52 MEN 52 WEEKS/ 26 FATİH POLAT
State of Manhood: A Comfort that Will Void Confrontation When You Let Yourself Go
Click to read the article in Turkish/Kurdish
"Hi Fatih. Maybe it has come to your attention. In 2018, bianet began a year-round series of articles called '52 Men Are Writing on Masculinity and Male Violence for 52 Weeks'. The articles have been published since the new year. I am the coordinator of this series.
"The purpose of this article series is to record the ideas, opinions and in fact the experiences of men, who are prominent in their respective fields, about masculinity and male violence. I'd very much like it if you would write an article for this series as well."
This email from my dear friend Şenay Aydemir whom I worked with for long years gave me pause. I was reading that series. And I thought it was important because it was an invitation to a confrontation that is seldom done by men.
However, from my point of view, the sincerity and authenticity of everything that I put my name under was of vital importance. If I was going to write such a piece, I was either going to lay myself completely open or not write at all. Playing safe with vague sentences that don't let on whether one is criticizing or praising themself did not sit well with me.
I feel that I am a person who has overcome the nervousness of confronting myself in public space as well, but I was worried for a few reasons, primarily the social contexts that I am in and how the people in my life would be affected by the story I was to tell about myself.
As I pondered this subject, asking myself "Should I write?", I thought that I first need to consult my ex-wife who has a profound meaning in my life, we lived together for seven years and broke up eight years ago.
By the way, I did not remarry again but I say "ex-wife" because I can't find a technically more correct expression. She encouraged me to write this article and thus I have her permission to talk about the period that concerns her as well.
In fact, the childhood period is also a striking part of this story. However, it doesn't seem possible to me to obtain the approval of my siblings and mother on this matter, therefore I decided to write those parts by taking this fact into consideration.
Here I go.
Like many of us, I was born into a family in which patriarchal relations are determining. My mother and father had immigrated to İstanbul from Erzurum 52-53 years ago. Even though I was born and raised in Turkey's biggest city, the introversion caused by the phenomenon of immigration has had an influence in shaping me since my childhood.
My father was a supporter of the Justice Party and he determined the family's political and psychological map until we three siblings grew up. Then he lost this authority.
Due to the aforementioned reasons, I cannot go into the saddening, hurtful aspects of the relationship between my parents caused by my father's attitude towards my mother.
But still when I look back, the attitude of my father, whom I remember with respect for his other traits, against my mother is the childhood wound of my life which has affected me and made me think "my relationships should be different".
My childhood passed in Eyüp where I was born and raised. During my childhood years, what kept me away from joining a gang was my passion for sports and reading. In those years, I was mostly reading Il Grande Blek, Captain Miki, Red Mask, Zagor, Bonanza, Mister No. I was constantly buying these books with the pocket money my father gave me and devouring them in no time.
I was going through them so fast that I ran out of money. Finally, I found the Il Grande Blek, Captain Miki barter stands set up in front of the—long gone—Zengin Movie Theatre in Gaziosmapaşa which wasn't very far from our home.
When I looked back after years, I realized that all those heroes that I read with admiration were all men and that this was actually reproducing the relationship formed between masculinity and heroism over and over again.
Perhaps the biggest contribution of those books to my later life is the never-ending passion for reading. Reading was like a door of meaningful transformation for me who was born in a slum.
I've always thought that Émile Zola's Germinal, which was recommended by my teacher in the English course I attended during my high-school years, was a leap for me. Before that, I had started reading Yaşar Kemal, Aziz Nesin, Rıfat Ilgaz but Zola had an effect on me which was like a further expansion of the horizon that they had opened up.
Later on, two teachers who contributed most to my intellectual evolution during my university years were women. Eser Köker and Meral Özbek. And like many young people who leaned towards socialism step-by-step, I was considering the state of constant self-confrontation as the first step of development.
In those years when I was reading the socialist writings, I also read a lot about women's struggle for freedom, and "confronting patriarchal relationships" was one of the main subjects of our talks as friends inside the youth struggle.
Surely it was no easy feat to overcome neither that inherited comfort passed on to us men from our fathers and grandfathers nor the relationship and tension between that comfort and the newly acquired "must"s and "should"s.
In the family environment, where I spent my childhood, there was no such thing as division of domestic labor. In this sense things were run in a patriarchal order and it was over time that I and my brother began to participate in domestic work.
