All posts tagged Sex

  • July 3, 2016

    A Turkish Brazilian Wax Gone Wrong

    beauty-2016-01-sex-and-the-city-bikini-wax-main

    Today before work I ran over to the hamam to get my lower body waxed, an activity I choose to do there because it is cheap, close by, and has hygiene standards no worse than I’ve seen in any other Turkish salon. BUT, as I’ve written before, the affordability of the service does come at a cost, which is the hamamgoers complete and utter lack of inhibition. Take today for example. I enter the hamam, ask to be waxed, am handed slippers and key to a locker where I may put my purse, than beckoned over to the waxing room and told to have a seat.

    Except there was already somebody in there.

    A naked somebody.

    A somebody who was, at that very moment, getting the hair waxed off her vagina.

    A woman in her late sixties, I’m guessing, casually getting a Brazilian wax. In front of me.

    Nobody else seemed to think this was awkward, so I sat down obediently while Brazilian waxer and waxee gossiped about godknowswhat and I studiously attempted to keep my eyes away from the danger zone.

    It must be said, before I continue, that in Turkey it is quite normal for a woman in her sixties to be getting a Brazilian wax. In fact, in Turkey having a clean pubic area is considered – and I quote – “a matter of basic hygiene.” So it was not the age of the woman in front of me that surprised me or made me uncomfortable, but the part where she spread her legs to get her butthole waxed?

    Maaaaybe a little.

    Before long there was a cry of “hadi bakalim!” which signaled the end of the Brazilian wax in front of me. The erstwhile waxee rose, adjusted her stomach, and sailed out the door. It was my turn.

    At this point, at the risk of oversharing, I should state that I am also a Brazilian wax-subscriber, and have been since the first time I got waxed in Turkey and asked my waxer to leave the bikini area alone only to have her look at me like I had two heads. So I shrugged, thought, “When in Constantinople…” and succumbed the next time to enduring the most painful beauty process known to man short of surgery.

    So, one of the other reasons why I like this hamam for my waxing is that the waxer is a veritable Brazilian speed-demon. I have seriously never had a less painless Brazilian than at her hands, and there is no bleeding or anything. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a miracle.

    There are two downsides to getting waxed by a Brazilian speed-demon in a room with an open door at a local hamam where people hang around naked and have no inhibitions. One is that anybody can walk in the door at any time, usually nude or nearly-nude. The second is that there is no opportunity to hold the skin taut because there are literally milliseconds between each rip of the wax strip. Because it’s a lot less painful than a customary Brazilian wax, I have learned to let this go.

    However, not everybody feels the same way.

    Midway through the wax, another woman sailed through the door in order to ask about getting a massage and saw me naked from the waist down on the table in the middle of a tornado of hair being ripped from my groin. She, it is fair to say, was not pleased with what she saw and started yelling at the waxer.

    “What are you doing?! Her skin is pasty like mine! If you do it without pulling the skin it will get red! You need to pull it! What are you doing?! Don’t do it like that!”

    The waxer responded in similarly raised tones. “It’s alright! No problem! She’s fine! Look, almost all the hair is gone already!”

    The new client did not take no for an answer, strode to the other side of the bed, and yelled again. “You have to hold her skin! Otherwise it will hurt her!”

    Then she paused for a moment as she realized I had been mute the whole time. “Do you understand Turkish?”

    I nodded, but was too shocked to formulate a response.

    My mistake. The new woman took the burden of relieving me of my ability to choose, and helpfully reached down and held my vagina skin for me.

    An unauthorized stranger touching my vagina helped jar me into action. I helpfully replaced my her hand with mine so that she would know that I would henceforth take better care of my nether-regions. She nodded approvingly, made another comment about how white my skin is and how I’d better not get it red, and went to sit in the courtyard.

    When I left she was still sitting there, and wished me Iyi Bayramlar (happy holidays for the end of Ramadan.) I responded in kind, because how the hell else do you respond? “Bye bye random vagina-touching lady! Hope to see you again never! Anyway, it’s all smooth down there and not too red, thanks. Okay, uh, see you! Bye!”

