Turkish women now have a reason to smile. During a speech on Monday, Turkish deputy PM, Bulent Arinc, advised women not to indulge in morally decrepit behaviour such as laughing in public. Their ?chastity? was no mere ?ornament?, he said. It should, in fact, be taken seriously. In response, Turkish women took to Twitter, posting pictures of themselves smiling and laughing quite flagrantly. Turkish men have joined the chorus of criticism too. And Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, running for president against Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the approaching elections, tweeted that the country ?needs women to smile.? Arinc has succeeded in turning laughter political. The deputy PM?s comments were made in a political culture that is steeped in misogyny and the ruling AK Party, in particular, has a poor track record. PM Erdogan once famously said that he did not believe in equality between men and women. When the government tried to constrain women?s right to abortion, the mayor of Ankara reportedly demanded why the child should die if the mother is raped. The mother should die instead, he suggested. When women in Anatolia went to ask the forestry minister for jobs, he asked them if housework was not enough. Beneath the laughter of the last few days, lies years of bitterness.
But laughter, in its lack of decorum, in its riotous physicality, has always had the power to unsettle the establishment. The Greek philosophers restricted it, the early church condemned it. The gloomy apparatchiks of Soviet Union came under a hail of jokes during the Brezhnev era. In the 1990s, social activist MD Nanjundaswamy invented the laugh-in, gathering some 50,000 farmers around the Karnataka state secretariat in order to ?laugh the government out.? Turkish women?s protest shows that one of the oldest forms of dissent is still alive and well.