Earlier this week, Turkey's Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc said in a speech that women should not "laugh in public" in order to demonstrate sufficient chastity:
"A man should be moral but women should be moral as well, they should know what is decent and what is not decent," Arinc said in a speech on Monday, in the western Bursa region for the Bayram holiday that marks the end of Ramadan.He also said: "Chastity is so important. She will not laugh in public."
"She should not laugh loudly in front of all the world and should preserve her decency at all times," he added.
And in what has to be my favorite pushback campaigns of all time, women in Turkey (and women of Turkish extraction living elsewhere) have taken to social media to post audio of themselves laughing and pictures of themselves smiling: "There have been more than 300,000 tweets using the term "kahkaha"—the Turkish word for "laughter"—and on the hashtags "Resist Laughter" (#direnkahkaha) and "Resist Woman" (#direnkadin)."
LOVE.
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