    And that, my friends, is the story of my Turkish Brazilian wax, and all I can say to conclude this festival of overshare is iyi bayramlar to you too, and I wish you a lifetime of no unwanted body hair.

    No Comments / Turkey /

  • May 24, 2016

    You Should Know about Bülent Ersoy and Zeki Müren

    bulent-ersoy-22

    I went out one night the first summer I spent in Turkey. It was late evening, and I was quickly walking the length of a wide boulevard in Izmir with an acquaintance. The quickness of my step was due both to the fact that it was nighttime and because the boulevard was lined with prostitutes. As we sped past, cars rolled to a stop all along the stretch and the prostitutes leaned into windows to negotiate. “They’re transsexuals,” my company said. “Transsexual prostitutes.”

    I hadn’t noticed, but learned to identify them as I continued to roam the streets of Izmir at night. I would later learn that prostitution is legal in Turkey, but that only women are permitted to work in brothels. (The current government has enacted a number of measures to make it more difficult for brothels to operate, which means that female prostitutes are increasingly being forced out into the street as well; however, transgender street prostitutes seemed, at least in Izmir, to be the norm.) As transgender people in Turkey already tend to live in the margins of society, many are pushed even further into performing street prostitution because widespread prejudice against them makes it difficult to find work outside the sex trade.

    Turkey is a land of contractions, however, and the story how LGBT people are treated here is less simple than one might think. Although Turkey’s patriarchal bent is undeniable, and although violence against LGBT people is alarmingly frequent (as illustrated by the bizarre ad I’ve attached below from Amnesty International, which implores us all to add #gayturtle to our tweets in order to spread awareness of Turkey’s homophobia problem), certain LGBT individuals have pushed their way to the top of Turkish society to become icons even among the most conservative and homophobic layers of society.

    One of these is Bülent Ersoy, who I first learned about via a conversation I had about feminism and women’s rights with Adem. “Feminists in Turkey often think about feminism too narrowly,” he said. “In conversations about rights for women and LGBT people, few give economics the place they deserve in the discussion. Women, gays, and transgender people are treated really badly here, it’s true, but money can reverse that completely. Just look at Bülent Ersoy. She is rich enough that nobody in Turkey can touch her.”

    “Who’s Bülent Ersoy?” I asked.

    “Bülent Ersoy is a trans woman,” Adem said. “A very popular singer who became popular while she was still a man. Also, believe me when I say that she looked a lot better when she was a man. Anyway, she got surgery to change her gender and a few years later she was even able to have her gender legally changed. She’s still famous, and really very popular.”

    I picked up my phone to google Ersoy. Adem was certainly right about her looking better as a man. Ersoy as a man could have passed as a woman with the help of a bit of eyebrow shaping. Ersoy as a woman – well, nobody would suspect she was born a man, I suppose.

    bulent ersoy man

    Source: YouTube

    Source: Internet Haber

    Source: Internet Haber

    I started mentioning Bülent Ersoy to different Turkish people to gauge their reactions and get a real idea of her fame. Everybody knew who she was, and most reacted the same way. “Ah yes, Bülent Ersoy. Very famous. Great singer. Looked much prettier as a man.” Eventually, this reaction gave me pause. I began to think about how everybody who spoke about Ersoy’s looks, and particularly her beauty, was implying that one of the functions of a ‘woman’ is to look good. And although women who were born women fight back against this societal expectation sometimes and are generally considered entitled to do so, transgender women do not enjoy this same privilege because the concept of beauty is something we use to judge the ‘womanness’ of somebody who was born with a penis.

    That being said, the real reason that Bülent Ersoy has managed to attain and maintain such fame is not the fact that she’s transgender and is not her physical appearance – it’s her music. I’ve included one of her tracks below; the video clocks in at nearly 10 million views, ensuring that nobody can claim Ersoy to be anything but mainstream.

    Here is another track, this time with Tarkan, another one of Turkey’s best known singers.

