Don't Laugh!



David Aaronovich used this column in The Times to get stuck into Bulent Arinc, the deputy prime minister of Turkey, who suggested recently that women should not laugh in public.

How depressing that a senior politician can speak in such ridiculous terms, but on the bright side the fightback has already begun with thousands of Turkish women using social media to poke fun at Mr Arinc and his deeply misogynist views. 

It’s no joke. He wants to stop women laughing

David Aaronovitch - The Times

The bizarre words of a Turkish minister are not so far removed from the world of honour killings and gang rapes

Bulent Arinc is the deputy prime minister of Turkey. He is a close associate of the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is the leading candidate for the beefed up Turkish presidency next month. Which is just as well, since he beefed it up.

Mr Arinc therefore is a man of some standing in his country and when he speaks it is not quite the same thing as, say, David Icke or Britain’s top Moonie offering their opinions on reptilian conspiracies or the spiritual need for silent childbirth. He is no eccentric figure; he is, rather, Turkey’s George Osborne.

So when on Monday, at a rally to celebrate the end of Ramadan, Mr Arinc delivered himself of a sermon on morals, these words were being uttered by a mainstream figure. “Chastity is so important,” he told his listeners. “It is an ornament for both women and men.” Which meant, he explained, that the man should not be a womaniser. As for the woman: “She will not laugh in public. She will not be inviting in her attitudes and will protect her chasteness.”

That a man will not sleep around by not sleeping around seems logical if obvious. That a woman will be chaste by not laughing in public seems deeply peculiar. So much so that since Mr Arinc did not spell out the connection we must consider ourselves “invited” to try to work out what is going on in his mind and, we must presume, the minds of many of his listeners.

There was a clue as to the mechanism that Mr Arinc sees as being at work here in another part of his speech. He had finished a boilerplate section on the moral turpitude of TV and the internet, of the kind that is common in almost all countries, and then asked a question. “Where are our girls, who slightly blush, lower their heads and turn their eyes away when we look at their face, so becoming the symbol of chastity?” he demanded.

So a truly sexually modest woman is one who does not laugh openly and who blushes if a man looks at her. Otherwise she is inviting attentions that she really should not.

I can forgive the Turkish deputy prime minister for not realising that an entire Japanese fetish industry almost certainly exists around the eroticisation of the blush, just as other men are hugely turned on by the niqab. That’s fallen humanity for you. Even so, one wonders what he thinks a blush in that situation represents, a post-paradise state of knowing or an Edenic not knowing? After apple or before apple? Of course it represents knowing, otherwise why blush? That’s why a blush is sexy.

But — and here’s the thing — it also represents being ashamed of what you know. The public laugh, however, is the woman not being ashamed of what she knows. She gets the joke and she enjoys it. And it signifies, too, a lack of total restraint, an almost physical enjoyment like a sneeze or an orgasm. The woman says (to Mr Arinc and everyone else) I know, I like, I take.

Such a stance would have been controversial even in this country — more than half a millennium ago. In the 1370s the Wife of Bath rode out into English literature to do battle against the position that men had decided women should occupy. In the prologue to her tale Chaucer has her reminding her audience that the rules have been written by the imams and the rabbis and the apostles. The Wife uses the example of Aesop’s famous observation that a hunt would be portrayed very differently if it was the prey doing the painting. “Who peynted the leon?” she demands. “Tel me who?” By God, she adds, if women wrote the stories, what tales they would tell of male transgressions!

The Wife was emerging from a period when it was indeed considered somehow undignified and immodest for women, particularly high-born ones, to laugh in company. We have enough clues in medieval writing to know that women were constrained from full expression of mirth — though one French, late 14th-century etiquette guide cites the marvellous (though in its view deplorable) example of a Moranesque young lady who, in a crowded event, joked that she was being so squeezed that her c*** was “half wrinkled”. Except she didn’t use asterisks.

Chaucer’s Wife sought sovereignty over her life in a culture that allowed the rape and physical assault of women and gave legal privileges to husbands and sons over wives and daughters. A successful businesswoman in the wool trade, she understood — made explicit, almost — the link between her right to property and her right over her body and enjoyment of it. So, when she is criticised for liking sex she retorts:

In Wifehood wol I use myn instrument

As freely as my Maker hath it sent.


The issue here is not really modesty or a lack of it. It is autonomy. The late medieval Chaucer comprehended very well what Mr Arinc in 2014 seeks to deflect, which is that telling adult women what is and isn’t modest, how they should and shouldn’t behave, is a way of exercising control over them. Left to themselves, who knows what they might not do? And that is why it doesn’t matter if men laugh in public. Because, other than regretting their womanising, there is no threat implicit in their hilarity. They belong only to themselves.

There is a funny side to this and an unfunny one. One thing that men always worry about when women laugh openly is that it is men who are the objects of the joke. More particularly they fear that it’s the male’s precarious potency — Falstaff’s lament about desire outliving performance — that is causing the guffaws. Mr Arinc is 66.

The unfunny side is the result of the logical extension of the ideas of imposed female modesty and immodesty. Mr Arinc’s strictures are a not-so-very-distant cousin to “honour” killings and gang rapes. In some parts of Turkey these still happen, and over the Syrian border in Raqqa, Isis has been stoning “adulterous” women.

I saw a news report yesterday from Somalia. An Islamist militia had driven into a village and found a woman there who was not veiled. They insisted she wear a head covering but, when they returned, she had taken it off. So they shot her dead outside her hut.

In Turkey, a country I love, thousands of latterday Wives of Bath took to social media following Mr Arinc’s speech, posting pictures of themselves laughing. Let us hope (as they must be hoping) that ridicule will be enough.

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