52 Weeks, 52 Men
Click to read the article in Turkish / Kurdish
On bianet, 52 men will write about male violence for 52 weeks in 2018.
The first article by journalist Murat Çelikkan will be on bianet on Wednesday, January 10, 2018.
Every following Wednesday, men from the fields of media, literature, academia, sports, cinema, music, and rights struggles are going to share their thoughts and personal experiences with respect to their "manhood" and "male violence".
This project will be coordinated by Şenay Aydemir; the drawings are by Kemal Gökhan Gürses.
2017 was not a good year, it did not go well for women, again. One of the better things was the #MeToo movement.
Everything started with the exposure of a Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. He had harassed many women throughout the years. Some of these women, including Hollywood celebrities, exposed Weinstein, yet others remained silent. Both those who spoke out and those who remained silent became the focus of the discussion.
US actress Alyssa Milano shared a message on her social media account on October 15, 2017: "If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote 'Me Too' as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem."
The #MeToo movement began this way. It produced an ever louder call for women to not remain silent against harassment and to expose the "male" oppression that surrounds them once they raise their voice. Moreover, feminists had been saying this for years; male violence is multilayered.
It did not take long before men also came up with a hashtag; #HowIWillChange started two days later.
bianet had supported this call by making a news report on it. But it would not do to make a call and not support it; so, I posted the first tweet with the hashtag #BenNasılDeğişeceğim (HowIWillChange in Turkish). It was not retweeted.
We the men in Turkey shrink from thinking about manhood.
May the 52 different approaches, introspections and experiences to be featured during these 52 weeks be a step toward refraining from this avoidance. Why do we men resist "change"? May each piece make us men question, think and discuss.
And how very difficult it was to tweet with the hashtag #HowIWillChange. At the end of the day, "no" is an answer, I know I should not insist. I had tweeted something on the lines of HowIWillChange, which now seems rather inadequate. But I am also aware that this difficulty I had and the state of not knowing what to say was also "a male state". How much had I thought about my own manhood or gauged myself up until now? The fact that I had not confronted myself enough became evident in the stereotypical sentence that I fell back on in that tweet.
The figures on male violence speak for themselves; you can look at bianet's Male Violence Monitoring Report released every month. These reports also document the women's gains despite the male government and state.
In short, we say, "It's no coincidence" that there is a form of masculinity behind every incident of violence. Let us men start by espousing the women's slogan: "It's no coincidence, it's male violence".
"52 weeks, 52 men" is an invitation to men, it is in our hands to turn this into a big campaign. Let us talk and discuss more openly with the courage that we draw from one another. (HK/TK/IG)
* Images: Kemal Gökhan Gürses