    Although by now I am used to being surprised by Turkey’s contractions, Bülent Ersoy’s popularity still shocked me. She even seemed a posterchild for Turkey’s contradictions; as I scrolled through internet photographs of her, I stumbled across a photograph of her wearing hijab. After showing the photograph to Adem, he said, “yes, she wears it when she sings religious songs. Oh, I forgot to tell you, when she got a sex change operation in 1981, the tabloids published a picture of her disembodied penis in a jar.” He googled the picture to show me.

    It was a penis all right.

    But here she is in a hijab, which she's accessorized beautifully with a feather wrap.

    I decided not to post the photograph of the penis, but here is Ersoy herself in a hijab, which she’s accessorized beautifully with an opulent feather wrap, straight eyebrows, and lots and lots of lipliner.

    My and Adem’s conversation continued. “There’s another person I have to tell you about,” he said. “Not Bülent Ersoy – before her.” His name was Zeki Müren, and he was like a gay icon in Turkey. He never officially came out as gay, but he dressed very effeminately and wore makeup, and he had a beautiful voice. It doesn’t matter who you are in Turkey – religious, not religious, liberal, conservative, man, woman – Zeki Müren is loved. Universally loved. I think he was one of the best vocalists the world has ever seen. He really sang very beautiful Turkish, and spoke it too for that matter. There are even videos where you can see his incredible diction because he’s just saying tongue-twisters to show it off.

    Zeki Müren has been variously compared to David Bowie and Liberace by people who feel like Western readers need some kind of reference point in order to understand his impact. If a further reference point is needed, Müren bears similarities to Neil Patrick Harris for his dual music and film career; Müren appeared in 18 films, usually as a straight male love interest. However, as as Cara Giaimo writes, “comparing [Müren] to others obscures the very particular role he played, and still plays, in his own country.” Zeki Müren wasn’t the David Bowie or Liberace or Neil Patrick Harris of Turkey, but the Zeki Müren of Turkey. Indeed, when Lady Gaga released her album art for her album “Applause” the internet was quick to point out a similar image of Zeki Müren and accuse her of blatant plagiarism. The fact that the Zeki Müren image was clearly photoshopped and couldn’t possibly have been real didn’t matter. The message was clear: Müren was the real deal, while those creatives who succeeded him are comparative poseurs.

    This is a hoax, but that's not the point.

    This is a hoax, but that’s not the point.

    A few weeks ago, an article appeared in Atlas Obscura about the Zeki Müren hotline. An initiative of Turkish filmmaker Beyza Boyacioglu, the hotline is a repository for Zeki Müren stories, memories, and tributes and ran entirely on word of mouth. As of a month ago, the hotline had received over 700 individual message proving that, even 20 years after his death, Müren is still an icon. His pompadour, makeup, and effeminate clothing mark him as a man who played with gender and sexuality, but his voice and legacy are universalizing.

    This video has 8 million views, even though Müren has been dead for 20 years. Not bad at all.

    On the whole, the Turkish establishment is becoming more conservative than it ever has before. It’s not fair to characterize Bülent Ersoy and Zeki Müren as pockets of resistance per say, but their popularity does serve as a reminder that Turkish society is a whirlwind of contradiction. Turkey is a place where transgender people are forced into the sex trade and are the objects of violence but also attain the heights of Ersoy, where female virginity at marriage is prized even in the most liberal enclaves (and in Izmir, this is coupled with pressure to look really good and dress provocatively), where hospitality is prized but urban residents can be incredibly rude, and where hijabis roam wearing incredible makeup and dresses cut to show off the shape of their body and make out with their boyfriends in secluded corners. I’ve given up trying to understand, but I’ve committed to keep noticing.

    No Comments / Turkey, Uncategorized /

  • November 13, 2015

    Chicken Soup for the Lesbian Soul

    This post is about one particular area of culture shock that, no matter how much time I spend in Turkey and with Turkish people, I still find challenging.

    I’m not talking about lesbianism, which I will get to later. I am talking about hospitality culture, and particularly, about when Turkish people buy me stuff. It’s not that I have any problem with people being generous, or with hospitality, or with people being happy that I’m there. All of these things are lovely.

