Actress Sila Sahin
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Like no other magazine, Playboy stood for a liberal sociopolitical spirit, whose breakthrough in 1960s America it largely helped facilitate. The subsequent rise of feminist criticism of the patriarchal structures of society largely discredited the political standing of the magazine and its founder, Hugh Hefner, who recently celebrated his 85th birthday.
Symbolic Counterpoint to 'the Girl with the Headscarf'
If nothing else, Sila Sahin's campaign to use nudity as a means to self-determination teaches us that this criticism may well have been shortsighted.
This is because the legitimate debate over if or when the display of naked female bodies starts to hurt female dignity — or, on the contrary, promotes it — presumes the ability of the woman to decide for herself whether she wants her naked body to be depicted or not.
That's how the right to pose naked gains an undeniable importance and explosiveness — also for the struggle within the Muslim community over its relationship to the secular, open society.
That Sila Sahin faces threats not only from within her own family for her explicit pictures but also from radical Turkish nationalistic groups illustrates this.
We have to realize and acknowledge that the trivial pop and lifestyle culture is a powerful force in debates over emancipation because they deliver the emblematic images that can pull a society in one direction or the other.
By creating an attractive example of the self-determined, young Turkish woman who wants to live just as freely and unburdened as her German peers without immigrant roots, Sahin's pictures have the potential to set a symbolic counterpoint to the recent trend of "the girl with the headscarf."
The beautiful pictures are breathing new life into the values of the constitution and our liberal legal system that are too often just hailed in the abstract.
Now we would certainly like to know what German feminists have to say. In the past, they led campaigns against nude covers on magazines. Today they fight against the mandate for women in the Muslim community to cover themselves.
The fact that young Muslim women are using nudity as a beacon against their entrapment in their traditional culture could undermine some conventional wisdom in the feminist community.
Also from Worldcrunch:
— Le Monde
— Le Figaro