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Female Factor
Sex Scandals in Italy Fuel Discontent of Women
Maurizio Degl'Innocenti/European Pressphoto Agency
On Saturday, protesters in Florence, Italy, marched in a demonstration against Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. One sign read, “Italy Is Not a Bordello.”
By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO and RACHEL DONADIO
Published: February 2, 2011
ROME — Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy has said he is laughing off his latest sex scandal, in which prosecutors are investigating whether he compensated a number of attractive young women, including a 17-year-old nicknamed “Ruby Heart-Stealer,” for sex.
The Female Factor
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Room For Debate
Decadence and Democracy in Italy
What does the tolerance of Silvio Berlusconi's hedonism say about Italians?
Tony Gentile/Reuters
Silvio Berlusconi, the embattled Italian prime minister, during a news conference in Rome last week.
But as this seemingly intractable scandal unfolds, filling media with images of scores of young women in his orbit, Mr. Berlusconi finds for the first time in his long career that a growing number of Italians are not laughing along: women.
Female discontent is increasingly pushing up against Italy’s traditionally byzantine, male-dominated politics.
About 73,500 people signed a petition on the Web site of the left-wing newspaper L’Unità asking Italian women to say “enough already” to Mr. Berlusconi. A demonstration in Milan on Saturday drew thousands of protesters, and a nationwide protest promoted by women is scheduled for Feb. 13.
“Another Italy exists,” proclaimed Emma Marcegaglia — the first woman to lead Confindustria, an association of major industries, and one of only a handful of Italian women with any significant political clout — in a widely noticed television interview last month.
Today, long-simmering anger is rising among those who say they simply do not see themselves in the dominant images of women in Italy: the so-called veline, hot-bodied showgirls who since the 1980s have been the hallmark of Mr. Berlusconi’s television networks.
The latest scandal has underscored frustration about the seemingly narrow range of roles touted as available to women today. “In Italy, women are suffering because they see themselves caught between two images, that of the happy housewife or the ‘velina,’ ” said Danda Santini, the editor in chief of the Italian edition of Elle. “Little else is represented on television.”
Italy significantly trails European Union counterparts on equality indicators like employment of women or women in leadership positions, and indignant women say the latest scandal highlights a troubling message: the way for a woman to get ahead in Italy is to sell her soul, if not her body, to powerful men.
“I don’t feel it’s a model that mirrors me in any way,” said Martina Priori, 25, a saleswoman in a shoe store in downtown Rome. “The real world is different.”
Getting ahead at work, however, is difficult. Although more Italian women than men have university degrees, only 46 percent of Italian women are employed, compared with an average of 59 percent in the 27-member European Union.
At the same time, Italy has one of the lowest birthrates in the European Union, at 1.4 per woman, and spends only 1.1 percent of its gross domestic product on child care and other family incentives, according to Eurostat, the union’s statistics agency.
France, in contrast, spends 2.4 percent of its gross domestic product on family incentives, and its birthrate is 2.1 per woman.
According to the 2010 World Economic Forum Gender Gap Index, Italy ranks 74th out of 134 countries — trailed in the European Union only by Hungary, Malta and Cyprus.
By some lights, Italian women have come far in a country whose most entrenched power structures — the Roman Catholic Church and organized crime — remain male and secretive.
For the first time, women now lead the industrialists’ association and Italy’s largest labor union. (“It took them nearly 100 years to appoint a woman, and they chose the worst economic moment,” Ms. Marcegaglia recently said about herself.)
But on the whole, in a country known for lacking meritocracy, Italian women face an uphill battle.
Decades after a feminist movement helped bring significant changes, including legal abortion and divorce, some argue that Italian women are worse off today than in the past. “It’s as if we’ve gone backwards since the ’70s,” said Antonella Giacobbe, 55, as she attended a recent meeting in Rome of Filomena, a women’s advocacy group.
The handful of women who have risen to top corporate posts in Italy often come from powerful families. Ms. Marcegaglia is the heiress of a steel fortune. Marina Berlusconi, chairwoman of the Fininvest holding company and the Mondadori publishing group, is Mr. Berlusconi’s daughter.
In familycentric Italy, women are expected to be caregivers and housekeepers, and they are often discriminated against in the workplace, experts say, because employers believe that they will place family above job.
“In Italy, you either work or have children, because so far legislation hasn’t placed women in a condition where they can work,” said Alisa Del Re, who teaches on gender policies at the University of Padua.
In a country where grandparents often become child care, fewer than 10 percent of toddlers have access to preschool nurseries — and 27 percent of women quit work after having a child, according to a study by Alessandra Casarico and Paola Profeta, professors at Bocconi University in Milan.
“It seems that everything works against women: family, society, how work is organized,” and often the women give up, said Caterina Soffici, author of a book on the gender gap in Italy.
Yet the Bank of Italy estimates that if female employment rose to 60 percent, gross domestic product would rise 7 percent. “In a country where growth is at 1 percent, that’s something to keep in mind,” said Anna Maria Tarantola, the bank’s deputy director general.
A central question being debated today is how much Mr. Berlusconi has been responsible for molding the image of women during his 30 years as head of the country’s largest private broadcasting empire.
Girls once dreamed of being on television; now they “think that being an escort is the fastest way to becoming someone, by having access to important men and successful politicians,” said Candida Morvillo, the editor in chief of the glossy gossip weekly Novella 2000 and author of the 2003 book “La Repubblica Delle Veline,” or “Republic of Showgirls.”
