| | | Aidy Bryant's adult summer vacation, plus Turkey's domestic violence laws | | | | | | | | | |  | | | | July 26, 2016 | Letter No. 44 | | | | | | | | | | | | Hot town, summer in the Lenny!
Hello, dear ones. By now we are officially in it — we've got a little more than a month of summer left in which to prove we know how to live like Anthropologie ads, replete with lemonade (album and classic beverage), sheer beach cover-ups, and maybe a fun Polaroid of our friend group in front of some particularly fetching graffiti. Uh, yeah right. Summer, much like New Year's Eve or Rihanna's Instagram, is almost sure to make us feel we are doing it all wrong. From the confusion of locating a bathing suit to the injustice of inner-thigh chafing, summer — for all its pleasures — is also uniquely designed to create a kind of hot, itchy fatigue. Just last week one single mosquito bit Jenni a total of eleven times (before Lena quit counting), and we wandered for a few hours before reporting to work, looking for the kinds of soft, plain T-shirts with droopy necks that are hard to find but make summer look easy. We also spend a fair amount of time as a pair looking for summer hats that don't humiliate us, with Jenni being so critical about size, shape, and slant that she's become known as "the hat bitch."
For the past six years we've had the opposite of summer vacation — it's the time when our work fully consumes us, swallowing us whole. We produce Girls from May to September, so our summer is a blur of sixteen-hour days, darkened sound stages, middle-of-the-night rewrites, and constant panic that the slightest cold might develop or other real-life events could interfere with the schedule. This is our final season, our last one in the adult summer camp that has constituted both our livelihood and our family, and so we find ourselves fat with nostalgia (or in Jenni's case, craft services), deeply emotional about everything from old photos to the full moon, and looking harder than ever for a hat that makes sense.
In this issue we hear from Aidy Bryant, who has the opposite situation: she is an adult with a full-scale summer vacation. When she's off of Saturday Night Live, the glamour of her day job recedes and she's left alone with her thoughts (and her armpits). A huge part of her journey has been embracing this time and allowing herself to be enriched by doing nothing. A huge part of our journey has been accepting other people's weekday beach Instagrams when we're locked in a sunless office inventing lives for girls who live in a perma-summer. To each her own.
We'd guess that the ideal summer is a mix of music, culture, laughter, and learning. This issue of Lenny offers a little bit of each, and we hope it can be a mini-vacation whenever you choose to consume it. Oh, and please Instagram pictures of your summer hats, tagging @lennyletter and @jennikonner. Lena wants to see if Jenni will be nicer about other people's headgear.
Endless love, endless summer,
Lena and Jenni (Lenny)
P.S.: Today we are taking a vacation of sorts, heading to Philly so Lena can speak with America Ferrera at the Democratic National Convention. Read about Lena's packing dilemmas, as well as the stories of two women's journeys to the convention on our special DNC page, and text DUNHAM to 47246 for updates. We'll also be bombing social media with our revelations. Lena does not plan to wear a hat on the convention stage, but crazier things have happened. | | | | | | | | | | | | My Adult Summer Vacation | | | | By Aidy Bryant | | |
I'm an adult woman living on an elementary-school student's schedule. Because I work at Saturday Night Live, which is on the air from September through May, I, a 29-year-old with a mortgage and a small terrier-mutt codependent, get a summer break just like my tween nieces. For the past four years I've gotten three and a half months to do whatever the heck I want. Every year I think I should start a band! Or learn to Rollerblade! Or start a Rollerblading band whose best song is called "Fat Baby USA!" But I haven't.
During my first season on SNL, the adrenaline was constant and thrilling. I worked long, fun days, and eventually I got to do my comedy on TV. Comedy that I wrote! I performed with Louis CK, Kristen Wiig, and Justin Timberlake. I met Paul McCartney!! It was worth it to work twenty hours straight because "Oh. My. Hell! Bruno Mars is so cool!" I felt like I had been abducted from my little life in Chicago by glitzy aliens — nice, good-looking aliens who took me to live on Planet Hollywood (sorry, had to sneak in a Planet Hollywood reference), and I loved it.
