Women's sexual vulnerability and social control

Women's sexual vulnerability and social control in the novel are presented as linked, unequal pressures: Füsun encounters unwanted advances from childhood, while the rules intended to regulate sexuality chiefly burden girls and women with protecting family honor. Her stories make that imbalance concrete, and the narrator’s account of 1970s Istanbul shows how it is reinforced by custom, gossip, popular culture, and unequal expectations of men and women.

Füsun’s childhood and the everyday threat

Füsun recounts that, between about eight and twelve, her father sometimes sent her to a shop on Kuyulu Bostan Street for household purchases. The shopkeeper, a friend of her father, repeatedly used ordinary errands and excuses to keep her there and behave inappropriately when they were alone. The setting matters: the man was not a stranger encountered in an obviously dangerous place, but an adult known to her family, whose familiarity and access helped conceal his conduct.

She also recalls a neighbor who visited her home regularly. While the adults talked, drank tea, and listened to the radio, he would make unwanted contact in ways designed to pass unnoticed by the others in the room. On another occasion, when Füsun was ten, she asked her father to sit on his lap while he played cards. He declined, but one of his friends invited her over and behaved in a way she only later understood as improper. Across these memories, the adults’ ordinary social settings do not protect her: they provide cover for conduct that is difficult for a child to name or challenge.

The contrast between her father’s responses is especially stark. Füsun says he did not notice men touching or cornering her in the home, yet when a boy wrote that he loved her outside the house, her father pulled her to the window and struck her. By thirteen, she believed that being a good girl meant not complaining about the men who crossed boundaries. The account thus shows a form of control that polices visible signs of a girl’s romantic interest while leaving less visible harassment unrecognized.

Learning to navigate public space

Füsun’s experiences extend beyond the home. She describes Istanbul’s streets, buses, squares, cinemas, and isolated corners as places where girls could encounter men who pursued or harassed them. Some followed her over long periods; others became impatient, pressured her to respond, or reacted angrily when she did not. One follower tried to force a kiss, after which she stopped confronting men as she sometimes had before. By fourteen, she had learned to recognize many approaches in advance, but her greater vigilance did not remove the threat: men continued to devise ways of making unwanted contact in public.

Her account distinguishes among men without suggesting that their actions were harmless. Some suitors were shy or persistent, while others made their pursuit intimidating or intrusive. Füsun did not treat every follower as deserving sympathy, despite Kemal asking about them. The difference between a welcome expression of affection and unwanted attention is therefore central: a man’s interest does not itself establish a woman’s consent or obligation to respond.

The narrator also describes a wider climate in which respectable girls learned to avoid parks, empty lots, and backstreets because men might expose themselves there. His account presents vigilance and self-restriction as part of girls’ ordinary navigation of the city. The resulting burden is uneven: public space remains available to men who pursue women, while girls are expected to anticipate danger, manage men’s reactions, and limit where they go.

Chastity, reputation, and social penalties

In a later chapter, the narrator sets Füsun’s experiences beside what he calls the harsh social truths of 1975. He describes virginity as a highly valued possession that girls were expected to preserve until marriage, even as urbanization and Westernization led some young people to marry later. Modern language and changing social practices had not simply erased the older moral code. In affluent, Westernized circles, premarital sex could be tolerated when a couple was formally engaged or otherwise considered destined for marriage, but that tolerance remained conditional on the relationship being socially recognized.

Outside such recognized commitments, the narrator describes an expectation that a man should marry a girl whose virginity had been lost, including in circumstances involving force or passionate attachment. If a man refused, a girl under eighteen might be taken to court by an angry father seeking to compel marriage. Newspapers could publish photographs of women with black bands over their eyes, grouping those labeled violated with adulteresses and prostitutes. The visual convention shows how public exposure could turn a woman’s sexual vulnerability into public shame, even when she had been harmed.

Popular melodramas reinforced a related set of assumptions. In the films the narrator recalls, girls whose honor had been compromised were portrayed as innocent victims; the good-hearted ones died, while those cast as bad became prostitutes. He also describes the fear attached to a woman believed to have acted from desire rather than prudence: her sexuality could be treated as a threat to a future husband. The penalties the narrator lists range from ostracism to violence, underscoring that chastity operated not only as a private virtue but as a rule enforced through family authority, public reputation, and popular storytelling.

Gendered double standards and the novel’s critique

The narrator’s discussion also exposes a contradiction between strict sexual rules for women and men’s fantasies about female availability. He recounts a widespread belief that unveiled or miniskirted women in affluent districts would welcome sex for pleasure, despite the same society’s severe judgment of women who crossed the chastity boundary. Young men could search for the imagined women while the women themselves remained subject to reputational punishment. His account of men cruising Istanbul with this expectation places male entitlement alongside the ideal of female respectability; the two attitudes coexist rather than cancel each other out.

The story of Belkıs gives this contradiction a social and class dimension. She came from a poor family and, as a lycée student in the late 1950s, fell in love with Faris, the son of a wealthy shipping family. Though the young couple were sexually involved, his family opposed their marriage, treating her loss of virtue as a possible strategy to secure it. The family sent Faris to Paris with her, where they lived together unmarried; after his death, Belkıs returned to Istanbul and had relationships with other wealthy men. Society men gave her a suggestive nickname, while women who had lived within narrower marital conventions envied her public pursuit of eligible bachelors. The narrator links her later financial difficulty and declining appearance to her precarious position, but also notes that the fatal accident ended her life. Her history reveals how a woman’s sexual reputation could be shaped by class, family power, and the judgments of both men and women.

Sibel directly challenges the unequal logic during a conversation with Kemal about their future. She argues that if they claim a modern, European outlook, virginity should not matter; if tradition makes it important, the same standard must apply to everyone. Her objection identifies the central inconsistency: a man cannot invoke modernity to excuse one woman’s sexual history while treating another woman’s virginity as a special obligation. Read alongside Füsun’s childhood stories and the narrator’s account of public norms, the exchange makes sexual vulnerability more than a series of private encounters. It is a condition produced by social arrangements that scrutinize women, excuse or overlook men, and leave girls responsible for avoiding harms that adults around them may fail to see.