Ottoman History Podcast - Freedom and Desire in Late Ottoman Erotica

Episode Date: February 7, 2020

Episode 448 with Burcu Karahan hosted by Suzie Ferguson Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud "One Thousand Kisses," "Plate of Cream," "Story of a Lily:" these are some of the provocative titles that graced the covers of Ottoman erotic novels in the early decades of the twentieth century. While erotic fiction and poetry had a long history in Ottoman and Arabic manuscript culture, the erotic novels of the second constitutional period (1908-1914), some creatively adapted from French originals, emerged in a period of unprecedented freedom for writers. Yet the novels themselves were often less explicit and transgressive than their their titles might suggest. In this episode, Burcu Karahan shows how, in late Ottoman fiction, stories about sex and desire celebrated not only sexual freedom, but also conservative fantasies about male sexual power and the power of heterosexual love. « Click for More »

In the preface to that novel, Mehmet Rauf talks about like how everyone talks about politics and he wants to write a novel that focuses on the center of the world which is vagina. Mehmet Rauf was the author of one of the best-known erotic novels of the early 20th century to be written in Ottoman Turkish, The Story of a Lily. Creatively adapted from a French original that had been written by a female author, Rauf's work is an example of how Ottoman men translated and imagined erotic life in the tumultuous years between 1908 and about 1925. After 1908's Young Turk Revolution,

Ottoman erotic fiction became a space to question the meaning of freedom and the power relations embedded in fantasy and sex. But while many early erotic novels were published under false names and even censored, our guest Burcu Karahan argues that this genre, the one that placed the vagina at the center of the world, was not always about transgression.

The main novel ends at the wedding night. Submission to authority will bring you sexual satisfaction. Other texts, however, pushed at the boundaries of erotica's patriarchal and heteronormative inclinations. Male sexual performance, the size of male genital organ is a common subject in these novels. Like women talk about these things, they criticize men on their performance, they criticize men on their size of penises. It's very common and normal in these stories, and nobody judges these women. In this episode, we explore the world

of erotic fiction in Ottoman and early Republican history, and the fantasy life of a different time and place. I mean, there's also the question of what is erotic, what's pornographic, right? These texts are not pornographic at all. Welcome to another episode of the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Susie Ferguson. I'm very happy to welcome to the podcast today Burcu Karahan, who is a lecturer in Ottoman and Turkish literature

at Stanford University. And the subject of our discussion today will be on the theme of women in Ottoman erotic novels in the second constitutional period. So Burcu, I just want to welcome you to the podcast. Thanks for the invitation. My pleasure. So today, I hope it's going to be a fun conversation about the genre of the erotic novel in Ottoman Turkish. And we're particularly going to be talking about the second constitutional period. So I thought you could just perhaps begin by telling our readers, you know, sort of what characterizes this period? When are we in time?

And what's happening broadly in the Ottoman Empire? So the second constitution was in 1908. So the very early 20th century and coming out of, let's say, strict comedian censorship, we see a stunning number of new publications like periodicals, journals, newspapers after 1908. And with these publications came along a new kind of genre for Ottoman literature, erotic fiction. literature erotic fiction but of course we have to clarify that we're talking about specifically print culture because like erotic fiction has a long history in Ottoman literature but in print culture it started after 1908 and many novels with suggestive titles like One Minute Virginity or The Pregnancy of a Virgin or the keyhole, or things like that. Like very suggestive titles, novels that circle around the idea of sexuality,

not maybe sexuality itself, with suggestive content, became to be published after 1908. But if I were to take a pinpoint, a specific date for the start of this, I would say 1910, the publication of Mehmet Röv's Bir Zamban Hikayesi, the story of a lily, which was published actually anonymously in 1910. So we're going to talk quite a bit about this fascinating novel today, the story of a lily from 1910. But I just wanted to ask you a little bit about, you had mentioned that, you know, this is a new genre for print culture, but that there's actually a much longer history of erotic fiction and erotic literature in Ottoman Turkish. In manuscripts. Yeah, so perhaps you could just

tell us a little bit about that and sort of how this new genre, you know, sort of interacts with that older tradition. Well, you actually had a podcast on this with jim irwin we do we can direct our our listeners to you you guys um irwin chick really nicely talked about uh illuminated that um era and they were those texts if i were to compare them with the second constitutional era novels they're bold, and there's no suggestion. It's all out there. But compared to them, the constitutional era novels are way, way than the manuscripts.