But after nine months I was back in my quiet little life. Now what? It was a jarring feeling to go from "every day is a personal Macklemore and Ryan Lewis concert" woman to "dirty pajamas in a studio apartment with cockroaches" woman. Working in a place that is so magical and so wonderfully old-school-glamour showbiz made the contrast to real life feel so much more, um, real. That first summer was the hardest. I had no income once the season finished, and I didn't know how to fill my time. I did lots of improv, went to Chicago, and visited my parents a lot. I wanted to be home, but at the same time I had a constant nagging feeling that I wasn't working enough. Were other people shooting movies? Or writing? I couldn't understand if this feeling of limbo was just how it is to be a TV person or if I was already failing at being a TV person.
In the past couple of years, I've been getting summer jobs — but not like the ones of my sweaty Phoenix childhood, babysitting or washing my neighbor's car; nor like my college summers, when I swept up men's hair and answered the phone at a Chicago barbershop. I've got a brand-new Hollywood lyfe, baby, where I do fun and glamorous summer jobs! Last summer I got to shoot an episode of Girls in Tokyo! So fun! And I wrote, produced, and starred in my own short film, Darby Forever, with my best friends! This summer, I went to Cannes with my SNL buds Cecily and Vanessa for NBC, and I ate a fancy salad on a beach in Saint-Tropez. I'm pretty sure that's what gorgeous Hollywood women do!! And I did it!
But I want to be very honest with you. The Adult Woman Summer(™) is not all sexi global trips and beach salads. There is also the fact that all your peers and friends have real jobs. Like, you know, how jobs are? Where you do work all the days except Saturday and Sunday? My own boyfriend gets up to go to work at 6 a.m.! I sometimes sleep until eleven and then spend an hour figuring out what I will have for lunch. There is a dangerous amount of time where everyone in my life is occupied and I am not.
At first, all this alone time felt lonely, like my life was either full throttle LIVING MY DREAM LIVE ON NBC or hiding in my apartment and having anxiety thunderbolts ping me with thoughts like Am I going to have to perform my personality for the rest of my life? There seemed to be no in-between. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it might be OK to be an extrovert for a living and an introvert for my life. That the time I wasn't working was valuable too, for my own creativity but also for my mental health. I feel energized by time alone, which doesn't always manifest as meditation and productive writing. In fact, most of my time alone consists of the following:
— Cutting my own hair. Usually a vv bad idea.
— Spending a solid 45 minutes looking at every Instagram EVER posted by @thekangaroosanctuary. Shout out to the Kangaroo Sanctuary! I genuinely love you!
— Experimenting with growing out my armpit hair.
— Still wearing underwear that my dog chewed the crotch of one time. (I wear them on my period, they are trash, I am trash, I am unable to give even one single fuck.)
— Upping my pizza intake by about 200 percent and my ice-cream intake by about 4 percent. I love ice cream, year-round. Annual ice-cream intake 6,000 percent.
— Having diarrhea.
— Looking at every single side table on the Internet.
— Calling my mom.
— Trying every face mask (purifying, moisturizing, detoxifying, exfoliating, illuminating, scrambulizing) known to woman.
— Watching seven hours (with commercials) of Naked and Afraid XL on the Discovery Channel.
— Texting my boyfriend. Example: Hi, I just put peanut butter on those ginger cookies, so very dope.
— Eating one half of a watermelon weed gummy and then spending six hours in bed.
— Being a person who has a Snapchat.
— Occasionally stopping by the SNL office to pick up some mail or print something. (I'm also an adult woman who has never had a printer that I could make work more than one time.)
— Doing research on volunteering, then never doing it, then having an existential crisis because I am a selfish bad person, watching Real Housewives.
— Feeling legit and real tears roll down my cheeks as I watch Teresa Giudice reunited with her daughters post-prison.
— Spending hours engineering lounge outfits to camouflage the fact that I am not wearing a bra, in preparation for the arrival of the Seamless deliveryman.
— Smelling my own hair and being haunted by its scent.
— Setting up plans for dinner with friends. Bailing.
— Planning to go to a museum! Bailing.
