By Nazlan Ertan
The word of the week is vibratör (vibrator), because Turkey has reached that stage of public life where even a small vibrating object of adult pleasure may require a prosecutor’s attention. Here, a vibrator is not merely a device; it is a small object with the bad manners to expose the size of the state.
The word itself should have been harmlessly technical. Turkish borrowed vibratör through the usual European route, from the family of words around vibration. A vibratör is, at its most innocent, a device that vibrates. But language, like morality, rarely remains in its proper drawer. In Turkey this week, vibratör left the realm of accessories and entered the courthouse.
The case began, as many twenty-first-century scandals do, with a woman speaking too freely on camera. Photographer Bennu Gerede, who loves to make public statements on sex, appeared on a YouTube program and described the rose-gold pendant around her neck as a portable adult product. She mentioned that this mini vibrator came in handy when she felt more sexually aroused than usual and could be used anywhere.
The internet performed its usual duties: surprise, mockery, fascination, moral fainting, repeat. Then came the state, which in Turkey is never too busy to develop an interest in what it calls müstehcen, or obscene.
OBSCENE OR MERELY SEXUAL?
Bakırköy prosecutors opened an investigation under Article 226 of the Turkish Penal Code, the provision on obscenity. The famous photographer was first detained, then released pending trial.
Article 226 covers obscene images, writings and words, especially where children may be exposed, but also covers any public display, publication, sale and advertising.
What makes the episode so Turkish is not the vibrator. It is the buzz around it, and the speed with which the buzz acquired a legal file.
Gerede, a mother of four in her 50s who describes herself as a sex coach, has long been a reliable supplier of Turkish discomfort. She speaks with the accent of one who has spent long years outside Turkey and once accused Turkish women of “not knowing where their clitoris is”. When she once said her dream was to die while making love, singer Aydilge objected that women’s problems could not be reduced to sex, pointing instead to mobbing, violence and harassment.
This time, journalist Deniz Zeyrek criticized Gerede’s remarks as pointless and politically unwise, arguing that she had merely provided the state with an excuse to open new cases on obscenity. Others on social media made cruder comparisons, asking what would happen if a man spoke just as openly about a portable sexual object of his own.
Some commentary dragged her lineage into the matter, presenting her not merely as Bennu Gerede but as the granddaughter of Hüsrev Gerede, Atatürk’s comrade-in-arms and Turkey’s wartime ambassador to Berlin. Hüsrev Gerede, the grandson of a vizier, has a street named after him in the posh Istanbul district of Nişantaşı. Apparently, even family trees can be summoned as character witnesses in a vibrator case.
Sevan Nişanyan, the provocateur and intellectual, argued that the real issue was not the obscenity investigation itself but why Bennu Gerede, a woman who in his view ought to occupy the summit of Turkey’s aristocratic order, would place herself in such a vulnerable public position. He read the vibrator, tank top, tan, teeth and accent as parts of the same failed gesture: an appeal to a once-prestigious Western code of superiority that, he argued, no longer works in Turkey and now merely leaves her exposed.
Politics has been here before. When Berat Albayrak’s hacked emails were published years ago, one of the most durable social-media jokes concerned an alleged vibrating ring purchase. The nickname machine did the rest: in some corners of the internet, the former minister and presidential son-in-law became a sort of reluctant “Lord of the Rings.” But the more revealing detail was not the joke. It was that a journalist later faced legal trouble after reflecting on how public attention had swerved from alleged corruption to the alleged sex toy.
STANDARDS, STANDARDS
That is the legal sociology of the Turkish vibrator. The object vibrates. The public laughs. The state files.
Perhaps that is because the vibratör is almost offensively honest. Unlike many words in Turkish public life mentioned here, it does not hide behind metaphor, family values or national sensitivity. One might almost admire its commitment to transparency.
And perhaps that is precisely the problem. Turkey is often more comfortable with euphemism than precision. We prefer “public morality” to adult choice, “sensitivity” to censorship, “operation” to morning arrests.
