'You either respect women or you don't'

de uma rootless girl em istanbul:
("An introverted woman of a certain age sells her house, gets rid of her stuff, and goes rootless.", que me faz pensar no sonho do H.: vai, homem!)

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You either respect women or you don't

Based on my anecdotal evidence (personal observation, personal experience, and information from other visitors): The Turkish touts (and regular man on the street) make comments to and invade the personal space of women they identify as Other.

I don't want to waste brain power parsing what I mean by Other because I don't know how they define Other. All I know is I observed them "taking liberties" (a phrase that should be brought back into fashion perhaps) with some women and not others. The 'not others' tended to be women who wore outward symbols of conservatism, such as hijab.

Some examples:
There was, of course, the day one of my colleagues had her ass groped quite thoroughly.
A fruitseller decided to handfeed me a portion of watermelon, pushing it into my mouth, startling the heck out of me and eliciting a noise of disapproval from his male partner because the fruitseller knew it was inappropriate
One man went from zero to "honey" and then to a presumption of something quite a bit more from me despite clear no-trespassing signals from me.

The evening that Bali and his family and I went out to the Bosphorus rocks, as we returned to our hotel, a tout thrust out his hand to me for a handshake (the prelude to getting me into his shop). My normal response in Istanbul was to ignore this behavior even though all of my American-politeness cells would scream at me to accept what Americans interpret as an act of friendliness. But I'd been chatting with Bali as we walked, and my polite reflex kicked in, so I returned the handshake.

Damn it, now the dance began immediately, "Can I ask you one ...." "No."  And I kept on going as I removed my hand from the tout's.

Bali was taken aback by the tout's behavior. I said, "They don't do this to your wife, do they"? [Bali and his family were tourists like me.]

"No."

And I told him about my colleague's experience (being groped) and added, "You know, people sometimes assume women are whores just because of where they're from and feel it's OK to do these things. It's not OK. We don't like it. And it's just as disrespectful to us as it would be to your wife."

When I talk about this stuff to Americans, generally women, a common response is, "what were you/they wearing"? As if that were relevant.


In my view, you either respect women or you don't. To see it otherwise is just another refrain of the "rape is the woman's fault" song. If you wouldn't say or do something of a personal nature to a countrywoman, then don't say or do it to a woman visiting your country. What the visitor is wearing does not dictate respect.

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não só todo o tag istanbul é bom de ler, mas todo o blog.