I've long tried to explain Italian President Silvio Berlusconi's political survival by saying that you'd have to imagine what Richard Nixon would be like if he owned not just Fox News, but MSNBC, CNN, and every network news channel. Nixon didn't have Berlusconi's sexual appetites, but he has a similar skill for leveraging cultural resentment against the left and "elites" that Nixon had.
What I've never really been able to communicate though, is how pervasive and casual sexism is in Italian society. Ariel Levy's story from a few weeks ago on Berlusconi, whose relationship with an underage girl may finally prove to be his political undoing, does an incredible job of getting this across:
Other Berlusconi enthusiasts in the tent were there not to protect democracy but to defend their vision of the male prerogative. An affable seventy-six-year-old named Michele Lecce, crisply dressed in a light-blue sweater under a navy blazer, explained, “If a woman comes with no clothes on, with her tits showing, you can’t say he has committed violence.” Lecce, a retired union leader, said he considers Berlusconi “a brilliant man,” adding, wistfully, “If only I had the money he has, I’d be on the top surrounded by beautiful girls. Maybe I’d drop, but it’d be a beautiful way to go!” He smiled sweetly and yelled across the street at the demonstrators, “You guys are all gay! We have the men who fuck!” Then he turned to me and said, “I see you are a girl—I want to kiss you!” He pinched my cheek and concluded happily, “This is nature.”
This is anecdotal, but it's the kind of thing I warn my women friends about if they ever tell me they're going to visit Italy. There's a substantial risk of getting pawed by some dude who has no idea he's even doing something wrong.
Now, don't get me wrong, I love Italy. I lived there for years, I speak Italian fluently, Rome was once home to me in a way no city besides DC ever has been. But when it comes to gender, there are a number of ways in which Italian culture remains incredibly regressive.
Ninety-five per cent of Italian men have never operated a washing machine. Until 1981, a “crime of honor”—killing your wife for being unfaithful or your sister for having premarital sex—could be treated as a lesser offense than other murders; as late as 2007, a man in Palermo was sentenced to just two days in jail for murdering his wife after their children testified that she had been disrespectful to him. According to the World Economic Forum's 2010 Global Gender Gap Report, Italy ranks seventy-fourth in women's rights, between the Dominican Republic and Gambia. Women constitute a smaller percentage of the workforce in Italy than in any other country in the European Union, apart from Malta, and those who work make barely half as much as their male counterparts. Emma Bonino, a Radical Party leader, told me, “When I was Minister of European Affairs, in 2007, I had to prepare a report on the status of women in Italy. The data came in, and I remember that I rejected it twice, saying to my staff, ‘That’s impossible: it cannot be so bad.’
Levy's piece is great, but I don't think it adequately contextualizes the first sentence. Ninety-Five percent of Italian men have never operated a washing machine because so many live at home with their parents, letting their mom feed them and wash their clothes, until they get married at which point they expect their wives to do it. I think it's hard for some Americans to understand this because you're expected by a certain age to at least be renting your own room somewhere, living in your parent's house while you're pushing 30 is regarded as pathetic. But not in Italy, where it's, well, normal.
Confalonieri said, “In this case, you have to differentiate the reaction of a pissed-off wife—and she has reason to be pissed off!—but what she says is not true, if you look at the Berlusconian period concerning women.” He continued, “They—La Repubblica and so on—pretend that Berlusconi's television is against women. Television is not against women! Look at Canale 5,” one of the networks controlled by Mediaset. “You start in the morning, the first program has an anchorwoman,” Confalonieri said. “ ‘Striscia la Notizia,' there is a woman.” In fact, there are usually two women on “Striscia la Notizia,” a popular program whose name translates as “The News Slithers.” The women—called veline, which means “slips of paper”—spend the program posed on top of a counter, while male anchors sit behind it discussing current events. Sometimes the veline crawl around on the floor wearing G-strings.
I think some people might find the contrast between Italy's reverence for what Americans might call the "traditional family" and its popular entertainment to be shocking, but it really isn't. It's easy for that moral framework to double as a justification for sexual exploitation, since the underlying point is that women shouldn't really be allowed to do what they want, but rather what they're "meant" to do.