— Texting my boyfriend that we should go out to dinner when he gets home. Bailing the second he gets home.
These are my activities when I'm me, strictly being me. I highly recommend them to you, my friend.
The number one question people ask me during the summer is "So, what have you been up to?" It used to feel embarrassing to say "I've been doing nothing" or "I have been in my home for three days," but that's what I like to do, so why not just be proud of it?
I've worked really hard to make my home a place where I can be most myself. It's what I dreamed my life would look like when I was little, with someone I love, my dog, my favorite blankets, a glue gun, face creams, googly eyes, air-conditioning, and all the other stuff that makes me happy. As fun and exciting as #Hollywoodlyfe.com is, for me it was a radical act to start enjoying my time with myself rather than feel guilty/sorry/embarrassed for giving the same value to wearing my PE shorts from high school with my dog on my lap as I do to being in front of five million people in a gigantic white wig. I feel very grateful for my #career; I love it with my whole heart. I also feel grateful to follow RuPaul on Twitter and always have diarrhea.
Aidy Bryant won't give culottes a chance. | | | | | | | | | | | | Remembering the Artist Greer Lankton and Her Uncaged, Uncompromising Dolls | | | | By Meredith Osborne | | |
| (Photo Paul Monroe, Hollywood 1987) |
In the late 1980s, when I was a newly arrived, barely solvent resident of the East Village, I had frequent debates with myself about whether to walk up East 7th Street on my way home. If I did, I would pass by Einstein's, a small boutique that to me was the fashion equivalent of a Viennese bakery, with sumptuous clothing and costume jewelry instead of Sacher tortes and petits fours. The jewelry was especially swoony. It was one-of-a-kind, big in size, wit, and personality: gold seraphs cavorting on a giant cuff, a pair of miniature candelabra earrings (complete with dripping wax), a black jet necklace with tentacles like an octopus.
There were no mannequins or display trays showcasing the goods inside. Instead, there were theatrical tableaux starring one or more dolls, hand-sewn and smartly attired. Some were effigies of fashion legends like Coco Chanel and model Peggy Moffitt, muse to the visionary '60s designer Rudi Gernreich. The invented characters might as well have been famous, too, because they were certainly fascinating: the sneering, anorexic society matron; the jolly circus fat lady; the cheery sideshow pinhead; the battle-hardened, chain-smoking housemaid. The dolls weren't about simple prettiness, yet each expressed an idea of beauty, including those that didn't conform to conventional ideas of beauty. The windows at Einstein's were a source of awe and delight, a free pleasure in a city where not much came cheap.
I never went into Einstein's; I never had the nerve. A few years and a move to Seattle later, however, I met the designer of that jewelry and owner of Einstein's, Paul Monroe. It was 1996, and I'd just gotten a haircut in a salon on a residential street. As I was leaving, I noticed a hand-painted sandwich board a few doors down that said "Que" in curling script. The sign led to a tiny boutique on the ground floor of a modernist house. There was an Anna Sui skirt in the window — and a Peggy Moffitt doll. Paul had brought a little bit of his old store's magic to gray Seattle. He and I became friends that day, and I learned that all the dolls I had seen were the work of his late wife, Greer Lankton, and represented just one corner of the singular universe she willed into existence during her 38 years.
Born in 1958 as Greg Lankton, Greer grew up in suburban Illinois. She was the youngest child of a Presbyterian minister and his wife. Fine-boned and androgynous, Greer's earliest desire was simply to feel pretty like a girl; as a toddler, she liked to put a washcloth on her head and pretend it was long hair. Even that fairly anodyne bit of feminine self-expression was alarming in those days. By Greer's reckoning, she was eighteen months old when she saw a psychiatrist for the first time. A few months later, lonely and longing for a friend, Greer made herself a doll out of hollyhock flowers. The link between life and art began there, when she was just two years old. Dolls were not only her primary creative medium; they were her stalwart friends, alter egos, and confidantes.
