As you may know if you are a regular reader, I rarely go on rants. I try to maintain as positive and optmistic a stance in my writing as I possibly can. And it’s hardly a put-on. I am mostly happy here in Turkey and that’s more than a lot of people.

Lately, however, certain thorns-in-my-side have been making it a bit uncomfortable for me to breathe. Of these disturbances, this whole culture of ayıp is the hardest for me to deal with.

Ayıp literally means “shame or disgrace”, but it also means “fault or defect”. But the whole idea surrounding “ayıp” is deeply entrenched in Turkish society. The fear of it guides peoples’ every-day actions. Beyond a mere system of societal taboo, it is a way of thinking that is passed from generation to generation. What the neighbors will think is extremely important. It is instilled into young children who will one day pass it on to their own offspring if they cannot break the cycle. Allow me to give you a few example of what I am talking about.

I would describe all of my foreign friends living here as very respectful people. All of them do their best to assimilate into Turkish culture. My friend Raquel lives in a neighborhood on the European side and she is deeply passionate about it, even supporting the football team liker a true fanatic and attending the local hamam. But even she is not safe from the scrutiny that is ayıp. Recently, a Turkish friend of hers told her that a picture she had posted of a man at the seaside wearing an undershirt and swimming trunks was offensive. She was obviously puzzled by this as well as frustrated.

Turks often think of people from other cultures as being too laid-back about things and Americans are accused of this all the time. We are simply too relaxed and this is wrong. Recently, I got my boyfriend into trouble accidentally.

Unfortunately, when it is obvious to a Turks that the offender is foreign, they turn to lash out on their Turkish mate instead. Twice in one week, I, in my heathenly relaxed state, committed ayıp, and the boyfriend took the rap.
Once was when we were in the grocery store. We had just come from the gym and I was parched. As we walked, I popped open my 7-Up and gulped it down. People looked at me as though I had just taken off my clothes. I couldn’t figure out what the big deal was. Back home, people routinely give their kid a candy bar to placate them as the shop and then hand the empty wrapper to the cashier. It’s commonplace. But in Turkey, this is major ayıp, aparently. And someone was on the verge of lecturing the boyfriend about it, too, but we hauled out of there.

The next night, we went to see a movie. The theatre was mostly empty. I had taken off my flip flops and put my clean feet on the back of the seat in front of me. There was no one in that row save five seats down. Again, people are forever putting their feet up wherever they please in America, and usually with their shoes on, even. You see it in sitcoms all the time. People flop down on the couch after work, with their boots on. This is incredibly offensive in Turkish culture.
The point is that some guy, five seats down, totally attacked the boyfriend at intermission. It got very heated. This guy was on the war path. Ayıp makes people very uptight. He wanted to take up a vote from the theatre goers if he was right to be offended by what I had done. He even offered to ask security’s take on it. In other words, he threatened to have us thrown out. I had dutifully taken my feet down as soon as it began. I am not looking to start any trouble, after all, and I especially do not want the boyfriend to be in a position where he has to defend me. That’s a slippery slope because even though he may agree with me, we are in THIS culture and we have to play by THEIR rules.

Single women often have their own difficult lines to toe. Two of my female friends, both Turkish, have been subjected to scrutiny by their kapıcıs. A kapıcı is the doorman of a building. He sometimes does the cleaning of the hallways, collects packages, changes light bulbs, that kind of thing. They are almost always incredibly poor, uneducated men from some god-forsaken village and this is the best work they can ask for in Istanbul.
Anyway, when my friend Filiz ecently moved into her building, the kapıcı said to her, “The girl who used to live here was so nice. She never had any male guests.” You can see what the implication is there. My other friend, Hale, suffered the same comments from her kapıcı. In her case, the kapıcı and his wife live on the first floor and whenever she comes home, they peek out the window to see if she is alone.

Speaking of kapıcıs, the boyfriend had a silly kapıcı in the building of his old music school in Ankara. Every year around the Kurban Bayram (Sacrifice Holiday), he would come around asking for donations. Even though he was dirt poor, he was trying to buy an animal to sacrifice so that he could show the people back home that he was a success. Naturally Allah excuses those who are too poor to take care of themselves, but this guy was suffering under the yoke of ayıp. It would have been ayıp for him not to send that meat and he couldn’t bear that kind of shame.

Americans are routinely accused of being liberal dirty hippies. The fact that we like to take our shoes off at the park and walk barefoot in the grass is absolutely appalling to most Turks and shows how loose our morals are.

And speaking of loose morals, I feel so sorry for all of my Russian girlfriends. I learned very quickly how Russian women are viewed by some Turkish people. Turkish women, in large part, despise them. Unfortunately, in the 80s, a lot of Russian women entered Turkey illegally and worked as prostitutes. A lot of them ended up wrecking homes and stealing husbands. To this day, they are regarded skeptically and sometimes even called whores outright. If you ask me, that sort of judgmentalism is what ought to be considered ayıp. But what do I know? I’m just a dirty hippie American with loose morals. (sigh)