And there are major differences. There's heteronormativity becomes the norm, actually, in the novels. We don't talk about boy-loving. There's noonormativity becomes the norm, actually, in the novels. We don't talk about boy-loving. There's no homosexual love, no such thing. Everything becomes more westernized in terms of content as well. So we're talking about a major reshaping of the genre then. So it becomes less explicit and more about innuendo or suggestion. And it becomes more oriented and more about innuendo or suggestion and it becomes more oriented around

heterosexual love as opposed to an earlier genre that had been very open to to same-sex sexuality in texts correct in terms of explicitness I think again the story of a lily becomes a norm because it was when it was published anonymously but everyone in the literary circles they knew that it was written by Mahmet Röv, a prominent writer of Servet Finun group and the novel is beautifully written. It's really well written. It's a nice novel and the first part of it is uses all the suggestive language that you expect from a western style erotic fiction that he uses a lot of metaphors and similes using exotic flower names for women genitalia as you would expect from a decadent novel or a fendous uh secular novel but towards

the end it becomes very vulgar and very explicit in the definition of the sexual act and with the vocabulary that he uses. And because of this, I think it was the first and only novel of its sort to be banned and taken out of circulation at that time. With this, it set an example for the up-and-coming writers of erotica, we might say, that they use a more elusive language. So it seems like the language was very important. But that same language was not an issue in manuscript culture, because there was no censorship, no publishing. Right. So with print culture, we also have the kind of introduction of a new regime of censorship um and you know it's

telling that the the novel that that we want to discuss today or one of them the story of a lily from 1910 is written anonymously um even though everybody as you say knows who wrote it yes and then uh but um this rumor that it was written by mahmed rove was published in i think carragher's and he wrote a response to this rumor, like denying all the allegations that he wrote a novel like this in Sadai Millet, but once he was taken to court, he admitted that he took ownership of the novel, saying it was telif and terjme, that is, he partially translated and partially wrote the novel, and as a result, he was discharged from the army. He was a lieutenant in Ottoman Navy at the time, and he was sentenced to eight months in prison.

So maybe what we can understand from this story is that the writing of erotic novels was by no means a kind of well-accepted literary practice in this time, that there were serious consequences for him once he was outed as the author of this text. I don't know if as a civil person he would have faced the same consequences, but as an officer of the army, he did. So we have a sort of sense of this genre as sitting on kind of the edges of

what was considered acceptable for Ottoman literary culture. Yes. So maybe you could just tell us actually a little bit about the novel. I mean, so the novel is called Story of a Lily. And very tellingly, as you mentioned, Mehmet Rauf notes that he partially translated and partially wrote it. So what's the story about this book? So it took me a while to figure out what novel he translated Zambak from. And it turns out that he translated it from Marquise Manorodecto, a French, late 19th century French novelist who wrote three erotic novels, and this was her last one. In the novel, in the Turkish

version, in the novel, our anonymous male narrator, he meets Najiye, an attractive woman, and follows her carriage to her apartment and sends her letters. And as a response, after sending many letters, he gets a response saying that she hates men. And that's that. Like, we don't know why she hates men or anything. Heartbroken and frustrated, he visits a friend where he finds Zambak, an orphan, a distant relative of this friend, who tells him she is not being treated well at that house, kind of like a damsel in distress. So our narrator saves her, takes her under his protection, takes her to his own house, and teaches her everything about sex. So it's kind of like a very primitive version of

pornographic or erotic text where the inexperienced one learns everything about sex from the experienced one. But through these conversations, our narrator learns that Najiye is actually romantically and sexually interested in Zambak. So a rendezvous is set up where Zambak would invite Naciye and they would engage in a sexual intercourse where our narrator would be hidden in a closet watching them, voyeurism here, and then join in. So that happens while Naciye and Zambak are making love, our narrator switches places with Zambak unbeknownst to Najiye. And in the end,

he forces himself sexually on Najiye, which would seem like a rape. But of course, Najiye likes it very much as a male fantasy because we're reading a male fantasy. And she appreciates the power of men. Right. So we can perhaps see the appeal of this story,

as you say, as a kind of male fantasy about sort of interrupting same-sex, literally interrupting same-sex practices among women and replacing them with the male figure. Yes. How did Mehmet Rauf transform the novel through his translation? I mean, how close is this to the original French novel

