How women dress on TV.

A spokesman for the AKP, the leading party in Turkey, spoke on TV about the party’s attitude to women’s dress: they don’t wish to regulate how women dress, of course, but there was this presenter on a tv show saturday, and her outfit was ‘unacceptable’. It seems that the woman in question, Gözde Kansu, is no longer presenting that show.

Here is the interview with the spokesman Hüseyin Çelik, together with a clip from Kansu’s show, in Turkish.

The idea seems to be that no matter how tolerant you are, some outfits are simply unacceptable, such as those that show off part of breasts, and legs above the knees. So one might surmise that his (and the party’s?) tolerance stops at allowing modestly dressed women who don’t cover their heads to be out and about or on tv.

I wonder how he feels about Miley Cyrus.

 

Thanks to Lucas, who posted this on Facebook.

 

Turkish protests and sexual assaults.

You’ve all heard about the protests that started last June in Istanbul. They received fairly little media attention, because unlike what was going on in Egypt there were relatively few people killed (although every death was both a tragedy and entirely avoidable). But while it did not turn inot a full blown revolution, it did not blow over and indeed there are still protests going on throughout Turkey, and much police violence.

Among the things I hear about on social media – one of the ways the protests have mostly been reported in the absence of press coverage – is that the police are committing sexual assault on women protestors. Until now I’d only come across hearsay. Here is an article on the matter by Pınar Tremblay. Thanks Y. for bringing it to our attention.