Turkish columnist stirs debate by chiding women wearing shorts

ISTANBUL

A Turkish columnist Meral Tamer said she “finds it odd” that people wear extremely short shorts in hospitals or shopping centers, citing several occasions she encountered. Hürriyet photo

A Turkish columnist has stirred a debate by chiding people, mostly women, who wear mini-shorts, in a column published in daily Milliyet on Aug. 9.
 
Meral Tamer said she “finds it odd” that people wear extremely short shorts in hospitals or shopping centers, citing several occasions she encountered.
 
“I have recently run across more and more people, mostly women, wearing mini-shorts in the most inappropriate places,” she wrote in her article, titled “Could we possibly wear shorts at Eid prayer, at a hospital or at a funeral home?”
 
She rhetorically asked whether it was possible to go to the hospital following an encounter with a woman in her 50s wearing the shorts at a hospital. Tamer also said she could not stomach an encounter with a more-than-middle-aged woman in mini-shorts at a funeral home.
 
Tamer also asked in her article whether wearing mini-shorts had become a type of reaction from secular groups against Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government, which has been accused of becoming increasing authoritarian and conservative.
 
But a columnist writing for daily Hürriyet, Cengiz Semercioğlu, criticized her remarks, saying they betrayed a repressive mindset.
 
A debate over the matter quickly erupted on Twitter, with the “dirensort” hashtag trending worldwide. #dirensort (#resistshorts) is a modified version of the slogans chanted during the Gezi protests.