‘Soft porn’ TV angers Italian women
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Watching Italian TV shows might give you the feeling that every Italian woman is a scarcely dressed blonde. Women all over Italy are sick and tired of the constant stream of nearly naked women on television and on advertising billboards.
It is fuelling Berlusconi-style ‘machismo’ and dragging their country backwards, they say. "What we are dealing with is a constant stream of soft-porn from morning until night on our TV screens," says Lorella Zanardo, the maker of a documentary film about women on Italian television.
"The real difference between Italy and other European countries is that women's bodies here are really shown as objects irrespective of the programme you're watching," she says.
‘Il Corpo delle Donne’ (‘Women's Bodies’), a provocative montage of national prime-time TV, raises questions about Italian society at a time when national headlines continue to be dominated by scandals over Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's liaisons with young glamour girls.
His appointment of former TV starlets to government posts has triggered an outcry, with a group of high-profile women going as far as writing to G20 leaders earlier this summer urging them to boycott a summit hosted by Berlusconi (72).
Ms Zanardo, who watched 400 hours of television for her documentary project, says: "I was really shocked. In one show, a young woman was literally suspended among pieces of dried meat. She wore only knickers and they stamped her bottom like it was a prosciutto ham. It's pure humiliation."
Ms Zanardo says the problem has its roots in machismo and tradition in Italy. "It's not just Berlusconi's party. The other parties have the same attitude to women. It's a problem with our society in Italy. We have lost the ability of saying 'enough'. Basta!"
Listen to a report by Network Europe's Vanessa Mock in Milan:
