Lines from countless pages and scenes from films are fluttering through my mind... Impossible loves. The more impossible they were— the deeper the contradiction, the sharper the pain— the greater the passion and the meaning. Loves born from a system extending across the genetic cliffs of evolution... It was always the man who desired, and the woman who could never forget.
 

While the two chased the triumph of conquest and the satisfaction of transformation, for some reason, it was always the women who cried. They cried during their first loves. And the ones that came after. When their love wasn’t accepted at home. When they were forced into marriage. When they were abused by the gardeners who tasted their fruits... Even when they did marry the man they loved... And after the marriage. And when they gave birth. And when the man died. And when the children died. Or when the children got married. Women were always unhappy. Always in tears. A world full of women who were detached from their mothers, who never found the fathers they lost— or didn’t even want to.

​

So who taught us women these impossibilities? And who taught us how to cry? We passed through legends, came out of fairy tales, book pages were inked, theater curtains opened and closed... Romeo and Juliet, Ferhat and Shirin,
Scheherazade spinning words for a thousand and one nights, Salome and beyond... We heard them, we saw them... We slipped our bodies into their first-person narratives. We adopted their destinies as our own and memorized them— mostly in stories written by men.
We were expected to be the woman who waits, who accepts, who controls things in secret. To complete ourselves, we were to cling to the guardianship of a man,
woven through with his ambition to succeed. We read and read. And we watched.

 

Women came to know love somewhere between “this is how it’s always been” and “this is how it will always be.”
For centuries...Then the camera was invented. Mankind—or rather, man—figured out how to reflect life onto another surface through light. He froze the unique moment, replicated it, and in doing so, stripped it of its uniqueness.
While a story could still feel unique in the mind even when told in a thousand books, once the image multiplied, it fell under the monopoly of a single gaze. It was no longer free like a painting. Ideas had boundaries now. All meaning was fixed within the moment—delivered in an even harsher tone. Beneath the opiated velvet of its aesthetics,
sharp-edged messages sliced through the mind like swords. What was blurred was retouched to clarity. And then the movie camera was born. Scenes, frames, cuts, and filters... That’s when the real havoc began. This time, man—the male of the species—began weaving a massive manipulation. He had finally succeeded in presenting his gaze as the gaze of life itself. And we women, mesmerized by the light, began to watch these godlike images without question,sitting in wine-red velvet theater chairs, perhaps with a man’s arm around our shoulders...

 

From that point on, we started to see the world through the eyes of men. And this visual grammar—layered through countless copied perspectives, seasoned with capitalism and a mix of other opiates— stretched all the way to the synthetic-filtered world of Netflix. Even the “values” Hollywood forced into our minds became invisible,
buried under the weight of all this manipulation.
The image-driven era of pop music had long begun.
And so, the imaginative castles of our inner world fell, one by one. For some of us, this started in childhood.
Now, which film gifted the scenes that creep into our dreams... who knows? Before we ever lived love, before we even met it, we had already learned what it was through films. Through the lens of the third person.
Through the visor of the director’s chair, where the king with the cross-legged pose roared.

 

And then, one day, we fell in love. According to what?
And one day, that man sat across from us. As we looked into his eyes, we imagined ourselves in the same cinematic frame. Our hands instantly reached for our most sacred organ. Not our hearts, of course— our phones. We snapped a selfie. When he kissed us, we expected violins in the background. We believed that loving meant going places, having fun, and enjoying life —just like in the movies. Or, on the contrary, we believed it meant constant lack and suffering —again, just like in the movies.
Or we thought it was a story with a beginning, middle, and end. Our minds, enslaved by shortcuts and lacking the patience of novels, dictated this to us. We couldn’t just look at him and see him.
 

We, the poor women, were already undone before we could begin. We, the always-unhappy women. The women who’d lost sight of their mothers, who never found the trace of their fathers. Women who could never become themselves —taught to believe they were nothing but a piece of visual aesthetic inside a frame. Women who could not speak. Or who spoke but not from the heart. Women who took nurturing as duty and feminism as salvation. Always swinging between black and white. Never seeing the beautiful presence they were born into. Never shedding the filters to simply savor being human... Women who, walking alone on a street, saw the dark blue sea but could not remember how lucky they were just to have come into this world and to still be breathing. Women who had turned into AI-powered speech bots from a movie—
whose expectations were generic and memorized,
who had long since lost touch with their own real bodies.
Now we float over this massive earth of stone and soil,
within concrete boxes sliced into tiny rooms—
like frozen film frames.

​

Sanat Deliorman, September 22, 2023, Istanbul

Translated by Chat GPT