Turkish Society’s Double Standard on Premarital Sex

Turkish Society’s Double Standard on Premarital Sex is a social code in which women’s premarital intimacy can determine their reputations and prospects for marriage, while men retain greater freedom to pursue intimacy and then assess the women who shared it. In Kemal Basmacı’s retrospective account, the code is neither simply displaced by Westernization nor applied uniformly: engagement can soften its consequences, but does not remove the unequal risks or the suspicion that follows women. The contrast between what men desire and what they expect women to protect gives the norm its enduring force.

The Code and Its Social Conditions

Kemal introduces the subject as a historical reality of 1975, not an eternal description of Turkish life. In Istanbul, he says, the drive to Westernize and modernize, together with rapid urbanization, had led some people to postpone marriage, and the practical importance attached to virginity had begun to decline in certain circles. Yet even affluent, Westernized families had not simply abandoned the moral judgment attached to women’s sexual histories. Modern manners and inherited expectations could coexist, leaving young people to navigate both rather than choose cleanly between them.

The consequences depended in part on whether a relationship was recognized as serious. In wealthy Westernized circles, engagement or another sign of intended marriage could make premarital intimacy more tolerable. But women in that position might explain their choice as evidence of their own modern independence instead of describing it as trust in a man’s promises. The distinction matters: apparent acceptance did not necessarily mean that women could speak openly about vulnerability or rely on the same standard as men. Social recognition reduced the danger without erasing the need to manage appearances.

Outside an accepted couplehood, the expectation could become more coercive. Kemal describes a traditional demand that a man marry a woman if her honor was considered at risk, and notes that a father might take a man to court when the girl was under eighteen and the man refused marriage. Newspapers further marked women caught in such public circumstances as people whose identities and reputations needed concealment. These practices show that the code was enforced not only through private judgment but through family intervention, public attention, and the prospect of a forced resolution. The burdens fell most visibly on women, whose circumstances could become a matter for relatives, courts, and newspapers.

Men’s Expectations and Women’s Risks

Berrin’s analysis of Mehmet makes the double standard explicit. She argues that a woman may judge a potential husband not simply by his individual intentions but by his family background and the attitudes he has absorbed. A man can present himself as serious while still regarding a woman who allowed intimacy before marriage with suspicion or disrespect. In Berrin’s view, the obstacle is not that women fail to recognize love; it is that they have reason to anticipate how the man, and the community around him, may treat them afterward.

Sibel gives that caution a practical basis: if a woman has been intimate with a man who then does not marry her, she may be left exposed to damaging talk with few acceptable options. She also observes that many women cannot easily decide what they want, or fear taking pleasure in intimacy because they fear its consequences. These remarks complicate any simple contrast between traditional restraint and modern freedom. The issue is not merely whether desire exists, but whether a woman can act on it without bearing a risk that her male partner does not share.

The pressure also shapes men. Sibel suggests that Mehmet has been influenced by stories of sexual freedom in Europe and has come to regard premarital intimacy as proof of being modern or civilized. Yet his expectations coexist uneasily with the caution that Berrin describes: a man may seek closeness and still inherit judgments that make women wary of granting it. The imagined freedom thus becomes another standard women are asked to satisfy, even as their actual choices remain constrained by local expectations and the possibility of a damaged reputation.

Class, Modernity, and Public Fantasy

The code reaches across class boundaries, although it takes different forms. Kemal describes the belief that women who dressed in Western styles and lived in affluent districts were freely available for pleasure as a popular urban myth, adopted by men from poor, provincial, and middle-class backgrounds and also by young men in wealthy neighborhoods. The fantasy made women’s appearance seem to disclose their sexual character. It allowed men to imagine a liberated counterpart to respectable womanhood without demonstrating that women themselves enjoyed comparable freedom or protection.

Kemal’s account of Belkıs offers a different view of how class and reputation intersect. Belkıs came from a poor family and became involved with Faris, the youngest son of one of Istanbul’s wealthy families. Faris’s family treated her sexual history as evidence that she had meant to secure marriage, and opposed the match. The family’s resources and status gave it power over the relationship’s terms, while Belkıs bore the social consequences of being judged. Her later relationships provoked envy among society women and fascination among men, but Kemal’s telling also describes the precariousness of her position. Her story makes visible how judgments about women’s respectability can disguise class power as moral concern.

Contradictions Within the Modern Ideal

The tension surfaces directly in Kemal and Sibel’s broken engagement. As they discuss their future, Sibel challenges Kemal’s appeal to modern European attitudes: if premarital virginity has no importance because they are modern, then the same principle must apply to everyone; if tradition still matters to him, he cannot selectively demand respect for it. Her argument exposes the asymmetry in Kemal’s position. The question is not only what he believes about chastity, but whether he applies his belief consistently to himself and to the shopgirl he has treated differently from his fiancée.

Other scenes show how quickly concern for women’s futures becomes a means of directing them. At a family gathering, Osman worries that Füsun’s beauty and revealing dress might lead to a reputation and urges that she marry the right sort of man soon. His concern is framed as protection, but its terms reduce her security to marriage and the management of how others see her. Across these conversations, women do speak: Berrin explains the logic of caution, Sibel names its consequences, and Füsun’s circumstances prompt family judgment. Yet their choices are repeatedly interpreted through male expectations, kinship, and public reputation. The double standard persists not because modernity is absent, but because its language of freedom can coexist with inherited demands—and because the costs of that contradiction remain unequally assigned.