By the time she was in sixth grade, she was working with wire, stuffing, and other materials that allowed her to make more sophisticated dolls, some of them life-size. And she became her own work of art once when she started dressing in drag around age twelve. On the sly, Greer became a dedicated and expert thrift shopper, scouring the racks for pieces that spoke to her love of Golden Age Hollywood and high fashion. She was as determined and tenacious as any '30s movie starlet, surreptitiously glamming herself up after school and riding her bike to the local Woolworths for photo-booth sessions in glorious black and white.
Meanwhile, she continued to see shrink after shrink in search of a solution to the "problem" of being both a cross-dresser and gay. The pressure to be someone else was unrelenting, suffocating. From the ages of fourteen to nineteen, Greer suffered through breakdowns and stints in mental hospitals that included shock therapy. Finally, she underwent a complete sexual reassignment — hormone treatment and penile inversion surgery, a procedure that inverts the skin of the hollowed-out penis to line a newly created vagina.
Sexual-reassignment surgery was even rarer in the United States when Greer had it in 1979 than it is today. In the mid-'60s a handful of American universities had established treatment clinics to perform penile inversions, a technique developed by a French doctor a decade earlier. Most of those clinics had closed by the early 1970s, and for years there were only a handful of private physicians who performed penile inversions in the United States.
According to her husband, Paul, Greer didn't want the surgery but, as she later explained, she was too worn out to fight. Greer had just turned 21 (but was still covered by her father's insurance) when she was treated at a private clinic in Ohio. Following her recovery, she moved to New York City, where she received a BFA from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.
Greer drew on those first two decades and her truth-is-stranger-than-fiction experiences for the work she began showing in 1981, when she was featured in the now-legendary New York/New Wave group show at PS1 in Long Island, which also featured Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Sarah Charlesworth, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Kiki Smith, among many, many others. The pieces she contributed to that show reflected the raw wounds of childhood, leading up to what Greer always referred to as her "sex change" or "the operation." There were hermaphrodite dolls and dolls trapped in wire cages, hunched and folded onto themselves. A series of watercolors gave a haunting account of the operation itself, from the eve of the surgery through the recovery. But the final piece of the show, a funny-looking doll named Rags, marked a beginning. She was literally made from the rags of her fellow dolls and splotched with red in a reference to Greer's surgical dressings. With her big, floppy feet and hands, bulbous two-tiered head, and messy, red-lipsticked O of a mouth, Rags was sui generis, a doll uncaged.
| (Clockwise from top: Photo Greer Lankton, 1989, "Einsteins installation of Marilyn Monroe figure" by Greer Lankton; Photo Paul Monroe, 1987, "Our Honeymoon; Beverly Hills;" Photo Paul Monroe & Greer Lankton, 1988; Photo Paul Monroe, 1986, promotional photo for "Circus of Couture") |
Greer became one of the bright stars of the '80s East Village art scene. She collaborated with and inspired fellow artists including David Wojnarowicz, filmmaker Nick Zedd, and photographers Peter Hujar, David Armstrong, and Nan Goldin. She made art that was ahead of its time in its exploration of the body, gender, and sexuality; art that no one else could have made. She made dolls of her heroes and friends who flouted social and cultural norms; Warhol superstar Candy Darling and Divine were favorite subjects, and there were dolls of local luminaries like drag performance artist Ethyl Eichelberger and transgender supermodel Teri Toye.
She and Paul became partners in life and work in 1983. They were uncannily well-matched, with creative and personal sensibilities that were of a piece: beauty resided in difference, too much was exactly right, and freak flags were made to be flown high. When they married in 1987, Greer created the bride and groom dolls for the top of the wedding cake. The dolls smile blissfully and hold hands: Greer, yellow-blonde and sexy in her mother's wedding dress, which she had altered to be form-fitting and partially sheer; Paul, green-haired and chic in a black turtleneck, white jacket, and black vinyl pants.
For nearly a decade, Einstein's was an ongoing platform for Greer's art, and fashion players noticed. Barneys commissioned her to make life-size dolls of Anna Wintour and Diana Vreeland for a window display saluting Vogue. As AIDS began to decimate New York's arts communities, Greer responded with anguished yet disciplined work, including masks and sculptures that evoked the ravaged bodies of people she loved.
