Premarital virginity and women’s honor in 1970s Turkey

Premarital virginity and women’s honor in 1970s Turkey function in the book as a system of social expectations, not merely a private moral belief. A woman’s sexual reputation could shape whether a relationship was recognized as marriage-bound, expose her to public humiliation, or make her vulnerable to family and community sanctions. Kemal’s later account attempts to map these pressures while also revealing how modern self-image, class privilege, and men’s desires coexist with the older code.

The Code and Its Unequal Consequences

The narrator places the issue in 1975, when virginity was still widely treated as something a young woman should preserve until marriage across Istanbul and neighboring regions. Urbanization and Westernization had led some women to postpone marriage, and the practical force of the ideal had weakened in parts of Istanbul. Yet even among affluent, Westernized families, a woman who had sex before marriage could still expect to be judged. The shift toward modern life had not simply displaced the older moral system; it left people negotiating between its expectations and newer claims of personal freedom.

The narrator distinguishes several social situations rather than describing one uniform rule. In affluent circles, premarital sex could be tolerated when the couple had already demonstrated serious marriage intentions, through an engagement or another recognized commitment. Even then, women might present their choice as evidence of modern independence instead of acknowledging that they had trusted a particular man to marry them. That distinction exposes a tension at the heart of the code: social acceptance depended on a presumed future wedding, but a woman could be expected to conceal the vulnerability and trust that had made the relationship possible.

When a relationship lacked that recognized promise, the burden grew heavier. The traditional expectation was that a man should marry a woman whose honor had been compromised, whether the sexual encounter followed coercion, passionate attachment, or what the narrator calls imprudence. In some cases, a father could take a man to court if the woman was under eighteen and he refused marriage. Newspaper photographs of women involved in such cases were commonly obscured to prevent identification. The same visual treatment appeared in coverage of rape victims, adulteresses, and prostitutes, so that women’s public representation was repeatedly marked by shame even when their circumstances differed sharply.

Popular films reinforced the moral logic through melodramatic plots in which an innocent girl’s honor was taken from her and her subsequent fate was divided between death and social disgrace. The narrator also describes a harsher suspicion directed at women understood to have acted from sexual desire: their appetite could make them seem frightening or untrustworthy as future wives. Yet alongside these penalties circulated a contrary urban legend—that supposedly modern, unveiled women in fashionable neighborhoods were readily available to men. This fantasy made women’s clothing and public presence grounds for male speculation, even though it contradicted the stringent standards imposed on women’s actual sexual conduct.

Sibel, Kemal, and the Promise of Marriage

The relationship between Sibel and Kemal shows how the code could persist inside a wealthy, Westernized couple’s self-image. Sibel had spent time in Europe and sometimes regarded herself as one of the women brave enough to have sex before marriage. But Kemal’s retrospective account qualifies that description: she had decided he was serious, trusted him, and believed marriage would follow. Her decision therefore rested not on the absence of social pressure but on confidence that their relationship would ultimately meet its demands.

At Satsat, where Kemal was general manager, the couple sometimes met privately after work. Sibel’s unease about making love in the office surfaced in her discomfort at feeling like a secretary. Kemal’s memory of their intimacy also holds the looming question of marriage beside moments of happiness. He recalls believing, as he held her amid the traffic noise from Halaskârgazi Avenue, that he was fortunate and could remain content for life. But Sibel increasingly wanted them to marry soon. Their proud sense of being free and modern was thus shadowed by the responsibility attached to her trust and by the expectation that the relationship must culminate in a wedding.

Later, when Kemal’s future with Sibel was already in question, she challenged the way he treated Füsun’s sexual reputation. She argued that if he and Sibel were genuinely modern, virginity should not matter; if he still believed tradition made it important, he could not apply that standard selectively to another woman. Her objection identifies a gendered double standard within Kemal’s own reasoning: the same norm could be dismissed as backward when it constrained his preferred relationship and invoked when judging another woman. Sibel’s appeal does not erase her earlier reliance on marriage as the guarantee that made premarital intimacy safe. Instead, the two moments show how modern principles and traditional obligations could coexist uneasily, even in one person’s life.

Füsun, Memory, and the Limits of the Rule

The book’s account of Kemal’s first sexual encounter with Füsun places a private emotional aftermath beside its broader examination of social convention. Füsun, eighteen to Kemal’s thirty, later says that she will remember that day for the rest of her life. In the quiet afterward, she cries and pays little attention to Kemal’s attempts to console her. The scene does not reduce her response to a single explanation, but it gives the encounter a lasting emotional weight that cannot be captured by the public categories of honor, marriage, or transgression alone.

Kemal, writing retrospectively, warns that attention to relics of first love can distract from the compassion and gratitude between the people involved. He associates the scene with a carefully folded handkerchief and other objects that he presents as witnesses to tenderness and embarrassment. That reflection matters to the subject because it resists treating sexual experience as a public label that exhausts a woman’s meaning. The social code makes reputation legible to families, newspapers, and prospective husbands; Kemal’s later narration tries, however imperfectly, to preserve emotional particulars that such judgments leave out.

Class, Reputation, and the Case of Belkıs

The story Kemal tells Sibel about Belkıs makes the unequal relation between sexual reputation and marriage especially clear. Belkıs came from a poor family and, as a student in the late 1950s, fell in love with Faris, a young man from a wealthy shipping family. Their relationship continued for years, but his family opposed marriage, believing that her sexual history meant she had surrendered her virtue in order to secure him. The family sent the couple to Paris to live together out of sight rather than allowing the marriage. Faris later died there; Belkıs returned to Istanbul and had relationships with other wealthy men.

Among society women, her visible sexual independence provoked both envy and condemnation. Men could desire her, yet none married her. Sibel interprets this as evidence that no man loved her enough to marry her, while Kemal explains that wealth and family standing could have changed how her past was judged: had Belkıs been rich, or married Faris before their sexual relationship, people might have treated her differently. Instead, because she did not conform to the rules and continued her relationships openly, the label attached to her shifted from a consoling figure to a sexually degrading one. Kemal admits that he found her repulsive even as he argues that her willingness to give herself to the first boy she loved, and not to hide later relationships, merits respect. His ambivalence exposes the code operating within the narrator himself: he can analyze its injustice without standing entirely outside its judgments.

Narrative Significance

The account is presented as a later act of explanation for future readers and museum visitors, rather than as a timeless description of Turkish society. Kemal explicitly anticipates that people visiting after 2100 may find the old assumptions difficult to understand. His catalogue of consequences preserves the historical texture of the code, while his own relationships show how its force varied with class, engagement, and a man’s willingness to accept responsibility.

Across the examples, women bear the greater reputational risk. Men’s conduct may be condemned, but the woman’s sexual past can become the decisive obstacle to marriage, a source of public exposure, or a reason to treat her as outside respectable life. At the same time, the narrative shows that the code is neither perfectly consistent nor simply vanishing: Westernized couples negotiate it through promises, newspapers reproduce its shame, popular films dramatize it, and men’s fantasies contradict the restraint demanded of women. By setting these forces beside Sibel’s argument and Füsun’s remembered distress, the book presents honor as a social judgment with intimate consequences, not as a neutral measure of a woman’s character.