On Monday, Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, made headlines by announcing at a summit on women and justice in Istanbul that women are not equal to men “because it goes against the laws of nature”.

Understandably this caused some outrage around the world but in Turkey it was outflanked by weary cynicism. We’ve heard it all before, you see, most recently in July when the deputy prime minister told Turkish women not to laugh in public. “Don’t rise to the bait, ladies,” said one (female) journalist on Twitter. Another Middle East observer called the story a “waste of news space”.

Here’s why it isn’t: Erdoğan is neither a lone madman in a padded cell, nor a Victorian uncle caught in a time warp. He’s the president of a country of 75 million people where only 28% of women are in legal employment, an estimated 40% of women suffer domestic violence at least once in their lives, and where millions of girls are forced into under-age marriage every year (incidentally, Erdoğan’s predecessor, Abdullah Gül, married his wife when she was 15). Exact figures on domestic abuse and rape are hard to come by because it is socially frowned upon to complain about husbands, and police often tell women and girls who have been threatened with murder by their partners to go home and “talk it over”.

During his speech this week, Erdoğan implied such widespread abuse is the work of the unhinged: “How could a believer – I’m not talking about perverts – how could someone who understands our religion commit violence against a woman? How could he kill her?”

How indeed? According to Erdoğan, Islam is a girl’s best friend. “Our religion has given women the calling of motherhood … feminists cannot understand that.” Warming to his subject, Erdoğan described how believers, including himself, “kiss their mothers’ feet” because they “smell of heaven”. This weird fetishising of mothers had as much place in reality as his reasons why women cannot work as men do: “Their delicate frames are not suited to it.”

Here was the evil genius of the speech: Erdoğan made this last remark while deploring the way women in rural Anatolia do much of the manual labour while their husbands “play cards in the local coffee house”. He immediately had the sympathy of his listeners – it is true, this happens and it is wrong. It does not mean that women are not equal to men and cannot work as men do, but Erdoğan’s supporters will brandish the broken-backed farm women as evidence of his deep understanding of the trials of womankind.

While fewer than a third of women are officially employed in Turkey, many others work unregistered on farms or in factories, and many families could not survive without this second income. According to Erdoğan, however, women should stick to being mothers. In 2008 he advised women to have “at least” three children and preferably five, for the sake of the economy; in 2012 he tried to outlaw abortion.

Perhaps he is unaware that the more children a couple has, the more expensive family life becomes, especially in an increasingly urbanised Turkey. Motherhood becomes less about having one’s heavenly smelling feet kissed and more about the strains of impoverished domesticity.

Why did Erdoğan make a speech like this? Turkey pundits often characterise his speeches as deliberately polarising, aimed at mobilising his parochial, conservative supporters. While they do achieve that, I think he really means what he says and after 11 years in power he has become increasingly – and understandably – confident about spouting parochialism to people who repeatedly vote him into power.

Does it really make a difference whether Erdoğan believes what he says or not, when the effect is to encourage a divide between believer and non-believer, man and woman, mother and non-mother? When he appeals to the conservative instincts of a country grappling with entrenched patriarchy and inequality, and assures his listeners that “equality in justice” is what matters most, not real equality – how does that help Turkish women, men, and their children?

And how can we laugh this one off?