Her own health began to decline in the 1990s, and she moved back to the Chicago area. But she continued working and achieved important recognition when she was included in the Whitney Biennial and Venice Biennale of 1995. She summed up her life in what would be her final work, a massive installation called It's all about ME, Not You, a doll-studded re-creation of her Chicago apartment. She died a few weeks after attending the show's opening at the Mattress Factory museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The Mattress Factory put the show on permanent display in 2009.
She didn't have an easy life, but Greer was loved: by her friends and her peers, and most of all by her husband, Paul. Since her death, Paul has worked nonstop to keep her memory alive and bring her work to the public. Those efforts took a big step forward in 2014, when he worked with the small nonprofit New York gallery Participant to mount the first posthumous retrospective of Greer's work. For nearly twenty years, Paul has been one of my closest friends, and I wanted to be there to support him on this milestone occasion. I flew from California to New York for opening night.
Finally, I was seeing all these works that I'd heard about for so many years: Princess Pamela, Aunt Ruth, Candy Darling, and Jackie O. The little wire cages with dolls trapped inside. And so much more. It left me speechless. And wishing like hell that I'd had the nerve to walk into Einstein's back in 1988.
Greer's work will be featured in the Museum of the City of New York's upcoming Gay Gotham exhibition, opening October 7, 2016. In 2017, she will be featured in a group show at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Photos of It's all about ME, Not You can be seen on the Mattress Factory website. Photos of Greer and her art can be seen anytime at greerlankton.com.
Meredith Osborne is a freelance writer based in San Francisco. | | | | | | | | | | | | Behind the Icons | | | | By Alex Ronan | | |
If you happen to be reading this on a Mac, take a look at the command key — it was designed by Susan Kare back in the '80s, a time when computer screens were often black spaces with blinking cursors and the mouse was an exciting feature. The ⌘ symbol's longevity is a testament to Kare's prowess as a designer. She joined Apple in 1982 to design icons and fonts for one of the first personal computers with a graphic interface, the Macintosh. Instead of typing extensive commands to do even the simplest functions, the Macintosh featured a desktop in the way we think of it today, with representational icons and easy navigation.
As the so-called "computer for the rest of us," the Macintosh was meant to be intuitive and user-friendly. To this end, Kare designed the "Happy Mac," a smiling computer that greeted users when the machine booted up. (Slightly less happily, she also created the "bomb" that appeared when the system crashed.) Her iterations of the trash can and folders that appeared on the desktop became Apple signatures. Her first typeface, Chicago, lasted through myriad interfaces, from the Macintosh all the way to the fourth generation of the iPod.
She's since gone on to create thousands of icons for hundreds of companies. For Windows 3, she designed the solitaire game; for Facebook, she created the original Gifts. Kare now works at Pinterest, where she's a product-design lead. IRL, she's whip-smart and wry. Earlier this month, Kare explained how to design an icon that stands the test of time, gave the scoop on working with a young Steve Jobs, and revealed the symbols she's still trying to get right.
| (Images courtesy of Susan Kare.) |
Alex Ronan: How did you became the Mac icon and font designer?
Susan Kare: I got a PhD in art history at NYU, and then I went to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco on a fellowship. It became immediately clear to me that I wasn't a great match for curatorial work because I was always envious of the artists we visited.
I had remained friendly with a high-school friend who was working at Apple as a programmer. He approached me about helping with some graphics and showed me an early Macintosh prototype. To prepare for the interview, I read typography books at the library and drew a few rudimentary bitmap icons and letterforms with a marker in a graph-paper sketchbook. It was a very brief interview, but I got the job and I started work almost immediately.
AR: Were you a computer whiz?
SK: No, I had zero formal experience. Computers were essentially foreign to me, so it was a bit overwhelming to get up to speed, but the Mac group was small and welcoming. Also, I did have limited experience designing for grids from working on craft projects such as tiled ashtrays and cross-stitch embroidery kits.
AR: What was your first project?
SK: The very first project I took on was designing the system font for Macintosh that became known as Chicago (its original name was Elefont, because it was a heavier weight than the existing text fonts). I branched out quickly into icons and other typefaces.
