My internet history

Considering how much time I spend on the internet, I have been relatively timid about posting comments. For instance, I have been reading the Lonely Planet's forum on the Middle East for at least three years if not more. My first posting to the forum, however, was less than a year ago. What brought me out of my shell finally was my growing frustration with what I call the "dreaded single white female question." You see, there are some women, who will a) consider traveling to a country without reading a page of information about that country and b) think that their whiteness and blondness make them an irresistable target of attention in a country like Turkey.

It is true that blondes in Turkey are relatively rare (think of Italy and Greece), so many Turkish men claim a fascination with blondes. This has something to do with Turkey's saturation with Western ideals of beauty - in fact, while the West has arguably taken a turn for a more multicultural norm, [Westernized] Turks remain more Catholic than the Pope. [More on this topic later]. A second component of the issue is that many women from former Soviet Republics have come to Turkey in the last two decades to look for work, sometimes as nurses and housekeepers, but often as prostitutes, unfortunately. Most of them are also blonde. This has led to the development of the "Natasha stereotype." I cannot imagine how difficult it must be for a young Russian or Ukrainian woman to navigate the streets of Turkey - because many will assume she is a prostitute even if she is not.

Having made all these caveats about how being a foreign blonde might lead to unwanted attention from some men in Turkey, I still get really mad at the question (because it is not appreciation of the above nuances but rather a question of bias), especially if it comes with the equally dreaded "should I wear a headscarf" inquiry. This is why I composed the following reply and posted it on the Lonely Planet webpage:

As a long time lurker, I am posting for the first time because I want to say something about the often asked question about the safety traveling in the Middle East as a single blonde female. And maybe offer some tips. I apologize now for the long post.

First some background that is relevant to the topic: I am Turkish, and I am blonde. Not Scandavian blonde, but a natural blonde nonetheless. Maybe for that reason, but more likely because I have lived abroad for a long time and something about my general demeanor has changed as a result, I am often mistaken for a tourist when I take my foreign friends to Sultanahmet. In my daily life I wear regular "Western" attire-the same things I wore when I lived in the US (and also before I went abroad). I do not change the way I dress when I visit touristic areas, with the possible exception of choosing more comfortable shoes.

I mention all of this because disregarding occasional stare, I do not really get harassed in Istanbul. Just two weeks ago, I took a female friend, who is from the US (and is very blonde) to the Sultanahmet region. We walked around several days without any trouble on that front. Of course there were a few botched attempts at carpet sales (dropped the moment they realize I am Turkish) but no unwanted attention of the sexually harassing kind.

I do not want to trivialize the experience of anybody who has visited Istanbul and suffered this kind of experience. But the discrepancy between my own experience and some female visitors has made me wonder what I was doing differently (as a Turkish woman) that fended off these kind of advances. Because it has nothing to do with how you look.

Here is what I came up with:

1) Do not make conversation if strange men approach you. Do not even respond. 2) Do not smile around as you are walking down the street. 3) If you are walking down the street and people are trying to talk to you, just ignore them. Look straight ahead and pretend and act like they do not exist.

Basically as a woman, act stand-offish and aloof. This doesn't mean you cannot look around, but you should control your own gaze. If you are looking around, and your eye meets the eye of some eager guy, immediately look elsewhere to signal you are not interested. In Turkish culture, holding eye contact is a signal of potential interest. It is the first move. There is even a slang word for it ("kesmek").

Istanbul is a very cosmopolitan city. Most tourists unfortunately never leave the tourist ghetto of Sultanahmet. In other parts of Istanbul, Taksim for instance, nobody hardly gives anybody a second look regardless of what language they speak or what they wear. Being in Sultanahmet potentially multiplies the number of these kind of incidents for two reasons. First, everybody in Sultanahmet who is not a tourist is trying to sell something to tourists. So they are predisposed to give you attention you do not want, sexual or otherwise. Second, most people who work in tourism, especially on the street level, are not from Istanbul and are recent immigrants or they are not that well educated or both. Why does this matter? Because that means that they are not yet fully socialized into the norms that control relationships between sexes in the West and in the urban centers of Turkey such as Istanbul.

Because it is a developing country and not all regions change at the same pace, groups with different cultural norms have to coexist in Turkey. In Istanbul, members of these groups have to interact on a daily basis. So take some guy who has just arrived from Eastern Turkey. Where he is coming from women and men do not interact. They do not have casual conversations as friends. For him, a woman talking to him or smiling at him or holding eye-contact with him means she must be interested.

What women who ask the dreaded question of single blonde female do not realize is that there are millions of Turkish women in Turkey who go about their daily business, alone, not wearing a burqa (carsaf) or a headscarf, who may or may not be blonde, who may or may not be wearing miniskirts etc. We have to interact with the guy described above as well. We make sure that he does not misread our actions by making it absolutely clear that he has no chance. He ceases to exist the moment he enters our personal space. The only interaction we have is for business transactions (initiated by us).

If you try this approach you will find it is more effective than cursing or shouting etc. Because if you act standoffish from the very beginning he will respect that. He is culturally programmed to. These guys have two kinds of categories of women they respect (the unsexualized mother/aunt and the chaste girl). If you cannot pull off the matron act, you have to be the chaste, standoffish, cold girl. Again, this has nothing to do with clothing or hair color.

I also have to say that I find it incredibly insulting if somebody asks "I am a single blonde female traveling to the Middle East, what should I do?" and somebody responds "Oh, respect their culture, wear a head scarf and all will be fine." This is like advising a woman who is planning to travel to the US to get breast implants because it is "their culture". I do not have anything against Muslim women who choose to wear a headscarf, but to advise tourists to do so in the name of respecting "culture" gives too much deference and power to a particular group within that culture who do not represent everybody (in the case of Turkey, they definitely do not represent even the majority of women).

Once again, sorry for the long rant. I cannot speak for other countries, but I hope my post clarifies some things with regards to traveling to Turkey as a woman.

And, my post was well-received. Someone encouraged me to put it on the Turkey Travel Planner website as well. And over time, I have received excellent feedback on this post. I'd like to think that its inclusion in the Lonely Planet Middle East FAQs has something to do with the decrease in the number of people posting this inane question.

So, in a way that post has paved the way for this blog.