Gender norms and love taboos

In the world Kemal describes, gender norms and romantic taboos do more than restrict intimacy: they determine which relationships can be acknowledged, who bears the consequences of desire, and how love can be communicated. The code surrounding premarital chastity coexists uneasily with Westernization, urban life, and private conduct. Its restrictions become both a source of danger and a condition that gives Kemal’s attachment to Füsun its secret, indirect shape.

Chastity, Marriage, and Social Judgment

Kemal places these expectations in 1975, when virginity was still widely treated as a valuable protection a young woman should preserve until marriage. Urbanization and Westernizing ideals had made marriage later and begun to weaken the practical force of the tradition in some parts of Istanbul. Yet even affluent, Westernized circles had not escaped its judgments. The difference between approved and disapproved intimacy depended less on a clean opposition between modernity and tradition than on whether a relationship had been recognized as serious and directed toward marriage.

Kemal contrasts his own premarital relationship with Sibel with situations in which a couple had no established commitment. Among wealthy Westernized young people, intimacy could be tolerated after formal engagement or another demonstration that marriage was intended. Even then, women might present their conduct as evidence of their modern freedom rather than as trust in a future husband. Where a relationship was not socially recognized, the code placed the burden on the man to marry the woman in order to protect her honor. The account includes circumstances ranging from pressure to passionate attachment, but the prescribed response remained marriage. If a man resisted and the girl was under eighteen, her father might take him to court to compel it.

The penalties described extend beyond marriage and legal action. A woman who had lost her virginity outside an accepted commitment could be treated as irrational, ostracized, or exposed to extreme violence. Popular melodramas rendered the same code as a moral template: young women deceived at social gatherings met tragic ends, while those represented as having chosen desire were cast as morally ruined. Newspaper conventions likewise marked women involved in scandal, adultery, or sexual violence as figures to be hidden from public recognition. Such representations did not merely describe reputational rules; they helped make women’s respectability a public spectacle while preserving men’s greater latitude.

Unequal Desire and the Westernized City

The code did not prevent young men from imagining that women who dressed in Western styles were freely available for casual relationships. Kemal describes this belief as a persistent urban legend, found among different social groups and reaching even affluent young men in neighborhoods such as Taksim, Beyoğlu, Şişli, Nişantaşı, and Bebek. In that fantasy, uncovered hair and miniskirts became signs that a woman would welcome a stranger’s advances. The belief could coexist with strict demands that women preserve chastity: male desire was licensed to search, while women’s actual choices remained subject to judgment.

Kemal recalls cruising Istanbul streets with his friend Hilmi in search of women imagined to fit that stereotype. Their search failed, and they went instead to a luxury hotel in Bebek, where women entertained tourists and wealthy local men. The episode exposes the distance between a myth of freely available women and the transactional settings in which some men sought intimacy. Kemal also complicates his portrait of Hilmi: despite his coarse masculinity, Hilmi would intervene when a woman was followed merely for her appearance. The anecdote neither erases the unequal assumptions nor presents male conduct as uniform; it shows how paternalistic protection could coexist with the very stereotypes that made women vulnerable to harassment.

Belkıs’s history supplies a different view of the same pressures across class lines. She came from a poor family and, as a young woman, loved a wealthy heir. His family opposed the match because it suspected that her premarital intimacy was a means of securing marriage. Unable to defy his family, he went with her to Paris, where they lived together without marrying; after his death, she returned to Istanbul and formed relationships with other wealthy men. Society men romanticized her as a consoling figure, while other women resented the freedom her public affairs seemed to represent. Kemal’s account links that freedom to economic insecurity and declining social standing, suggesting that the appearance of sexual independence did not free Belkıs from class judgment or material constraint.

The Gaze and the Secret Relationship

Restrictions on relations between men and women shape ordinary acts of looking. Kemal recalls that women in Istanbul’s streets, shops, and markets were expected not to meet a man’s gaze. Even when young people did form relationships after exchanging looks, those encounters were remembered as exceptional beginnings, sometimes followed by marriage. His parents’ accounts illustrate the uncertainty of such memories: his mother recalled first seeing his father at a ball attended by Atatürk, while his father admitted that he did not remember her there.

Kemal says that his time in America delayed his understanding of what an exchanged glance could mean in a society where women were expected not to become acquainted with men outside the family. His understanding changed through Füsun. At the Keskin family table, their eyes sometimes met and she looked away. He first read the gesture as distance and resentment; later he came to regard her avoidance as a deliberate performance of shyness, especially painful to him because they had shared an intimate past. That shift is filtered through Kemal’s interpretation: Füsun’s looks communicate, but their meaning is never entirely separated from his hopes and assumptions.

The same conventions make Kemal’s frequent dinners at the Keskin home possible while concealing their emotional meaning. In a society where showing interest in a married woman before her parents would be unthinkable, and where even a sidelong glance could carry severe consequences, the household could treat him as a family visitor rather than as Füsun’s former lover. Kemal describes their situation as requiring everyone to behave as if such love could not exist. He argues that in a more candid social environment, Feridun would recognize his presence as directed toward Füsun and might stop the visits; the prohibitions therefore restrict the relationship while also enabling its distinctive form. During the eight years of dinners, Kemal repeatedly weighs when to leave in relation to Feridun’s return, fearing both the discomfort of meeting him and the exposure implied by leaving at once.

Conflict, Double Standards, and Narrative Meaning

The conflict between modern ideals and inherited rules becomes explicit when Sibel challenges Kemal over his attachment to Füsun. She argues that if they are genuinely modern and European in outlook, virginity should not justify what he has done; if tradition makes it important, the same standard must apply to everyone. Her reasoning exposes the selective use of modernity: Kemal cannot invoke freedom from tradition only when it excuses his own conduct, while treating a woman’s chastity as a special obligation.

Across these episodes, the norms are historical and socially uneven rather than timeless or uniformly obeyed. Their force varies with class, engagement, age, family recognition, and public reputation, but women repeatedly face the sharper risks. Kemal’s account also places his own desire inside this system: he benefits from the social fiction that his visits are innocent family sociability, even as he interprets Füsun’s glances as signs of a private bond. The taboos thus become part of the relationship’s narrative structure. They limit direct speech and open courtship, making the household visit, the averted look, and the prolonged stay carry meanings that the characters cannot safely acknowledge aloud.