    What I find difficult about Turkish hospitality culture is that its rules are totally different from Canadian hospitality culture. It’s like learning a new language. Moreover, unlike actually learning a language, there are few Turkish culture teachers who have also spent a lot of time immersed in Canadian culture that can instruct me on the finer points of how to feel and behave when people (read, mostly men) offer to buy me stuff or just buy me stuff without allowing me the space to politely refuse. My cultural codes play constant interference in my head, and I always struggle with making the same assumptions about gifts in Turkey that I would make in Canada.

    Oh Canada / my home and native land / your cultural norms / the only ones I understand.

    Oh Canada / my home and native land / your cultural norms / are the ones I understaaaaaaaaand.

    Here’s an example: in Canada, if a man asks you out, there are tacit codes for about how much money he can spend on you before it becomes clear that you are very interested in him romantically. The last time I went on a date in Canada, I think I let him spend $10 on me. This is low, but it was a first date and I was entirely unsure about my own level of interest, so I didn’t want him to get any ideas.

    If, however, I had allowed him to spend $30 or $40 on me, I would practically have been obligated to give him a second date, and if it had been more, he probably would have expected me to sleep with him that night. I would be allowed to refuse, but it would be considered greedy to do something like that and we likely wouldn’t continue seeing each other.

    However, if I were interested but not ready or willing to have a physical relationship, I could keep the amount of money I allowed him to spend low, perhaps pay for the second date, and by the third date have a frank and honest conversation about our mutual expectations going forward.*

    In Turkey, the first time I went out with a guy, I made it very clear beforehand that I wasn’t romantically interested in anything because I was only there for two months, and he told me that he was living temporarily at his parents’ house because he was between jobs. From my perspective, considering the fact that he didn’t have a job, and because I didn’t want him to think that I was romantically interested, we should choose cheap places and both pay our own way, right? Wrong. He paid for everything, including a fair amount of alcohol (which, relative to the Turkish cost of living, is like liquid gold.) I felt quite badly about how much money it was, and I remember him saying to me, as I made noises of protestation, “you’re a guest in Turkey,” and then “it’s basically impossible to say no to things in Turkey.”

    He was right. I have now been in this situation countless times, and I usually can’t say no. Each time, I am very thankful for the generosity but I normally feel a bit guilty as well.

    I also have trouble distinguishing between what is regular “you are a guest” gifts and what are “I like you romantically” gifts. In some ways, it doesn’t matter, because it is difficult to say no either way. Eventually I realized that the only way I can deal with this is to be clear about my expectations, be careful, and accept gifts graciously and thankfully. Then, if somebody turns out to have other intentions, I can politely tell them that I was telling the truth about what I was and wasn’t looking for.

    Easier said than done, however. I still find myself doing things to mitigate how guilty I feel about people buying me things. So, when a Turkish guy invited me out here in Georgia, I suggested we go to a place that I knew wasn’t that expensive so that I would feel better about him paying.

    Unfortunately, when we got there it was temporarily closed. He said, “Hey, I had sushi last night and it was really good. I’d be happy to have it again – do you want to?”

    In Canada sushi is not particularly expensive, so without really thinking about it, I said, “Sure, sushi sounds good.”

    Big mistake. When we got to the sushi place I looked at the menu only to realize that the sushi was approximately three times the price of Canadian sushi. So I said, “Oh, I didn’t realize it would be so expensive.”

    And he said, “Don’t worry, I wouldn’t invite you to an expensive place and expect you to pay.”

    Welp. Here we go again.

    I told him that he could order because I couldn’t even order food that expensive for myself, and he did the honours. The sushi came (it was the best sushi I have ever had) and he started making racist comments. I can’t even write them down because I don’t want to make my Turkish friends who read this blog angry.

    Shit.

    Finally, I said, “You know, I don’t agree with what you’re saying and I would prefer to talk about something else.” We changed the subject, tucked into the sushi, conversed, whatever. I already knew that me and this guy were not going to be friends, so I couldn’t act remotely flirtatious. Just politely friendly.