that was in fact written by a woman? So everything up to that he learns that this other woman who hates men is interested in the young girl. Everything is the same up to that point. But then in the young girl everything is same up to that point but then in the French novel they set up it's very egalitarian that they share the young girl she becomes lovers for both but then the young girl in the original novel she wants to become an actress and she wants to take acting classes. And they found like the most popular actress of the time who was notoriously a lesbian, but they

thought they would lose the young girl to the actress. So in the original novel, Odette, who's Nagia in the original novel, Odette starts a relationship with the actress beforehand to ensure that the actress will not actually make advances at Zambak in the French novel so it becomes like a two separate couples but they actually share Zambak in the end and there's much more room for female same-sex practices to kind of be ongoing even once the male figure enters the scene oh the male fear is very effeminate in the original novel like um violet uh deflowers herself on him without him being instrumental almost or let's say the actress has a dildo, like an artificial, of course, a decadent idea to value artificial over the natural one. And that that dildo is named after a woman.

So there are all these themes that empowering women and just diminishing the role of men to almost nothing in sex. And then in the translated version, this is all kind of transformed into the celebration of male sexual power. Yes. So you mentioned that this novel, Story of a Lily, was actually banned shortly after its publication

and Mehmet Rauf himself was discharged from the army and sentenced to eight months in jail. And yet it seems that the novel continued to have a reception. Yes, it was banned. The story of Elulili was banned. But let me tell you, it was published twice already. And after it was taken out of circulation, it was so popular, we know that, that the publishers hired people to handwrite copies of the novel, and they were renting them overnight from 10 to 20 kush. Ali Binci tells

us about this. It's also really interesting that we learned from Yakub Kadri's memoirs that Besime Hanım, a wealthy merchant's daughter in Izmir, she reads this novel, and she proposes to Mehmet Röv in a letter after reading this novel and actually becomes the second wife of Mehmet Rove. So there's a complicated space of fantasy going on here, it seems like. And yeah, success on different levels, kind of. We also know that an Iranian, I think, kind of like an entrepreneur who was impressed by the success of this novel, had a novel written, but we don't know by who who wrote the novel, or we don't know anything specific about this,

but it goes around in dark histories as a rumor, that he ordered a novel called Kaymak Tabı, like Plate of Cream, kind of in the style of Zambak's, the Walgur side. And he, of course, he had them printed, but not sell them in Istanbul, but put them on his horse or something and apparently like sold them in Antalya. So the success of Story of a Lily and Mehmetmet Rauf despite his jailing led to a kind of fluorescence shall we say in the genre of Ottoman print erotica but not everybody maybe agreed with Mehmet Rauf in terms of his gender politics or his sort of masculinist fantasy life so maybe you could tell us a little bit about some of the novels that followed and and how they sort of agreed or disagreed with the story that Mehmet Rauf was telling about sexuality.

I can say that I want to group what came after Zanmak in two. A big chunk of these novels were very moralistic and punitive on its female characters. But then i want to keep aside a series that came late into the field in like 1920s early 1920s bimbir bu se serisi like a thousand thousand and one kisses series the second one i'll talk about it later um but they they kind of depict female characters in this erotic context completely differently than the rest of them. So if we come back to the moralistic ones, there were many novels with suggestive titles. Like I can talk about one, for example. It's called Harem Asının Muhaşakası or Zıfaf Gecesi Harem Asının Muhaşakası,

masun muashekası, the lovemaking of a eunuch, in which a retired eunuch wants to settle down and have his own family, and he's looking for a young, suitable woman. It becomes really hard because young women in the circle that he's looking for one are kind of hesitant because they're curious how it's going to play out in the bedroom. So they have their own like sexual questions and about their sexual satisfaction, which is something very new. And he is well off.

He's financially well off. So it's not an issue. And finally, the rumor goes that the eunuch has a dildo. This becomes an issue again about the young woman, and one of them, Envaye, she is intrigued by the idea of the dildo and also intrigued by the possibility of its size. She hears it's a big one, and then it can outperform a natural one. Again, a really decadent idea in a very non-decadent context here she agrees

to marry him so there's all this tension there's all this waiting and curiosity and it starts with the title like lovemaking of a eunuch it's very uh it's very um contradictory in a sort of way yeah thank you and comes the wedding night the moment that everyone is waiting for the eunuch goes into the bathroom to put on the dildo and then he doesn't come out so and why is she's waiting she's waiting she doesn't come out and she goes into the bathroom to check on him where she finds him lying on the ground dead because when he opens the box apparently there was a snake hidden in the box and the snake stung him on his crotch, so he died.

