We have to see to it if being a slut is that easy

EZGİ BAŞARAN

We have an abundance of examples, but I am choosing the United States because the event is very fresh.

The incident developed this way: Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke spoke before Democratic members of the House of Representatives, arguing in favor of requiring all private insurance plans to have contraception coverage and adding $1,000 to insurance packages. 

In response conservative Rush Limbaugh on his radio show said about Fluke, “She’s having so much sex she can’t afford her own birth control pills. What does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex.” 

Were we surprised? No.

Because wherever you are in the world, those rights granted to you as a woman do not exceed a certain limit. 

If you talk about your sexual drives, desires, your freedom to have sex and to not to give birth, then you become a slut. It is very easy to become a slut. 

Look, you can vote, you can enter the Parliament; we sometimes make you a manager; well, as long as you are not beaten by your husband or boyfriend… “Well, what else?” they would ask you. 

When you say “If equality, then equality in every sense,” then you either become “loose” or “femi-Nazi” – that is to say, woman “non grata.” 

The feminist struggle has changed a great deal of things in 40 years but not this, because it is men who make the laws and grant the rights that upset equality. 

Only rights and laws? Men also give the news. In other words, the climate of a country is determined by male journalists as well as male politicians. 

How this can be changed is being contemplated; tests are being done. 

This example now is not from the U.S. It is from the eastern province Diyarbakır. I don’t know if it has a match in the world. Two female journalists and entrepreneurs have started a very interesting and valuable business. Hangül Özbey and Hazal Peker have set up a news agency where all the staff from reporters to editors, from camerapersons to accountants is made up of women: Jin Haber (Jin News). It will start to broadcast on March 8. 

“We have been covering women’s news for years in several agencies, but the stories we bring as reporters transform into something else in the hands of male managers. Since we have recognized this does not work, we have set up our own news agency. Free from a sexist language, we will adopt a system where every story will be viewed from a female perspective. This is the reason we opted to form an agency and not a newspaper,” said Peker. 

The small amount of money they saved as journalists was largely supported by businesswoman Cemile Yıldırım. They have also trained all their staff on gender awareness because even if the whole staff is female, that masculine and hideous language involuntarily spreads to all of us.

“We have taken the risk. We will post in Kurdish, English and Turkish and we will draw attention, with a louder voice, to gender discrimination, to violence against women in our region. As Virginia Woolf has always said, we will write without thinking what men would say. Both for the woman in Iraq, and also for the woman in the Aegean,” explained Hangül as she described their road map. 

They will write because in our country women are disciplined by beating, killed by pumped rifles, the female quota is still a joke, the fact that the injustice toward headscarf wearing women is still a political leverage. 

A news agency made up of women only…A law student who demands that health insurance should cover contraception… If you see these as a “luxury” and if a sarcastic expression covers your face, you have not done right… Because: 

Think of Rush Limbaugh as a simulated jigsaw puzzle. Take his mouth out; put it on another man or another woman who has adopted the masculine language. You will hear the same sentences, the same words. It is that mouth that instigates violence against women, that ridicules the quota, that hires women in a company as decoration. Because the brain is the same, what can a mouth do? For this reason, we have to accept this as the problem of the “whole world” and figure something out, without thinking what men would think! 

ezgi.basaran@radikal.com.tr 

Ezgi Başaran is a columnist for daily Radikal in which this piece was published on March 8. It was translated into English by the Daily News staff.