Over the years, Mr. Berlusconi has blurred the line between show business and politics, choosing women from his television shows as candidates for the Italian and European Parliaments. One former showgirl, Mara Carfagna, is now equal opportunities minister — and has won plaudits even from critics for promoting gay rights. She is one of 5 women in the 23-member Berlusconi cabinet; 3 are without portfolio and few are seen as setting the agenda.
Many believe that change will come from the media rather than Parliament. Loredana Lipperini, a journalist and author, said she hoped that younger Italian women would be shaped by the Internet rather than the showgirl culture on television. “I’m comforted by this, because most young people are getting or will get their main information on the Internet,” she said.
For her part, Susanna Camusso, the first woman to be secretary general of C.G.I.L., Italy’s largest trade union, predicted that the Berlusconi era would eventually be seen “as an accident of history — not a mirror of the country.”
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179 Readers' Comments
Post a comment »The Italian public will forgive him for everything as soon as he give them something in exchange...hope for a job or tv announcement of tax cuts.
Italy is passing through a moment of its history where the public has lost his strength. For many years Italy has been in need of deep changes. Nowadays we are more in need of a miracle.
To actually change Italy we would need a "tabula rasa" and start re-educating the public about the meaning of legality, respect of the law, honor, decency . all things that in Italy seem to be long forgotten
1- Berlusconi sells a strong and neat dream to italians.
No matter how despicable, sexist, plutocratic is. It's a DREAM. The dream of the richness, the high life, the self made man. No one in Italy does something remotely similar nor alternative to this.
It's a shame, but we don't have any other leader. Italians aren't stupid, and our history reveals how fast can we change opinions. Berlusconi is just the strongest choice for a lot of people.
2- Italy is not a bigot country.
No one really cares about sex scandals. Italy is much more open minded than USA about sex. I'm a scriptwriter and there are a lot of stereotypes in your movies about how catholic and retrograded we are.
3- "everyone does it".
Corruption is something inside italians. Berlusconi is just a mirror of what Italians are. Unlucky. We need a strong moral education. We can change fast, but our leaders need to do it before.
Fiumicino, 27 of january 2011 h. 4.44 am. Mario Rosario Zampella
That's a much, much livelier and truer sounding word. My feeling is that puritans and scolds on the left are just going to have to *suck it up* as we say in the increasingly unsexy USA.
The real point should be on the failure of his governance in various walks of Italian life. on this account he should be criticized as fiercely as possible. But the media obsession with his sex life is simply counterproductive and is in favour of Burloscone. Anyway, a good room for debate.
It didn't end Bill Clinton's career.
I would like to share with you my idea of the two most important origins of the big Italian problem. Understanding a problem helps to solve it.
1. Italians outside of Italy are very successful. The reason is that we are simply the best. The Italian political parties of the opposition are full of Italians; so they are all the best. Every politician of the opposition believes that he is the best and he fights against the leader, no matter how good he is.
2. In 1943 our American friends landed in Sicily with the slogan: “It is better to be Mafioso than Communist!” The majority of the Italians still believe that. I believe that to solve our big political problem our American friends should land again in Italy, but in Florence, not in Sicily, with the slogan: “It is better to be an Italian Communist, like the Mayor of Firenze, than a Mafioso like the prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.” Moreover, mutatis mutandis, in Italy we had something similar to Iraq. In fact Americans tolerated terrorism both in Italy and Iraq in order to fight communism. And may be in a few critical cases they even helped them!
We need help from outside Italy. President Obama should inform us that communism is dead forever.
We have a minority here that dominates our politics, based on a false dream of independence, patriotism, religion, and military might. The very people who are most adversely affected by their actual policies, are the ones who fall under the spell of the dream the most. The media here is more and more under the influence of these false dream makers, and the democratic balance is disappearing under the effects of the Citizens United case.
In short, the billionaires pull the strings here too, fool the people for their own gain here too, and few are doing anything about it, and the few who try are targets of the crazies who listen to Fox and the far right radio pundits. In both countries, we are losing our democracy - the people are becoming more and more subordinate.
The scandals are atrocious, and the more I read about them, the more I see that they go far beyond "personal life" issues, but the real problem is the concentration of power. Italy is a good mirror for us right now.
And still a beautiful country.
Their "headquarters" is the..... Vatican. Educate yourself, before posting nonsense.
People simply do not "embody" their leaders, nor do such leaders represent some sort of sociological compendium of the people. As an italian I simply feel outraged to be even remotely compared to Mr. Berlusconi. The point is that Mr. Berlusconi seized power through a shameless use of populism, the worst ever to be seen in western Europe since the war. A huge disinformation campaign has taken hold of the less educated 30% of the population who would vote for right wing parties anyway and who get their news only from Berlusconi's lying, ultrabiased tv channels. Should we expect these people to stop being conservative voters and start voting for the left wing parties? More likely they will stick to their belief and look the other way, as they do.
The sad bottom line is that Berlusconi was forbidden by law to run for office (a 1957 law that prevents public licencees like him to run). Once that hurdle was overcome through legal loopholes the whole game was rigged, and this could have happened anywhere. After all, as Alexis De Toqueville said "Democracy is the power of an informed people".
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