And seeing this, like, shocked to see her new husband on the floor dead and that all this anticipation is going nowhere, she goes crazy. In Maya goes crazy. Like, we can say she goes crazy out of, I would like to say, sexual frustration. And so not only she's punished in this novel, if you look at this at the end, she's punished because she values this artificial male organ over a natural one. And then the eunuch, poor eunuchuch is punished because he dares to fake male sexual power,

something that he doesn't have. And then the readers who are intrigued by the title and waiting for this moment, we are also punished. And instead of reading about a lovemaking of a eunuch, we read about a tragedy in the end. So there's something really rich about this in the sense that you have a literary space in which women are talking explicitly about desire, about dildos, about, you know, sort of explaining their own curiosities and interests around sex. But then, as you say, in the end, nobody gets what they want. And in part because I think what you're suggesting is that there's a question about what happens when you're willing to substitute for real masculinity, right? With the use of the dildo, the eunuch, and that this is actually what brings kind of death and destruction down on everybody's head. Yes, it's really tragic. But there are many novels like this that,

let's say another popular one, Zifaf Hatrası, Memory of a Wedding Night. Sorry, the first one was published in 1913, I think, and this one is 1914, so very close to each other. This one actually was not published anonymously. It was published by Akagündüz, like written Akka Gündüz, a well-known writer. And in this one, we have a female character, main character, known as Little Miss, Küçük Hanım. The novel starts when she's reading the newspapers, the constitution, the second constitution is proclaimed,

and everyone is writing about hürriyet, h hurriyet, freedom, freedom in these newspapers. And she, as a young woman, a young Ottoman woman, interprets this idea of freedom. Okay, I can do whatever I want now because she's almost in a set up marriage. She's set up to marry someone that her father wants. And she interprets this, that I can get out of this because there's freedom in this country now. So she goes and tells her father wants and she interprets this that I can get out of this because there's freedom in this country now so she goes and tells her father about this now there's freedom like I can marry whoever I want and the father does not buy this and she isn't now she resorts to these columnists who were writing about Hurriyet in their columns so So she writes to Ahmed Rasim, a real character, a real writer in Ottoman late 19th, early 20th century.

And she also writes to Riza Tevfik, a member of Committee of Union and Progress. And although they, in their speeches and in the columns, they talk about Hurriyet so much, in their responses to her, the little miss in their letters, they never use the word freedom so they advise her although yes there's uh yes there's constitution and everything but you still should submit your it doesn't mean you can marry who you want nope you should submit your father's

wishes and they say maybe it will surprise you so she does that like out of desperation. She has nowhere to go. She accepts that and she gets married. And at the wedding night, again, you see like many novels ends at the wedding night. As the readers were, again, like left out of the bedroom door, we can't go in. So that's how far the erotic goes in those novels.

But we hear the moans and sighs from little miss and saying my lion my this my dad and we learned that actually she was pleasantly surprised right so submission to authority submission to your father will bring you sexual satisfaction that's i mean that's the kind of converse of the story we just heard where, you know, the woman tries to sort of subvert classic masculinity and, you know, marry a eunuch and use a dildo and, you know, the ending is not good for anybody. Whereas in this novel, what you're describing is that, you know, the willingness of the female character to accept this kind of limited definition of hurriyet or freedom actually brings conjugal sexual pleasure behind a closed door.

So it's the kind of construction of this, you know, maybe a private sexual sphere that is acceptable within, you know, within the bounds of the male public as sort of, as pleasurable for women. I mean. Yes, I mean, this is also like this time we have a lot of women's magazines talking about like women's emancipation, like freedom in marriage. And so like maybe it was written as a response to these.

So if you want, if you go out clamoring about freedom, you have to give up your sexual pleasure that only comes in your arranged marriage. Interesting. Like men define the limits of freedom. And what you're actually showing here is that erotica, which maybe we would assume to be kind of a transgressive genre, is actually deeply conservative in a certain way. Moralistic and punitive in this case. It punishes everyone who goes out of the men's ways.

Right. But we have to keep aside this Thousand and One Kisses series from all of this. There were two series with the same title, quite confusing, but they never overlap. Like one of them was published with known writers like Mehmet Ruf, Halit Ziya, Selami Enes. And then there was the second one, which was published anonymously or with pseudonyms like Kiraz, Burgu, or like very made up names. These series, though, they are surprisingly liberal and they were published with the subtitle Enşen Enşuh Hikayeler. So the most saucy and most joyful stories. In these little novellas or stories, the women are very liberal.

