It felt like I became a secret foreign agent, who spoke enough Turkish to pass, but had sex that very morning, in a crowd of oblivious innocents, celebrating a Muslim holiday in the most holy city in Turkey. Giddy, because by putting on the headscarf, I acquired the power to take it off with no moral trepidation, just to adjust it or let my sweaty neck breath for a moment. Immoral, because I knew I was appropriating a sacred practice for my own comfort. Right after relief, I felt immoral – and giddy. I went back to the hotel and dug through my luggage for my white scarf.
My uncovered head usually put me in the majority in Turkey that morning in Konya, I did not see a single female hair. Men stared at me: the female body, exhibit A. The streets were naked, stripped of the colorful lamps and sweets that spilled from tourist shops just the day before. I felt no quite strongly on a holiday in Turkey’s religious capital, the birthplace of the whirling dervishes. In Turkey’s context, that no comes partly from religion. The plot of the Museum of Innocence is tied to the no, but a different no: society’s no to losing your innocence before marriage. Even now I cry a lot during sex, from hope, frustration, love, the overwhelming desire to be a “bad girl” and say yes while the pain often still says no. Just like that – his lips against my ear, taking me from behind – I had sex without pain for the first time after many excruciating attempts with three different partners. Specifically, he “entered her from behind,” nibbling on her ear. One read: kötü insan değilim, “I am not a bad person.”įlipping through the book, I found a scene where the lovers are having sex. I listened to the ghost whisper the audio book in my ear, starting with the first exhibit: tens of thousands of lipstick-stained cigarette butts, each marked with the smoker’s thoughts. That is, he arranged salt shakers, toy dogs, and toothbrushes behind glass and haunted a home with a faux ghost-written memoir about a man’s secret relationship with an 18-year-old girl. Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk curated the museum based on his novel by the same name. The Museum of Innocence is a red building sidled between washed-out houses on a cobblestone street, like a blood stain on the rumpled linens of Istanbul. I had sex nearly every day for the three weeks I spent in Turkey, but by that definition, I flew home “innocent.” I read somewhere that losing your virginity shouldn’t mean the first time a penis enters your vagina, but rather the first time you orgasm.
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