“I Could Not Bear to See Her Kissing Someone Else!”

“I Could Not Bear to See Her Kissing Someone Else!” is the line at the center of a society-gossip column that exposes Kemal Basmacı’s jealousy to public view. White Carnation’s Akşam column presents it as a confession about Füsun, but its importance lies in the gap between the report’s inaccuracies and the feeling Kemal cannot deny: he does not want her to be intimate with anyone else. The phrase therefore operates both as a public accusation and as an unwelcome recognition of his possessiveness.

The phrase in the newspaper

White Carnation’s column identifies its subject as a wealthy, recently engaged society bachelor, called Mr. K, and describes him as infatuated with a young married woman he calls a distant relation. It claims that jealousy has stopped him from putting an art-film project into production, that he follows the woman and her director husband through Yeşilçam bars and Bosphorus restaurants, and that he has admitted, “I could not bear to see her kissing someone else!” The column also says he broke off an engagement to a Sorbonne graduate and promised to make the married woman a star. Its closing admonition turns the alleged contradiction into a public spectacle: a man cannot claim to be making an actress while refusing to let her appear in a film that requires kissing scenes.

The report is not simply a neutral account of a private remark. It arranges jealousy, a broken engagement, the woman’s marriage, and the proposed film into a mocking argument about the bachelor’s conduct. Its sharpest charge is that his artistic ambition cannot be separated from his wish to guard the woman from other people’s attention. In this framing, the phrase becomes evidence against him: what might have remained an intimate feeling is made to look like the governing principle behind his actions.

A false report with a recognizable truth

Kemal reads the column and removes the page from the newspaper, while his mother and the staff at Satsat also learn of its contents. Although he knows that several details are wrong, he later judges those errors to be minor beside the impression readers are likely to retain: his love for Füsun and what he has done for her have brought him into disgrace. He is particularly troubled by the attribution of the kissing remark. At first he imagines it is the phrase that will provoke the most laughter; then he admits to himself that it sounds credible because there is something in him capable of saying it. He cannot even be certain that he did not say something similar to Füsun, in jest or while drunk. Most decisively, he acknowledges that, even for the sake of art, he does not want her kissing anyone else.

That inward concession gives the line a double status. It is not verified as a verbatim statement by Kemal: the column reports it, while his recollection leaves open whether he ever spoke those exact words. But its emotional substance is confirmed by his own account. The newspaper’s invention or distortion can therefore embarrass him precisely because it is not wholly alien to him. The phrase names a desire he would rather dispute as gossip than examine as part of his own conduct.

Jealousy, art, and public humiliation

The column’s circulation changes Kemal’s relation to his social world. He wonders how Akşam readers judge him and worries about Füsun encountering the report. He considers warning Feridun to keep the paper from her and the rest of the family, but does not make the call. One reason is fear that Feridun might react; another is that Kemal feels a concealed satisfaction. Their connection has appeared in the society pages, and he takes this publicity, however malicious, as a sign that society has in some sense acknowledged it. He tries to imagine the gossip as a route back to his former place in society, with Füsun beside him.

That hope does not hold. Kemal comes to feel that gossip and insinuation are making him into a different person: no longer someone who chose an unconventional course by force of will, but someone ostracized after becoming a newspaper subject. He cannot bring himself to visit the Keskin household the evening the column appears. Imagining his eyes meeting Füsun’s, he fears that the encounter would confirm not merely their shared distress but the truth beneath the false reports. His shame becomes so consuming that he spends a week going to cinemas, using American films as temporary alternatives to the world in which he has become an object of ridicule. He even begins to believe some of the newspaper’s lies.

The gendered code behind the accusation

The phrase also belongs to a wider account of sexual respectability in 1970s Istanbul. The narrative describes virginity as a social treasure young women were expected to protect until marriage, even as urbanization and Westernization changed the timing and meaning of marriage for some affluent circles. Premarital sex could be tolerated when a couple had established its seriousness through engagement or another public promise; where such recognition was absent, the burden of protecting a woman’s honor could fall on a man expected to marry her. The same account describes harsher consequences, including ostracism and violence, and a press convention of obscuring the eyes of women presented as having been violated or otherwise placed in situations deemed shameful.

Against this background, Kemal and Sibel Hanım’s earlier disagreement gives the jealousy phrase a pointed counterpoint. Sibel argues that if they are genuinely modern and European in outlook, virginity should have no importance; if they remain attached to tradition, the same standard must apply to everyone. Her challenge exposes the unequal logic of treating a woman’s sexual history as decisive while leaving a man’s conduct less constrained. The column’s ridicule of Kemal does not undo that inequality, but it makes his wish to control Füsun’s on-screen intimacy visible as a contradiction within his modern, art-minded self-presentation. The line thus condenses the tension between professed freedom and possessive expectation: its public sting comes from the fact that the accusation is distorted, while the desire it identifies is not.