The popular TV show Quelli Che ... Il Calcio
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Carfagna is keen to emphasize her ministry's accomplishments: a law on stalking, for example, "has made Italian women feel more secure." The government is committed to tackling domestic violence, she says, and to helping women achieve equal opportunities in the workplace. She has her work cut out for her: Italy has the lowest percentage of working women in Europe. Only 2% of top management positions in Italy are held by women, less than in Kuwait. In last year's Global Gender Gap report from the World Economic Forum, Italy ranked 67th out of 130 countries. Such figures are particularly shocking for women like Elisa Manna, who is old enough to remember Italy's muscular feminist movement of the 1970s. "Back then, young women wanted to become doctors, lawyers — professional people," says Manna, director of the Department of Cultural Policies Centre for Social Studies and Policies (CENSIS) in Rome. "It was terrible to get ahead in your profession because you are beautiful. Now, it's absolutely the reverse: if you use your body, your beauty, you're clever. You're pragmatic."
Quite so. For Elisa Alloro, a former Mediaset presenter who was tapped for the E.U. election, "Silvio's" suggestion that she go into politics was a welcome attempt to close the age and gender gap in government. She'd met the Prime Minister back in 2005, when she was 28, and was interviewing him for a Mediaset program. Alloro missed her plane; he offered her a ride on his jet. As they flew, she recalls, he quizzed her on his policies, on that morning's newspapers. By the end of the afternoon — some of which was spent strolling in the natural museum section of his Sardinian villa, looking at olive trees that were a gift from the Israeli Prime Minister — he had asked her to join his new task force on Europe. "He chose people who already work in TV, because they are usually better than others at talking in public situations," Alloro says. "Because politics is a show."
Will the velinization of Italy continue? There are some signs of a backlash against it — and Berlusconi. Earlier this year, two women parliamentarians argued that he had breached the European Convention of Human Rights for his "repeated statements that offend female dignity." Lorella Zanardo, a management consultant and former Unilever executive, grew so disgusted with the scenes of degradation on Italian television that she made her own video to raise awareness of the problem, splicing together clips from shows. The closing shot, from a show called Joking Apart, shows a woman in a thong hung on a hook in a meat locker, next to the bloody carcasses. "Women come up to me and say, 'Listen, I've been watching television for a long time, but I didn't realize,'" she says, her eyes welling with tears. Zanardo says that some Italians have opted out of their society. "People like me are guilty," she says. "We're well educated, so we traveled, or worked abroad. Italy was left completely in the hands of [Berlusconi's] media." And after Berlusconi snapped on national television at Rosy Bindi, 58, a gray-haired, opposition politician, that she was "always more beautiful than intelligent," La Repubblica launched a petition declaring that his use of women's bodies undermines democracy. "This man offends us," it reads. "Stop him." More than 100,000 have signed.
But it will take more than that to challenge Berlusconi. Italy's center-left opposition is in disarray, as usual, having just elected its second new leader in six months. And for most Italians fed Mediaset fare for 30 years, Berlusconi's cultural outlook runs deep. Midway through the ironing contest on Quelli Che ... , the would-be schedine look up from their ironing boards to watch a comedy clip, in which three fat, old women compete in a beauty contest. The audience laughs, as do the presenters and the schedine.
Imagine: women who are not young and not beautiful, daring to show their faces on Italian TV. In Silvio Berlusconi's Italy, that really is a new idea.