Turkey’s overstretched justice system has apparently found a new threat to public order: a small portable vibrator hanging from a photographer’s neck.
Photographer and model Bennu Gerede was detained in İstanbul on August 4 after displaying the device during a YouTube interview, according to the independent news outlet Bianet. Prosecutors opened an “obscenity” investigation after a clip from the programme circulated on social media—now the country’s most efficient mechanism for converting manufactured outrage into criminal proceedings.
The offending object appeared during an interview on journalist Emel Özuğurlu’s YouTube channel. When Özuğurlu noticed that Gerede wore few accessories and asked about her necklace, Gerede explained that it was a portable vibrator with several settings.
She also described circumstances in which it could be used, including in a toilet or while driving. The latter suggestion was perhaps unwise from a road-safety perspective, although it remains unclear whether prosecutors were more troubled by distracted driving or by the unsettling discovery that adult women possess sexual autonomy.
The Bakırköy Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office launched the investigation without waiting for a formal complaint. Gerede was taken into custody, questioned and subsequently released under an international travel ban, Bianet reported. Thus, a woman who displayed a legal consumer product during an online conversation may now leave her home but not the country—a punishment calibrated with the exquisite proportionality for which morality prosecutions are seldom famous.
The case would be merely ridiculous were it not part of a broader and increasingly coercive pattern.
Turkey’s obscenity investigations once concentrated largely on adult-content producers. Authorities have since widened the net to include musicians, social-media personalities and public figures whose material is sexually suggestive, socially provocative or simply insufficiently deferential to conservative expectations.
Bianet noted that influencer Fatma Soydaş was placed in pretrial detention after authorities accused her of disseminating obscene material. The girl group Manifest faced an investigation connected to an age-restricted concert, while queer singer Mabel Matiz was prosecuted over a song describing a romantic relationship before eventually being acquitted.
The legal instrument enabling this campaign is Article 226 of the Turkish Penal Code, which criminalises the publication or distribution of obscene images, writing and speech. Convictions may carry prison sentences ranging from six months to three years, alongside substantial judicial fines.
Conveniently, the law does not clearly define what “obscene” means.
That omission grants authorities an elastic concept capable of stretching from explicit pornography to pop music, suggestive social-media posts and, now, a vibrator worn as jewellery. Obscenity therefore becomes less a precisely identifiable offence than an administrative mood: one knows it when a prosecutor sees it—or when enough angry accounts repost it.
The Gerede investigation is consequently not really about one device, one interview or one provocative remark. It concerns the steady expansion of state power into speech, art, sexuality and private behaviour, with vaguely drafted morality laws serving as the master key.
The absurdity is difficult to miss. A country facing profound economic, political and institutional pressures has deployed police and prosecutorial resources against a necklace because it vibrates.
Yet authoritarian moralism often works precisely this way. It turns trivial objects into public dangers, embarrassment into evidence and personal freedom into a matter requiring judicial supervision.
The vibrator may be portable. Turkey’s morality regime, regrettably, appears to be everywhere.