    Midway through the meal he said, “You know, you have a lesbian soul.”

    I said, “What?”

    He said, “I can tell you’re a lesbian.”

    I said, “I’m not a lesbian.”

    He said, “No, I promise you that you are. I have a lot of lesbian friends, and you act exactly like them.”

    I thought, “When you say “lesbian friends,” do you mean women who don’t find you attractive? Or are they actually lesbians?”

    I said, “well, I’m not a lesbian.”

    He said, “No, seriously, you are definitely a lesbian! If you want, tonight we will go out to the club and I will buy you a prostitute and you can try being with a woman. I guarantee you that if you are just with a woman once you will not want to go back to men.”

    This was preposterous. I made a face as if I were seriously considering it.

    He said, “See, you are not grossed out!”

    I said, “I’m afraid I might have to refuse your offer. I don’t like the idea of paying for sex. Also, I’m not a lesbian.”

    He said, “What’s the problem? You won’t be paying, I will be.”

    Did I feel bad when he paid for 40 American dollars’ worth of sushi for me? No, no I did not. Did I feel obligated to see him again? Also no!

    The ladies in Bend it like Beckham are as confused as I am.

    The ladies in Bend it like Beckham are as confused as I am. Although I am neither a lesbian nor a Pisces.

    On a side note, this is not the first time this has happened to me with Turkish men. The other three times, I politely refused a man’s offer to take me out only to have him ask, “what, are you a lesbian?” as though it were the only possible reason I could possibly refuse to spend time with such a stud.

    I always have to bite back the urge to say, “not usually, but your Mom is special.” In Canada, it would be a mild burn. In Turkey, it might get me beaten up.

    *The amounts differ depending on the relative income brackets of the two people going on a date, and there is a threshold where you cannot safely assume romantic intent, which is usually about the cost of one coffee or beer.

    No Comments / Turkey /

  • October 20, 2015

    Noah’s Ark, Mount Ararat, Drunkenness, Rape, Incest, and Armenian Pride

    Mount Ararat from Armenia

    The snowy peak of Mount Ararat rises imperiously above Yerevan and greater Armenia and, despite being officially on the Turkish side of the border, it is a major symbol of Armenia and has been on the Armenian coat of arms since at least the Soviet period.

    Armenian Soviet Coat of Arms

    Please excuse the checkered background and focus on the hammer, sickle, mountain, and grapes.

    But in this post, I don’t only want to talk about the mountain. See the grapes on the bottom of the coat of arms? Well, those have a special significance for Armenia. A delicious, intoxicating, darkly comedic significance.

    On my way to Armenia, I met a woman on the train. “Armenia’s very famous for its wine,” she said. “It all started in the Bible. After the great flood, Noah’s ark landed on Mount Ararat, and when he came down off the ark he planted vineyards and made wine. And then . . . well, we don’t have to talk about what happened after that. But wine is still being made there today! It’s delicious. It’s a really great thing about Armenia. You should taste some while you’re here.”

    It’s true. We don’t have to talk about what happened after Noah made wine on Mount Ararat. But we can, because the black humour of this story turning into a source of Armenian national pride is too good to pass up.

    So, as my train-buddy said, tradition has it that God sent a great flood in antiquity to punish a world rife with evil. Noah was the only good person in the whole world, so God let him in on a little secret. “I’m going to punish everybody,” God said, “and send a great flood. Everybody’s going to die. Except you, because you’re righteous. So in order to prepare for this event, build a vast ark and take animals from each species so that they might repopulate the earth after I’ve finished making it rain.”

    So Noah did. Everybody looked at Noah like he was utterly crazy as he was building the ark, but when it started to rain everybody drowned except Noah because Noah was better than everybody else.

    When the waters did go down, the ark landed on top of Mount Ararat. General scholarly opinion holds that, if the flood story is based in historical fact, the biblical Mount Ararat was probably not located in modern-day Armenia. This is not important, however, for the traditional signification of the mountain. In order for the story to take on the trappings of reality, all that has to happen is for people to believe.

