “honor” of the family were the pillars of the Turkish family. What is an elderly man doing in the bed of a young relative’s wife, probably not for the first time?
 
The first reason I can think of is that we Turks are so used to lying and cheating that we continue to do it at all costs and at all levels. We are such hypocrites that there is no limit… 

Poor little Enes… This is a country where in certain places young girls can be killed because they were spotted “talking to a boy,” or because a text message was found in their phone. Women are considered guilty in rape cases. It is up to the girl to protect her “honor.” 

Another reason I can think of is that Turkish women are taking revenge for the “virginity factor,” or the restrictions imposed on them until they get married. They are making up for the lost time before marriage in their life after marriage.

Or could it be that women continue to be used, either by force, blackmail or any other kind of trick, by older and more powerful male members of the family? Could it be that they have to maintain the secret affair, even though they don’t really wish to? The elderly male lover ordered the woman to get rid of Enes’ body, right? Perhaps women only have sex with other members of their family because they are forced to, blackmailed, raped… 

Once a friend of mine from a rural area told me, “You city girls don’t know of the notion of ‘How to escape your father-in-law.’ When we marry into a family in the village, the first thing for us to look out for is the father-in-law. We have to keep clear of him. Then come the brothers-in-law. We have to figure out how to avoid any harm coming from them.” 

Whoa. 

As the comedian Cem Yılmaz jokes, “They could make a train in the neighborhood,” implying that everybody is having an affair with someone else, “And they call us, the lives of artists, ‘marginal.’”

Exactly. My “marginal,” sinful, drinking, non-fasting, swimming-in-a-bathing suit, monogamous life certainly looks dull compared to this episode of Dallas.


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