SENAY OZDEMIR, magazine publisher
Senay Ozdemir, 36, magazine publisher
International Herald Tribune
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 1, 2005
Born in Turkey, Senay Ozdemir grew up in the Netherlands, trained as a teacher and worked as a secretary. Then she got breaks as a television reporter and a magazine columnist. “So many young girls seemed aimless and lost,” she recalled. “So I started an advice Web site. It got 100,000 hits in the first month.”
That led to her own magazine, SEN, for young, educated Muslim women. “The other glossies had little that I and the women in my world could identify with. We are members of a new culture, half in our own traditions, half Dutch.”
SEN appeared last year as a monthly for “Mediterranean women,” a way to sidestep the stigma of Muslim or immigrant. “People here link the Mediterranean only with France, Italy and Spain,” she said. “But it’s a much larger, richer culture. It’s also Moroccan, Tunisian, Algerian, Bosnian, Turkish. And we all have strong traditions, macho men and respect for religion and parents.”
SEN, circulation 20,000, addresses topics ranging from mixed marriages to ideas for Ramadan, Islamic banking, domestic violence, and how to address virginity, abortion or birth control while respecting the Koran. Arts reviews alternate with fashion, from the demure to the daring.
Ozdemir says it is important to show role models to women who were brought up to feel inferior. So SEN profiles achievers: law students, artists, women in business, designers, engineers. Questions sent to her advice column can be very difficult, she says. A young girl wants to know how to avoid her arranged marriage; a woman wants a divorce from a violent husband, but he has hidden her immigration papers.
“There is still so much insecurity and so much ignorance,” Ozdemir says. “Women have been indoctrinated that they don’t count, but I want to show they can get involved in this society and help their husband and their children to do the same.”
“Ten years ago the Dutch were always discussing what to do about us, the foreigners,” she says. “And now we have joined the debate.”"
