Having the last laugh

The Deputy Prime Minister of Turkey, Bülent Arinç, in a speech during an Eid al-Fitr meeting on Monday said women should not laugh in public. Arinç told a crowd celebrating the end of Ramadan, that woman should be chaste and know the difference between public and private. According to him, women should not laugh in public spaces. His comment sparked social-media outrage, with thousands of women posting pictures of themselves laughing in an collective act of defiance on Twitter.  On Wednesday, hashtags such as #direnkahkaha (resist laughter) #direnkadin (resist woman) and #kahkaha(laughter) were world-trending.  Both men and women have been tweeting their solidarity with the cause.”The men of a country in which women are not allowed to laugh are cowards”, tweeted one user.

And you thought our politicians said the weirdest  things about women.

In a quick rebuttal to Arinç’s comment, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, opposition Presidential candidate tweeted, “Our country needs our women to laugh and to hear everyone’s joyful laughter more than ever”.

Melda Onur, a member of the main opposition party Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (CHP) tweeted that Arinc’s comments portrayed laughing as a dishonourable act and left women exposed to violence.

According to a report in The Guradian,  Mehtap Dogan, one of  the women who posted pictures of herself laughing, said Arinç’s statement illustrates the ruling party’s stance on women. She believes that for them, women should not have any rights.She isn’t the only one who thinks so.  A lot of women, along with posting their pictures on twitter, also highlighted incidents and posted experiences of what it was like to be a woman in Turkey under the current government.

In a defensive statement to the media, Arinç said his comment had been taken “out of context”.”From one and a half hours of my speech, some only heard what I said about women laughing in the street. What a disgusting, ugly and unfounded fabrication.”

But he did say that he stood by the words of his speech about “moral values” and “social degradation”. Read excerpts from his speech here.

He took to philosophy in a weak attempt to steer attention away from his misogyny, by saying “Laughter brings relief and makes people happy. I think we are in need of that everywhere, but your laughs are fake”.  He even went so far as to say that someone who would want to ban women from laughing in public “would have to be an idiot”.

But his defence did little in curbing defiant enthusiasm on Twitter, and even now #kahkaha is picking up momentum. Here is a link to some of the images and we suggest you get ready for the fireworks, because God! Turkish women are gorgeous.