Im finding it harder and harder to find something interesting to write about, or even speak about for that matter. As days start blending into weeks, I feel as though Im beginning to lack topics of conversation at the dinner table, that the silence between both the people I’m with and the people whom I speak with online has stretched and that no one can go for too long without mentioning the harsh reality of the world we are living in right now. See, i’ve done it myself, I’ve mentioned it without even saying its name.
I have to say that I am glad I am a university student right now. I have no excuse to be bored because I have essays that need to get written, readings that need to get read and once i’m done with that there is always more that I can dive into. And yes, motivation is hard to find, but there is no excuse for boredom as there is always more to learn. This week I want to write about one of the readings that Bernhard put up, which reminded me of that exactly, there is always more to learn.
‘Western Perversions’ at the Threshold of Felicity: The European Prostitutes of Gala Pera (1870-1915) by Malte Fuhrmann, was a reading about a topic that had never previously crossed my mind. It speaks about an international network of prostitution entered around Constantinople in the late 19th to early 20th centuries, otherwise known as ‘girl trafficking’ or ‘the white slave trade’. Now, I could have guesses that there were prostitution networks at the time (some of which we sadly still have today), but what had never crossed my mind where its relations to race, empire, nationhood and religion, as Fuhrmann eloquently illustrates. In this case, the trade of European girls in the Ottoman Empire was very much a question for the state, as several of these girls originated from the Habsburg Empire, Russia, Romania, and several other central and Eastern European countries.
The demand for these European women lead to a vision of the European woman as being morally loose, or lacking female honour. Because of this, eve though Ottomans had made an effort into modernisation which included adopting certain ‘Western role models’ there grew a problem of othering in terms of European women and what they saw as ‘their women’. This in turn impacted the several European women who were living in the Ottoman Empire not as prostitutes, but as teachers, nurses and governesses for the upper class. But even the reputation of their chasity, and by large the reputation of European women was at stake, leading to a desperate attempt by the Austro-Hungarian empire to eradicate this trade and prostitution and thus restore the honour and reputation of the Empire in the eyes of the Ottomans.
What I thought was particularly interesting about this is how prostitutes, which were considered to be the lowest of the lowest in regards to social standing (not only due to their economic conditions but because they were women, and more specifically morally loose women or women with no honour) could create a such an anxiety for the Austro-Hungarian empire in which they felt their reputation was being attacked too. This leads to the idea that a man’s honour was dependant upon a woman’s honour, and thus, in a bigger scale, a nations honour was dependant upon its women’s honour.