I had realized the effects of this in my home environments during my university years as well.
My flatmate Baki gave me a photograph as a gift; it was a picture of me cleaning the house back in those years and on its back he wrote, "This snapshot is a sign that revolution can also come true one day."
I have had male friends who are more skillful and involved in housework than me. The attitude towards housework is surely only one of many criteria in terms of male-dominated relationships and a person's self-assessment cannot remain limited to it. Anyways I am mentioning this part merely as a confession of one of my flaws.
I can say that, in the following years, the transformative part of my process of confronting "the dominant state of manhood" was predominantly during the time of my marriage. I have always called the impact of my wife on me as an "exercise in carving".
When I wrote her to get her permission before drafting this piece, she told me, "Let's not call it carving. But, of the men who are with feminist women, the ones who have a tendency to transform undergo a transformation. Actually, I was just trying to explain myself to you".
Though my wife, as a graceful and understanding woman, describes the situation in this way, I still think that this process was an exercise in carving, or in the sense they taught us in my vocational high-school, a sort of "filing and grading".
My wife is one of the architects of my current graded state. I feel that her being a sociologist has also had a positive impact on this transformation process.
Seven years after we got divorced, at a dinner we had together drinking raki and talking about our married years, one of the things that we recalled was my first experience of wearing sandals in the city, in daily life when I was not on holiday.
I think that among the leftist men involved in political organizing, the ones who have gone through a similar history like me tend to prefer clothes in dark and dull tones. At least in my generation this is the case. I don't know if it is one of those "serious man" attitudes, but it is like that. It was during those seven years when I was married with my wife that I plucked up the courage to wear clothes with more vivid colors.
Let's return to the sandals. We had chosen the first sandals that I wore in the city together and she had encouraged me to buy a pair with a more modern style falling outside the established patterns of manhood.
But even these sandals' color was somewhere between gray and black. I was going to buy a pair of sandals with more vivid colors in the years to come. So be it, this too was a step. And years later my wife told me at that dinner:
Evidently, one night when I got back home from the newspaper, I turned to her and said in a nervous (!) manner, "The grocer looked at my sandals". I cannot tell you how much we laughed at this years later.
It was in fact a way of bemoaning that "the grocer treated me as if I was effeminate", and when looking at it from the other way around, it was also a donnée for reconsidering the fact that the women in this country experience more serious and traumatic things every day.
I will move on to an example that has remained as a wound inside me, one that I have to express.
At a moment when we were quarreling and our voices were raised, I remember having said to my ex-wife, "Stop nagging". It was actually an abusive and sexist manner of discourse targeting women which we have acquired, learned and maintained throughout generations within our world. I am also associating it with the fact that both of the two women who shared my life have told me, "You are not listening to me".
I was claiming that I was listening to them; but, this fact which was expressed to me twice shows that I am not a good listener to the women I live with and that when I'm cornered I try to escape with the help of sexist statements such as "stop nagging".
And, the women whom I have worked with also have an important place among the ones who have contributed to whatever transformation I have managed to undergo thus far.
Working with intellectually and professionally competent and strong women for long years keeps a person awake in this respect as well. I should also give credit to my women friends in my continuing life in organized labor, as well as the life experience that we have accumulated together.
In the meanwhile, no matter how much I think that I prioritize a democratic functioning in my workplaces as the basis, as a man who has long worked as an executive, I am sure that the mark my women friends would give me in that respect would reflect the reality better.
Because, since the state of manhood, together with everything that it comprises, is like an official ideology, I think that it can be seen more nakedly when looked at from the opposite side.
In the last analysis, that a man confronts the male-dominated relationships is something that needs to be reconstructed every day. Because it provides men with such a comfort, which at times we probably do not even notice, that the moment you let yourselves go, you return to that comfortable state of manhood.
The things that you think you have transformed and accumulated thus far can also become void very quickly. In other words, there is no such thing as "I have overcome it". It is a reality that needs to be confronted everyday over and over again. In terms of the history of a socialist man there is also the ritual of the "serious man" which I should make note of. This ritual, which is sometimes personal and sometimes nurtured by the social environments we live in, actually sticks the male-dominated values on us quite easily. Lightening up a little would not give anyone a bad name. (FP/ŞA/APA/SD/TK/IG)
* Images: Kemal Gökhan Gürses