Connie Brockway, the award-winning US author of romance novels, believes that the lower a woman’s décolletage is, the less need there is for conversation. That may be the case in her country but it certainly does not apply in Turkey, where the issue of women's cleavage is currently at the heart of a heated social debate.

The extreme sensitivity of Turkish women who consider themselves secular and modern toward the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in power, especially when it comes to issues involving their bodies, was revealed again when a deputy leader of the party recently criticized the way some women dress.

Huseyin Celik, a former minister for education who is currently the government spokesman, came out during a talk show on Beyaz TV, a pro-government channel owned by the son of the AKP mayor of Ankara, against revealing dresses displayed on television.

Ironically, he was touting the merits of the government’s latest “democratization package,” which appears to have pleased no one except Islamists. He was trying to convince the public that with this package, the lifting of the Islamic headscarf ban for women who want to work in the public sector was a step toward more democracy in Turkey.