They're very free. They are urban. They live in Istanbul. We see that now they moved out of mansions or houses. They live in apartments in Beyoğlu. They dress up in a westernized manner. Everything about them is westernized. westernized. And they, in these novels, adultery, premarital sex, are very common and are not something condemned or punished. So, and these are from the early

1920s, is that right? Yes, early 20s, the first part of 1920s. So, do you think you can, you can trace a kind of shift between the early second constitutional period, so 1910, 1913, 1914, and the beginning of the 1920s, in terms of attitudes, at least among literary circles, towards, let's call it, women's sexual agency or female sexual freedom? There are other individually published novels, like in the late 1910s but we never see a shift between like in terms of how they depict female characters i'm pretty sure this thousand and one kisses series the second one um are translations or adaptations from french um fiction or French novellas. But it shouldn't mean anything

because Zambak was also a French translation. But again, in the end, the writer tied it back to maybe the early Tanzimat novels where they polarized female characters as the femme fatale and in Candioti's terms, like tame sex slaves. But these ones, although they might probably, they're adaptations or translations, the narrators, the writers and the narrators

are not judgmental against their female characters. If they judge anyone, they judge the possible judgmental readers, but not the female characters. For example, like a discussion of male sexual performance. The size of male genital organ is a common subject in these novels. Like women talk about these things. They criticize men on their performance.

They criticize men on their size of penises. And it's very common and normal in these stories. And nobody judges these women. And so I'm curious, I mean, you said that these novellas are written under pseudonyms, right, under fake names. Do we have any idea sort of who are the translators or writers of these? And also, who are the readers? are the the translators or writers of these and also who are the readers no oh the readers um it's who reads these things is always a very complicated question we don't know who read them but we know that this one was a very popular one because if you if we for us i guess the indication is that if they're easily accessible now like if if you can find copies, if you can read them easily that they were popular,

they made many copies, whereas like the first 1,001 kisses, which are more, let's say, proper stories compared to these ones, they're much harder to find than the second one. So there's at least some suggestion that these were quite popular in their time, even though they didn't conform to the kind of moralizing,

punitive patterns of the earlier parts of the genre, such as Mehmet Rauf's novel. Yes, but also we have to keep in mind that these were like early 1920s. It's a very chaotic time. So we don't know who read what how it was distributed like and there was um kind of a gap in authority let's say who would be overseeing right the censorship this is right after world war one and the dissolution of the ottoman empire yes so they they these kind of texts were published, let's say, freely until 1930s when the republic was settled. And then they passed a law about publication and what should be in those publications.

So until 1930s, we know that they were published freely. But in 1930, after the republic, a couple of years after the republic has settled down they passed a law about publication and until then everyone was kind of free to publish these kind of novels and again um we don't know who read them right but at least in the case of mehmet raouf's novel the one we with, we do have the indication that the woman who became his second wife read a novel, which suggests that there were women among the readership.

That is very interesting because in the preface to that novel, Mehmet Rauf, first of all, he talks about how the political environment parades all the publications that everyone talks about politics, that now he wants going he wants to write a novel very entertaining and that focuses on the center of the world which is vagina basically

he says and an idea kind of like that echoes in Gustave Courbet's famous um realist uh realistic painting L'Origine du Monde which which was commissioned by Halil Pasha, the Ottoman ambassador to Paris. So like Mahmoud Rolf, there's no way he did not know about this painting. And then he echoes the same sentiments in this preface, and he warns his female readers. He says specifically that he did not write this novel for mothers or like sisters, a classic Bajji rhetoric, that he did not write this for women, like proper women, the house women or this and that.

And he says, like, if you're going to read after this warning, basically read at your own risk. And Besme Hanım reads it. So we know women read it and that she was in Izmir. So it made all the way to Izmir yeah and then she becomes his wife so indeed you know uh it's hard to know how to soon but yeah they she became his his wife well I think what you've opened up for us here is this really um rich space for talking about sexuality in in Ottoman novels after 1908,

in which we've talked about what it matters, the gender of the writer. So the question, the difference between the French novel Violette, about Violette, that is the story of Violette that is written by a woman and how it is translated by a man into an Ottoman context. We've talked about the possible gender of readers um the fact that you know these at least in mehmet raouf's case there is evidence that women read although he warned them to do so at their own risk and we've also talked i think about the the sort of what it matters the way that that female protagonists are portrayed in these stories and sort of how the different ways that female sexuality,

