Romance, Love, and Sex Matters in Turkey
The Turkish 'Kinsey Report'
-- Part 2 of a Series --

Turkish Sexuality Survey Question -- From whom did you receive your first sexual information? The Hürriyet Sexuality Survey of 2005 Headlines from the survey... Of all those surveyed (both male and female), 9 of 10 participants said they'd never received any 'formal' sex education. 24% of females and 43% of males said they got their sex education from personal experience or experimentation. 20% of males and 32% of females learned about sex from friends. Most of the remainder got their education from books, magazines, and TV. None of the women and only 4 of the men in the survey listed the Internet as a source of their sex education. Of the men and women in the survey overall, 2.9% said, "I have never received any information of any kind about women's sexual organs." And, 7.5% of the survey participants made a similar statement about men's sexual organs. In the Southeastern Turkish provinces, the bekaret zarı (maidenhead, hymen) is the 'sexual' body-part most well-known to women. (Ed. That's probably because the hymen must remain intact for a young woman [in that tradition-steeped part of the country] to have any hope of a 'respectable' marriage.) Among Turkish women overall, the best understood part of their sexual anatomy is the vagina -- understood by 84% of Turkish females. Of males and females overall, the least understood sexual body part is the clitoris. Women who know most about the functioning of the clitoris live in metropolitan areas, especially along the Black Sea Coast. Aegean region women know the least about it. Eighty-nine point six percent (89.6%) of Turkish men know most about their penis, but only one man in the survey had a reasonably correct understanding of sperm. 'Conservative' (religious-right) survey participants (both male and female) had a good basic understanding of orgasm. But, Conservatives (male and female alike) were skeptical that a woman could reach orgasm, on her own -- through self-arousal. Even among Liberal participants, only a few accepted that possibility. A majority of the men and women in the survey believed that man alone possesses the ability to arouse the [passive] woman to orgasm. Separate from the 'ordinary citizens' in the survey, a select group of Turkish celebrities was also polled on this sex education question. The stories of Pop Singer/Actor Teoman and Comedy-writer Metin Üstündağ caught our attention. Teoman -- see photo at upper left By the time my mother got around to telling me about 'the birds and the bees', I had already been with a prostitute and I had slept with one particular [older] woman, a non-prostitute, multiple times. I was 15-years-old. Before then I had learned everything I knew about sex from books. When my mother started her sex education speech to me, I interrupted her saying, "Oh mother, please keep it to yourself. I already know all about those things," and we both laughed out loud. Metin Üstündağ -- In the past, too many Turkish parents raised their very young kids in an atmosphere of fear. A child's 'fear' (of the bogeyman, for instance) provided parents an easy a way of controlling childish misbehavior and of keeping young kids in line. But, as the kids began to mature they wised up to their parents tactics, and a communications-gap opened between child and parent. By the time kids reached puberty, the gap was so wide that receiving instruction about sex from one's parents was out of the question. So those (alienated) kids picked up their sex education in a very haphazard manner -- with mostly bad results. My generation was luckier, in some ways -- because of what happened during the 1970's in Yeşilçam (Turkey's Hollywood)... In Part 3: The conclusion to Metin Üstündağ's sex education story, more headlines from the Turkish 'Kinsey Report' -- and answers to the Sexuality Survey Question, 'How would you describe your first sexual experience?' In Part 1: Turkish Kinsey Report Summary