Things That Bang

Selin Tamtekin, the daughter of a Turkish consular had to go into hiding for three weeks when her novel- Diplomat's Daughter shocked Turkey with its explicit story line.

The Turkish Diplomat’s Daughter is a racy roman à clef, chronicling sexual affairs with a Bangladeshi landlord, a sailor and a Freddie Mercury-obsessed fantasist.

When Turkish newspapers got hold of the book, Tamtekin admitted her identity (it is written under the pseudonym Deniz Goran) and was so roundly pilloried that worried friends dubbed her “the female Salman Rushdie”. Splashed on the front pages of at least four national newspapers, she was derided as a “high-class Mayfair prostitute” who was writing about her own thinly veiled sexual experiences. The media were astonished that not only a Turkish woman but one from the highest echelons of society had written so frankly about her sexuality.

Nothing surprising there. When Arundhati Roy's book - God Of Small Things came out , lot of eyebrows rose not only in the literary world but also amongst the so called liberal middle class. Arundhati's book was an amalgamation of gritty vulgarity and earthy writing. A book so hard to digest that most women were horrified that it was written by a female.
She blew our minds with her sarcasm and devil may care attitude and won the Booker Prize in 2002

But before Arundhati there had been other women who blew the mind of conservative India- be they scathing columnists like Shobha De or actors like Deepti Bhatnagar doing daring role in a movie like Mandi, or dancers like Protima Bedi who streaked naked on a Mumbai beach just to make a point that she didn't give a fuck about conservatives.

Why is it considered to be lose behavior on the part of a woman if she discusses sexual matters openly? Worse still why is a woman called a whore if she writes about explicit sex? Stephen King isn't some psychopath just because he wrote numerous books about blood, gore and gruesome death. What a writer writes does not necessarily reflect his life, right?

Tamtekin is unbowed and is furious about the hypocrisy. “It’s not as if no one has sex in Turkey. Of course women have sexually active lives, but they always make sure that no one hears about them. Women aren’t able to stand out as individuals and talk openly about sex or fancying men,” she says.

Even today how many women in India fearlessly address sexual matters? How many female blogs exist that talk about adult issues? Why the need for pseudonym? Why are we so scared of society's or even our own family's' backlash?

Protecting the right to freedom of speech, right to individual choice whether in sexual matters or conception are hallmarks of feminism. And yet many of us despite calling ourselves feminists shrink from addressing these issues or consider those who protest to be foolhardy.

Till we women don't deliberately grab the tiger by the tail like Selin did and show our middle finger to the patriarchal system we will remain slaves despite all the outward appearances of freedom enjoyed .