both heterosexuality and same-sex practices among women were depicted. And I think what this shows us is that there's a much wider variety of ways of thinking about sex in the late Anun Empire than I had certainly thought of or imagined. So I wondered if we could close today by just asking you to sort of sum up what you think looking at sexuality can tell us about this moment in late Ottoman, early Republican history in the Ottoman Empire in Turkey. First of all, we can say that compared to early modern or pre-modern text on sexuality,

the late 19th, early 20th century erotic texts, or the way they call them, mustahchan, like obscene literature, it's very timid compared to the pre-modern or early modern ones. I mean, there's the idea of sexuality there, but sexuality is not there. Like, look, reading them from today's perspective, we would hardly name them as erotic. I mean, there's also the question of what is erotic, what's pornographic, right? And usually the idea is if a text is suggestive of a sexual intercourse or sexuality, it is erotic. Like it's buried in the language, more elusive, more ornate language, whereas aim of pornography is sexual arousal. So these texts are not pornographic at all, and they would be hardly considered erotic now so and also we see a

different big difference a big change between pre-modern and early modern texts and early 20th century there's as we talked about heteronormativity it's all about heterosexuality and if there is any homosexual love it's between and women, and it is to give men a chance to do voyeurism. Again, to feed into male fantasy, nothing about female emancipation or completely taking men out of the picture. But what we have is adultery that is punished, the premarital sex that's punished or so until thousand and one kisses series these are the most common themes that have been published uh published and punished at the same time yeah so what we have is the kind of moment where you know it's a kind of moment of remaking for the ottoman empire after 1908 right in this language of freedom or hurriyet, but it's also in this, what we see through the study of er sexual order is being, like, aggressively promoted in

these novels that we might otherwise consider to be transgressive. So I think that's really interesting. That's correct. And in earlier Ottoman novels, the first Ottoman novel, that is Tanzimat novels, the woman, there would be this loose woman character, quote-unquote, like the famous one being Mahpekar in Nami Kemal's Intibah, Awakening. And these female characters were also punished at the end of the novels. They either die or they commit suicide, but they're severely punished at the end of novels. So come early 20th century, nothing has changed. Maybe the content or the frame of the novels

have changed but the ones who are punished for sexual asking for sexual emancipation or they're following their desires are still the women with the exception of the eunuch in one of the novels right until the 1920s yes yeah so maybe we could

just end by asking for an example of where we end up in the 1920s. What are the differences between these novellas in A Thousand and One Nights and the earlier kind of moralizing punitive erotica of, say, Mehmet Rauf? For example, in one of these 1001 Kisses stories called Milakat Saatine İntizaren,

close to the hour of rendezvous perhaps, we follow a very excited Cemil waiting for his rendezvous with Nazlı. He decides to stroll around to kill time because he's so excited. But during his outing, he sees two women friends of him. Of course, this is in Beyoğlu. He decides, sorry, one thing leads to another, as usually happens in these novels. he sees two women friends of him on of course if this is in Bay all he decides sorry one thing leads to another as usually happens in these novels and he ends up having sex with both of these women which takes away from his strength

and come the rendezvous time he fails to impress Nazlı she's underwhelmed upset and disappointed with Jamil's performance. She storms out of the bed and calls a very apologetic Cemil. She says, men with a problem like this should never invite ladies to his apartment. So like references to male sexual performance as a topic of criticism, as crudity, and was a crucial aspect of men come up several times in these novels. And again, the narrators judge the readers. They say, oh, what, are you surprised? But this is the new woman now.

This is a new wave of life and new woman. And if you cannot get used to this, you should just leave or not, you should just not live anymore in these times. So it ends in a very optimistic, very promising note for women. But in the early Republican era literature, can we say this freedom for women continued? It's hard to answer. Well, I think that's a great note to end on. And perhaps we'll have to follow up with future work about the early Republican period. And I hope to see

many more studies of Ottoman and early Republican erotica that we can feature on the podcast. Or Yesilçam cinema of the erotic era. Absolutely. So perhaps we can institute this as an ongoing sort of field of discussion on the podcast. But I just want to thank you so much for joining us today, Borju. Thank you. Oh, my pleasure. Thank you.

And for our listeners who want to find out more, as always, we'll be posting a bibliography on our website, www.adamandhistorypodcast.com. And you can also join us on Facebook, where we stay in touch with our community of over 30,000 listeners, and stay tuned for more episodes. That's all for this episode. Until next time, take care.