Just as fast as Turkey’s deputy prime minister Bülent Arınç declared that women of his country shouldn’t tarnish their pure image by laughing in public, so the women of Turkey are responding by laughing and tw**ting about it, laughing at Muslim Leisure Fascist Arınç at the same time. And some men are supporting them. As the Guardian reports,
On Wednesday thousands of women posted pictures of themselves laughing out loud, with the hashtags #direnkahkaha (resist laughter) and #direnkadin (resist woman) trending on Twitter.
Turkish men also took to social media to express their solidarity. “The men of a country in which women are not allowed to laugh are cowards”, tweeted one user.
Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, the main opposition presidential candidate running against current prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in next Sunday’s elections, joined a chorus of male voices criticising Bülent Arinç’s comment, tweeting: “More than anything else, our country needs women to smile and to hear everybody’s laughter.”
Other opposition figures pointed out that Arinç’s comments highlighted the dismal state of women’s rights in Turkey. Calling on people to protest against massive violence towards women at a demonstration next week, Melda Onur, an Istanbul MP for the main opposition Republican People’s party, wrote on Twitter: “We would have left Arinç to his fantasies and wouldn’t even have laughed about it, but while so many murders are being committed he makes [women] a target by stressing the need for chastity.”
I knew I could count on Turkish women to defy this stupid Diktat! Maybe there’s a chance for secularism after all.
Note: some of the pictures feature nudity, and you can see more at the Femen Turkey website. Here are a few of the pictures that are Safe for Work. ‘ Be sure to read the captions.
On holiday without their husbands!!!:
They’re so strident!
So true. I mean, I guess they have the right to express their disagreement, but why be so loud about it? Why can’t they be respectful about it and just smile a little? Not only is this behaviour strident, but it’s also aggressive! These women are blatantly attacking the minister with their laughter.
I think the word you’re looking for is “militant”.
They just HATE everything that’s good and holy, that’s all.
Good to see such stupid comments from a stupid person getting the reaction they deserve.
Dearly hope that Turkey can maintain its broadly secular nature despite the best efforts of the current administration.
How profoundly twisted does a person have to be to want to ban LAUGHTER? This might be one of the most ridiculous examples of the dehumanizing effects of religious belief, albeit not as graphic as the misogynistic violence associated with the faith. Still, I submit that anyone whom is threatened by laughter needs to have their hard-drive reformatted. I sentence PM Arınç to a Parks and Rec and Trailer Park Boys marathon! The pic of the woman laughing with the glass of wine is my favorite. Whatever she’s laughing at, must have been hilarious.
In addition, laughing has been shown to produce health benefits. The deputy prime minister has become the surgeon general in reverse. Dr. Distemper unleashes his misogynistic prescriptions at the pharmacy of the socially morose.
Wonderful! The emancipation of woman should be one of the world’s most important goals. Can you imagine how much they could contribute if given the chance? This would benefit everyone. Science, in the form of computer enabled information proliferation and communication, has again come to the aid of mankind against these entrenched primitive superstitions.
Good on them, and good on the men who support them! How does one say “woman power” in Turkish?
There is a couple in our village of Nakusp, BC who have a daughter living in Istanbul. Her mother tells me that an election will be held in Turkey in October this year – the bad news is that the same idiots are going to be
re-elected.
Arınç bans laughter. Hilarity ensues.
/@
+1
While I greatly sympathize with the sentiment, I realize that, living in Turkey, their English may not be all that great (though certainly better than my Turkish), and so I’ve taken the liberty of improving the style and colloquial nature of the thought:
“The men of a country in which women are not allowed to laugh are
cowardsfucking assholes”Are they? Well then, they don’t need women for that, they can manage fine with each other.
Sorry….
Allah did not create man so that he could have fun. The aim of creation was for mankind to be put to the test through hardship and prayer. An Islamic regime must be serious in every field. There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious.
— Ayatollah Khomeini
And just in case you thought he was just having a bad day …
A man can have sexual pleasure from a child as young as a baby. However, he should not penetrate vaginally, but sodomising the child is acceptable. If a man does penetrate and damage the child then, he should be responsible for her subsistence all her life. This girl will not count as one of his four permanent wives and the man will not be eligible to marry the girl’s sister… It is better for a girl to marry at such a time when she would begin menstruation at her husband’s house, rather than her father’s home. Any father marrying his daughter so young will have a permanent place in heaven.
The Forces of Happiness must rise up against the fun police!
And the second paragraph – so many kinds of insanely awful. Desperately terrible.
Sub
I am reminded of Umberto Eco’s great novel, the Name of the Rose, the plot of which on one cranky old priest’s effort to hide Aristotle’s book on comedy, because he thinks laughter offends God.
Well, it may just do that, because laughter reminds us that life is very silly, and whoever designed it wasn’t thinking too clearly.
Laughter is expression of the joy of undesigned life. Of course religionists would hate it, it’s bare existence ridicules their over-determined scariness.
If I’m going to hell, can I at least get a good handbasket?
On a straighter note, kudos to the brave women and their male supporters who have collectively flipped this minister the bird he so richly deserved.
It is precisely when “things go to hell” in the slang European-like sense that other folks, say the Inuit, love to laugh the most. The idea seems to be that if something horrendous has just happened, you should try to get back to the mean (Aristotle nods) by being over-silly and happy.
Makes sense to me😍
Turkey’s in a weird place right now… I have a colleague who acts as an opposition election monitor, and a friend who seems to get regularly tear-gassed.
The current lot will probably be re-elected as they’re more popular outside the cities.
And what about Arınç’s wife? The Tw**t*r feed has pictures of her (and Erdogan’s wife) laughing.
Just today I read about a court giving a man who injured his wife, a lighter sentence, because she was wearing leggings.
http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/turkish-court-considers-wearing-leggings-as-provocative-factor-in-domestic-violence-case.aspx?pageID=238&nID=69832&NewsCatID=509
Laugh long and hearty ladies! 🙂