“Dear Güzin Abla, how can I tell if I'm still a virgin?” “Dear Güzin Abla, I have caught my wife... No more advice for

“Dear Güzin Abla, how can I tell if I'm still a virgin?” “Dear Güzin Abla, I have caught my wife with another man. I always thought we were happily married. What should I do?” “Güzin Abla, is there any standard regarding the penis size?” Turkey's “Dear Abby” for over 40 years passed away at 84 last Sunday, leaving thousands of Turkish people with unanswered questions about their relationships, sexual orientation and sex life.

Güzin Abla, or Fatma Güzin Sayar, has been a household name since 1960s, when she began her quest as the savior of relationships and confusion over sexuality in Turkey. Her advice column moved from one newspaper to another through the decades, eventually anchoring in Hürriyet daily.

When she couldn't write due to health reasons in 1998, her daughter Feyza Algan took the torch and continued the column under her mother's name. Ironically, the American equivalent “Dear Abby” went through the same path as the column was passed from Pauline Esther Friedman Phillips to her daughter Jeanne Phillips.

Coming from an elite Istanbul family, Güzin Sayar began her journalism career in 1952. In the 1960s, she began an advice column, “Sorun Söyleyelim” (Ask and We Shall Tell) in Son Havadis newspaper. The brand name “Güzin Abla” began as the column title in the 1970s, as she continued answering letters from the readers.

She married a commander when she was 16, despite the reactions from her family. Her marriage ended with a daughter and a cheating husband. When her second marriage also ended with her husband cheating on her once more, she channeled her frustration to her column, cautioning thousands of young women towards marriages and men in general.

At one point, she was among the 30 most powerful women in Turkey. Güzin Abla, naturally, appealed to the more conservative and the uneducated. Although she was strictly against women losing their virginity before marriage, she also sent the message that women who were not virgins should not be socially excluded. Homosexuality, for Güzin Abla, was a deviation, a disease that needed to be cured. It was treated as a disease with very low chances of being cured, next to cancer and AIDS.

While she advised women to be more passive in relationships, asking them to be patient when heart-broken, she asked men to be more assertive, to talk to women when there was a problem.

Careful readers would notice how emotional she could get about adultery, as a woman with two broken marriages for the same reason. She was very harsh on affairs with married men, something definitely to stay away from. Most of her answers treated women as “victims,” who were forced to get married or who were stuck in unwanted relationships. And as far as Güzin Abla was concerned, men could hardly be trusted.

When we look back at Güzin Abla's role as the advisor to millions of Turkish people for almost four decades, we see how little has changed since her first columns in the 1960s. Young women are still scared to death of premarital sexual relationships, men are still cheating on their wives, afraid of becoming gay and not satisfied with their penis sizes. And women are still left for younger women.

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