    So, let’s say for the sake of argument that Noah’s Ark really did land on top of the Armenian/Turkish Mount Ararat. Noah and his sons climbed down off the snow-covered summit, God sent them a rainbow as a sign that he would never again send such a great flood, and then Noah got down to the business of planting the vineyard that would become a symbol of a small landlocked country called Armenia several millennia later.

    After the grape harvest, Noah made himself some wine and got so drunk he passed out, naked. His son Ham entered the tent and “saw” Noah lying there. Ham went out and told his brothers Shem and Japheth about Noah’s nudity. Shem and Japheth, rather than going in to “see” for themselves, went in backwards with a blanket and covered their father up.

    After Noah woke up from his drunken state, he cursed Ham and Ham’s descendants. Why, you ask? Just for seeing him naked? Well, my heathenistic friends, the general consensus is that “to see” functions as a euphemism for sex. So Ham raped his father.

    If I were told this story about a major landmark of my country, I would be like, “whoa now. We should just get rid of grapes. Like, all grapes. Can’t have things like that happening. Rape is bad. Cursing descendants who didn’t do anything wrong – also bad. Let’s just. Uh. Yeah. No. Okay, if we’re going to continue to have wine in this place, we might just want to keep it on the down-low. You know, because of that terrible bad thing that happened. Which probably happened on another Mount Ararat. Yeah.”

    And yet the Noah’s Ark imagery seems to be everywhere. A major wine and brandy company in Armenia is called “Ararat.” I went to their factory, which contained prominent signage about the origins of winemaking in Armenia being when Noah’s ark landed on Mount Ararat.

    Ararat Brandy (Distilled Wine)

    Ararat Brandy (Distilled Wine)

    I like to imagine that Armenians, when told this story are all like, “well, that sucks but . . . wine.”

    And so wine and brandy are a great source of Armenian national pride, and nearly every Armenian I meet finds a way to tell me about how good they are. And they’re right – they are good. Just . . . enjoy responsibly and make sure you educate your children to know that drunk means no and …. incest also means no.

    photo by:
    No Comments / Armenia /

  • September 21, 2015

    Turkish Culture II: Ankara is SO BORING

    Ankara is the capital city of Turkey, and if I had one lira for every time a Turkish person has told me that it is a boring hellhole, I could buy a plane ticket from Ankara back to Istanbul. For a long time it was a mystery to me how nearly all Turkish people could feel such unbridled hatred for their capital city, so I decided to go there to learn what none of the fuss was about.

    To be honest, Ankara is a fairly inoffensive city with some nice trees and one huge mausoleum (on which more some other time). But okay. My Turkish friends were right. After admiring the trees and the mausoleum, there’s nothing in particular to do.

    IMG_2665

    In Ankara, there are some trees.

    A friend of mine and I have a pact to send each other postcards from the worst most uninspiring areas of the world that we can find, so as soon as I discovered how right everybody was about Ankara’s things-to-do scene, I went on the postcard hunt. Finding myself in a huge underground bookstore, I soon realized that, not only do Turkish people hate Ankara, they do not even consider it exciting enough to make postcards about.

    That’s bad. Even Ottawa has postcards.

    As luck would have it, I spied a teetering pile of dusty secondhand paperbacks and wondered if I could find some funny covers to rip off and use instead.

    IMG_2693

    On the left, ‘fiery nights.’ On the right, ‘what women want.’

    I was not disappointed. The paperbacks turned out to be Turkish-language Harlequins from the 1990s. Not only did they do their duty as postcards, they confirmed that people in Ankara get up to the same thing as people in boring cities everywhere.

    Suddenly overcome, I wiped a single tear from my eye. From Margaree, Nova Scotia (which, believe it or not, is more boring than Ankara) to Ankara Turkey, one thing transcends the manifold cultures of humankind: where there is nothing to do there is always at least one thing to do.

    But seriously, if you’re planning a trip to Turkey, don’t go to Ankara. I’m not sure if the faint possibility of a fiery night is worth the trouble.

    No Comments / Uncategorized /