AR: What was it like working at Apple in the early '80s?
SK: The environment was clubby and friendly; there was a Ping-Pong table in the lounge area in the middle of the software group's cubicles, and Steve Jobs [co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Apple, Inc.] would often drop by at the end of the workday to see what was new and play a little Ping-Pong — he was more enthusiastic than skillful.
The original Macintosh group had many women in key roles: CFO Debi Coleman, controller Susan Kelly Barnes, engineering documentation manager Linda Wilkin, international marketing manager Joanna Hoffman, product marketing manager Barbara Koalkin, technical writer Caroline Rose, and documentation writers Lynnea Johnson, Hasmig Seropian, and Carol Kaehler, programmer Rony Seebok, circuit-board designer Collette Askeland, and software librarian Patti Kenyon.
AR: I had no idea there were so many women back then. Looking at pictures from that era, it's remarkable how young Jobs was. What was it like working with him then?
SK: It was always really fun to show Steve something new because, if he liked it, he was so joyful. Sometimes he brought in visual material to share that had caught his eye, such as graphics from Memphis, a 1980s Italian design group founded by Ettore Sottsass. And it's no secret that he had a shiny Bösendorfer grand piano and BMW motorcycle in the lobby of the Macintosh building so that everyone could be inspired by examples of design excellence.
AR: What makes an icon easier or harder to design?
SK: Generally, it's a lot easier to represent concrete nouns than abstract concepts, so "document" is easier to design than "undo." I try to focus on developing a memorable symbol for a concept, as opposed to a detailed illustration, to give icons a better chance of longevity. For a "fill" tool in the paint program that changed a defined area to black, white, or a pattern, I designed a can of pouring paint. Because our mission was to be accessible and "friendly," I sometimes took a humorous route.
AR: How did humor come into play in your work at Apple?
SK: Early on, I was asked to design a symbol for total system failure, something that the programmers and engineers thought would rarely happen, so it was highly unlikely the icon would be seen much at all. Probably cartoons inspired that icon — a bomb with a lit fuse — and of course I wouldn't have been so irreverent if I had known so many people would see it!
Right after the first Mac shipped in January 1984, some software-team members were gathered in our office and a call was forwarded to us from Apple's main number. Unfortunately, an early Macintosh user's system had crashed, the dialog box with the bomb was visible, and the woman on the phone was worried that her computer might blow up.
AK: Growing up, one of my first computer experiences was fighting with my brothers over whose turn it was to play the solitaire you designed for Windows. I recently saw that you've turned that design into an actual deck of cards, and all those memories came flooding back. I know people have tattoos of your designs and buy prints for their homes and offices. Did you ever expect people would develop such an emotional attachment to your designs?
SK: I loved designing those cards because I'm addicted to solitaire — it's one of the first card games I remember my mother teaching me to play — and it was a great pixel challenge.
At the time, I really was focused on solving the design problem at hand, not speculating about the future. Of course it's gratifying to see some of the icon concepts in use 30 years later, and I'm flattered that people have good memories and associations with them.
AR: Even though computers are a modern invention, you have, as you mentioned, an art-history background. How has that influenced your work?
SK: When you study art history, you learn that there is very little that is completely new, and in many ways digital art is no different. I love to derive inspiration from all types of images: mosaics, hieroglyphics, petroglyphs, woven patterns in textiles, and needlework. There is a lot of very good "pixel" design work before the twentieth century, like a 1760 sampler by Elizabeth Laidman that looks like a bitmap font.
I don't use work from the past as a literal guide; rather, those artifacts reinforce a view that simple images can communicate with wide audiences over time. Icon design is like solving a puzzle, trying to marry an image and idea that, ideally, will be easy for people to understand and remember.
AR: Are there icons that you still find hard to get right even after designing for decades?
SK: I'm still trying to come up with something good for concepts that defy easy visualization, such as "categories" or "followers." I never stop trying to think of a really good icon for "idea" that doesn't involve a lightbulb.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Alex Ronan is a writer living in Berlin. | | | | | | | | | | | | Turkey's Kingdom of Men | | | | By Lauren Bohn | | | |
Last week a faction of Turkey's military tried to take over the country in a failed coup attempt. Noticeably absent from the torrent of coverage and political discourse are the country's women — not surprising in a country that activists say has become increasingly patriarchal and misogynistic.
