Book deeming women subordinate to men distributed by a municipality in Turkey
Municipality of Turkey’s Kütahya province has been distributing a book titled as ‘Marriage and Family Life’, written by Hasan Çalışkan, a former religious officer at Turkey’s Religion Affairs Presidency, to newly wedded couples right after the official wedding ceremony, as ‘a guide for marriage.’
According to the reports of Gizem Örnek from Evrensel newspaper, CHP MP Fatma Kaplan Hürriyet brought the issue to the Parliament floor, pointing out the ‘sexist statements’ used in the book.
MP Hürriyet: ‘Calling men as ‘the shepherd of family’, this book portrays women as herds to be controlled’
In her call to the Parliament, MP Hürriyet said the following: “This book, which portrays women as herds and calls men ‘the shepherd of the family’, is lacking morals and consciousness. I got goosebumps as I was reading it. It even talks about the details of the ‘wedding night’ and the ‘man’s right to have sexual benefits’... According to this book, a woman should not complain much... It’s a perverted fantasy book... This book deems women as a second-class citizen, degrades women, and, even more, talks about superficial assertions that are created for the sake of men’s sexual life – such as, ‘if one talks while having sex, the child would be a stutterer’; ‘a woman must be skillful in housework and in serving her husband’,etc. If I were to read all of this book to you here, you would all blush, too.”
MP Hürriyet submitted a request for an investigation to be launched about the issue.
‘Greatest problem for marriages is for women to work’
In the book, where the ‘greatest problem for marriages’ is stated to be ‘women working’, there are also numerous other statements and arguments that degrade women.
Some of such statements are:
‘If a woman sees a man at workplace who is more handsome than her husband, she can have a feeling for him. So, it is better for her to just stay at home’;
‘It is useless for a woman to work’;
‘Man is the shepherd of the family’;
‘Good woman is a woman who obeys’;
‘Women must be skillful in house work and serving his husband’;
‘One of every two working women get harassed at work so her sexual duty for her husband gets negatively affected’;
‘A woman who does not dress up fancy for her husband and does not obey the authority of the man can be beaten, as that would remind the woman who the chief of the house is: it is like a medicine’;
‘Polygamy is beneficial for men’;
‘When the man of the household gets angry, the woman must get quite immediately and apologize.’