Ariel Levy opens her piece on Silvio Berlusconi by describing a campaign ad that the Prime Minister of Italy ran in 2008:
A beautiful blond woman, standing in a grocery store beside a pile of bananas, sings, “There’s a big dream that lives in all of us.” A throng of women belt out the chorus together under a cloudless sky: “Menomale che Silvio c’è”— “Thank God there’s Silvio.” Other women in various settings pick up the tune: a young mother in a pediatrician’s office, surrounded by nurses; a brunette in a beauty parlor, dressed for work in a camisole that barely covers her breasts. To American eyes, the ad looks like a parody, or perhaps some new kind of musical pornography that’s just about to erupt into carnality.
Decide for yourself:
Needless to say, not all women fawn over Berlusconi. In 2009, the same year he said, in response to rising sexual-assault statistics, “We don’t have enough soldiers to stop rape because our women are so beautiful,” Rosy Bindi, a center-left politician, delivered a zinger of her own during an exchange on the television show “Porta a Porta”:
“Presidente, I am not one of the women at your disposal.”
Their exchange spawned bumper stickers and T-shirts bearing her words: “Non sono una donna a sua disposizione!”
Levy also describes “the vision of female sexuality that Berlusconi has communicated through his television monopoly over the years,” which “even the most permissive American audience might be unsettled by.”
On “Colpo Grosso,” a game show that aired in the late eighties and early nineties, contestants had to strip if they got an answer wrong, and the inevitable conclusion was a showcase of topless women, blushing and trying to cover themselves with their hands…. “Buona Domenica,” which is on the air now, features young women in tight dresses being prodded into a clear shower stall to get soaked in front of a live audience. On one episode, the host explains to a guest, “I’m not doing it for me, I’m doing it for all Italian men—you get the shower.”… On “Scherzi a parte,” a woman in her underpants hangs from a meat hook alongside hundreds of hams as a man in a butcher’s costume stamps a sell-by date on her behind.
The video below (be forewarned: it’s twenty-four minutes long) excerpts and examines the images of women on Italian TV.