Despite Turkey's emergence as a world leader, the country has a rocky record of female empowerment. It ranks 130th out of 145 countries in the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report. That's just slightly above Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. The labor force participation rate for women is only 33.6% — one of the lowest rates in Europe and the Middle East. Honor killings, in which women are murdered by family members for perceived damage to the family's reputation, still occur in rural parts of the country.
Last summer 28-year-old Çilem Karablut became a cause célèbre among Turkish women activists when she turned herself in to police after admitting she had killed her husband with a handgun. Karablut insisted that she was defending herself. Her husband had allegedly beaten, drugged, and abused her. The prosecutor demanded a life sentence. In June, the court sentenced her to fifteen years behind bars.
"It shouldn't only be women who do all of the dying here," she told local press, claiming that she went to authorities several times with a black eye, but no one helped her. "It's time for men to do some dying, too."
Last year, the brutal murder of Özgecan Aslan, a 20-year-old student who was stabbed in a minibus in southern Turkey while resisting a rape attempt — her body burned and dismembered afterward — helped lift the silence around the treatment of women in the country. While crimes against women are widely underreported, it's estimated that almost 300 women were killed last year, mostly at the hands of men. What's more, around 40 percent of Turkish women have experienced domestic violence in their lifetimes.
It wasn't always this way. Turkey gave women the right to vote in 1934, a decade before France and Italy did. By some reports, the country had the world's first female combat pilot. While activists say Turkey has long been patriarchal, many focus the blame on current President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Islamic-rooted AK Party for rolling back the status of women and moving what was once a distinctly secular country toward Islamic conservatism. Analysts predict that the failed coup attempt will only strengthen his autocratic grip on the country.
Shortly after Aslan's murder, Erdoğan called violence against women the "bleeding wound" of the nation. But his detractors weren't fazed. They pointed to a series of repressive practices and rhetoric that minimizes women's rights. In 2012, Erdoğan announced that the AK Party would draft a law banning abortion completely. Following debate, the draft has been shelved, though the demeaning rhetoric continues, including a call for women to have at least three children each and an oft-referenced speech in which he declared that men and women aren't equal.
"We only hear whispering of progress … not real words," said Serap Güre Şenalp of the Women's Employment and Labor Initiative. "And if there were real words, we wouldn't hear them because we're not at the table."
Last February, the Istanbul Police Department established a new bureau for fighting domestic violence and appointed a 39-year-old female police officer, Kiymet Bilir Değerli, to head the post. Turkish police have long been criticized for failing to provide protection for women and focusing on family reconciliation rather than punishment. Activists point to the government's 2011 decision to rename the Ministry of Women's Issues to the Ministry of the Family as further proof of their minimized role and protection in society.
In order to interview Değerli for Lenny, my translator and I had to get a series of approvals from the police department and explain the intent of our story. Bureaucracy and suspicion toward the press are standard in Turkey; the country has one of the worst press-freedom records in the world. While she had been vocal in our off-the-record preinterview, Değerli relied on her male deputy, Yavuz Morgul, to do most of the talking once our discussion was for public attribution.
"He is more knowledgeable than me," she explained when I asked her why he was fielding all our questions.
Morgul, who had previously been assigned to the homicide unit, explained that Turkey doesn't have a specific issue with violence against women. It's a global problem, he said, that is imported from the West.
"We are some of the most loving people in the world toward women," he said. He offered an anecdote about a famous blind Turkish poet who knew his wife was cheating on him, but instead of confronting her, he left money in her shoes in case she needed any for the journey to her lover's home.
"That's how deeply Turks love," he explained. "But Westernization has now brought us to the point of talking about violence against women … the West has unfortunately deteriorated the family unit and sexualized women."
For survivors like 52-year-old Nazan Eroğlu, who found solace in Purple Roof, Turkey's first domestic-violence shelter, the new police unit is mere window dressing, an extension of a retrograde Turkish government and society.
"When you first hear about it, you say, 'Oh, what good news! Such a unit, and a woman as the head of it!' Then you think for a moment. A woman with the mentality of the current government does not give me hope," she says. "These steps are just for show."
Aylin Nazliaka, an opposition-party parliamentarian who has thrown major muscle behind fighting domestic violence, remains skeptical as well. Two years ago, Nazliaka made local headlines when she launched a tirade during a session of parliament, lambasting the AK Party for failing to aggressively tackle domestic violence. She became so incensed that she threatened to throw one of her high-heeled shoes at her fellow deputies. The exchange birthed a Twitter hashtag: #geliyorterlik, or "My slipper is coming;" Turkish women posted it with pictures of shoes and rallied for equal rights.
"Turkey is facing a serious problem," she said. "If leaders don't acknowledge we have a crisis when it comes to the treatment of women, we will go increasingly backward."
But here's the rub: not many leaders seem to think there's a problem. Influential national figures like Ismet Uçma, a founder and deputy of the ruling party, claim that violence against women is often exaggerated, if not exploited, by women's organizations and the media.
"Some organizations give unnecessary encouragement for women to take police action," he said, perched in an office strewed with religious texts. "Some women exaggerate minor issues. If abuse is once a month … if violence is not something like you had trauma and had to go to the hospital, then it's not an issue to exaggerate. If it's a minor slap, then things like that can be tolerated and shouldn't be exposed."
He abruptly stopped his explanation to ask a question of his own.
"Are you married?" he asked me.
"Yes," I responded, forgoing an explanation of how I'm in an unmarried long-term relationship. I field this question regularly while reporting in Turkey and the Middle East from both men and women. Our not being married and not having children doesn't culturally register, so I often just say I'm married as shorthand.
"Do you have children?" he snapped back. It's another question I receive almost weekly.
When I told him we don't, he issued a verdict.
"You're selfish," he said, echoing Erdoğan's recent statements that women who reject motherhood are incomplete and deficient. "You're focusing on your work and not your true calling."
Soon, his stylish fifteen-year-old daughter walked into the office. I asked her if she agreed with her father's assessment.
"No, you're not selfish," she said, slightly blushing. "You're just contributing to the world in a different way."
The two agreed to disagree, but not without Uçma getting the final word.
"She's young and easily influenced by the West," he said. "One day, she will understand."
Back at the police department, the new domestic-violence task force was busy organizing security logistics for a large Islamic conference hosted by the city. Değerli says most of their daily tasks aren't related to countering violence against women, but supporting other units — an acknowledgment that isn't seen as problematic.
"There had been challenges previously in Turkey, but now, thanks to the government, women can stand on their feet and can be independent from men," she explained.
"The media shouldn't focus on the violence," Morgul added. "They should focus on love."
Değerli smiled and nodded her head in emphatic agreement. She then wished us well and said she hoped we would write nice things about her.
Meanwhile, Çilem Karablut has begun her fifteen-year sentence for her husband's death. She's not as lucky as men who have openly admitted to killing their partners have been. In 2014, a 62-year-old man appeared on a TV dating show looking for a new wife and shocked the audience when he casually mentioned he'd murdered his former wife and a girlfriend. He was reportedly released twice from prison, both of his sentences shorter than the one handed down to Karablut. Last year, an Istanbul court released a man who beat his wife to death after he had served just one year of his three-year sentence.
In a small town not far from where Karablut claims she killed her husband in self-defense, a group of self-described feminist activists whom I met at an International Women's Day rally last year in Istanbul said they had hoped to hold a rally for her, but life got in the way.
"I don't think my mother and brother will think that's a good idea … they're looking for a husband for me," a 24-year-old medical student explained, asking for her name to be withheld for fear her family would find out that she had participated in a demonstration. "Making noise on the streets won't help them find me one … sometimes it is easier to compromise."
Lauren Bohn is the GroundTruth Project's Middle East correspondent, based in Istanbul, and a co-founder of Foreign Policy Interrupted, an initiative to amplify female voices in foreign policy. | | | | | | | | | | | | Alison Steele | | | | By Jess Rotter | | |
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