In January 2003, the Financial Times published an article by Tobias Jones about the state of Italian television. Jones, a British writer married to an Italian woman and living in Parma, documented his reactions to Italian TV shows in a way that was refreshing and throurougly enjoyable. Enjoyable for anyone who is NOT Italian. Because the picture he painted was clearly depressing:
The following evening, about 7pm, I flick to Channel 5 again. This is the prime-time quiz show, Passaparola. To understand this kind of show, there are more key words to learn. Letterine “the little letters”, Veline “quick news flash”, schedine “the little statistics”: all are diminutive “me” descriptions of the bikini-clad women who start dancing erotically at random intervals. Passaparola is a quiz show based on the alphabet, hence the “little letters”. As I’m watching, Gerry Scotti – the anodyne host – is flirting with one of them and winking at the 8m viewers. Italy, don’t be in any doubt, is the land that feminism forgot.
A clip from Striscia la Notizia – one of the most watched TV programs in Italy (satirical news on primetime TV, on weekdays). These are the “Veline” Tobias Jones talks about:
Passaparola & the Letterine:
From Buona Domenica – Italy’s most watched Sunday afternoon program:
(The male tv presenter jokingly says the two women should keep doing this “until one of them dies”)
The article made a big impression on me back then. As an Italian, who has studied mass communication and film in the United States, who has lived abroad for many years, an activist and a feminist, this subject was very close to me. While in college, every time I went to Italy to visit my parents, I was positively shocked by the representation of women in mass media. Especially when making a comparison with the U.S. or the U.K. I would protest, and tell friends and relatives that I found this overt objectification of women offensive. My blood would literally boil at the sight of young women, about the same age as me, dancing around in bikinis and smiling to creepy 60-something anchormen. Yet all my Italian friends and relatives were relatively non-plussed by this. They found it normal. And it is still the same now, years later. If anything, the number of women scantly clad, offering their bodies for visual consumption has multiplied. Now they are everywhere.
The Financial Times doesn’t carry the article anymore, but I found a blog that reproduced it in its entirety. You can read it at this link.
What fascinated me the most, re-reading it just yesterday, was media consolidation. Because we have all heard the arguments that sex sells and men love looking at pretty women. But very few people go below the surface, to discuss the system that permits this.
It often seems that, in Italy, there aren’t advertisement breaks; there are short programme breaks. Fifty seven per cent of all Italian advertising budgets is spent on television (compared with 23 per cent in Germany, and 33.5 per cent in the UK). Even RAI, the state-owned television network – to whom I pay an annual licence fee of euro 97 – runs adverts. All of which means that audience chasing is crucial, and programmes are designed for quantity not quality. “It’s become a kind of psychological dictatorship”, says Gad Lerner, the most intelligent anchorman on Italian TV. “The figures from Auditel (which measures audience share) scare people into only producing these vulgar, crowd pulling programmes.” Berlusconi, of course, owns Publitalia, the company responsible for selling 60 per cent of advertising space on Italian television. Within a few days of starting my TV induction I can feel my brain turning to custard.
I had forgotten about this fact. Berlusconi, Italy’s prime minister, in addition to owning a media empire made up of 50% of the main TV channels, Mondadori – the largest Italian publishing house, countless magazines, newspapers, home video distribution firms, film production houses, a soccer club and insurance companies, also owns the “company responsible for selling 60 percent of advertising space on Italian television.”
When writing “Citizen Kane” Orson Welles would have thought this was too much for his character. And yet it is possible in Italy (watch Sabina Guzzanti’s awesome documentary ‘Viva Zapatero’ if you are insterested in the subject)
When having discussions with friends, I often compare Italy to Russia – it definitely feels like a media dictatorship. And, when asked where I’m originally from, I would jokingly reply “the Banana Republic” – because it feels so surreal. Women have a really hard time being taken seriously. My “golden ticket” is my international background: the fact I have lived for so long abroad and speak English and French fluently. So, my competence is not questioned when I am in Italy. But scores and scores of Italian women, who live and work there, have a difficult time in the corporate world. A few stats, culled from another article (“Naked Ambition”)
“In the largest Italian companies, women represent about two per cent of board directors.”
“In 1976, she says, 11 per cent of members of parliament were women, the same as today.”
Italian women need to break into the boys’ club – in academia, politics, the corporate world, and in mass media. But first they need to be aware of Italy’s pervasive mysoginy. And most of them aren’t.
No need to speak Italian to understand the I.Q. lowering, rotten quality of Italian TV. Here is a clip from Big Brother 9… A textbook case of Madonna-Whore complex. Italy’s prime minister – the disgraceful Mr. Berlusconi – owns this TV channel (and many more) and was a pioneer in the 1980s of this kind of trash TV.
Fast-forward to 5:30 for the crème de la crème:
[EDIT] I somehow forgot to mention that this is the “American Idol” of Italy – the TV show that draws the biggest audience. It is dissected by mainstream media – all major newspaper cover it on a daily basis. But there have been no feminist critiques of it. None at all. It is seen as normal and matter of fact. This is what Italy has become. So, so sad.
Judd Apatow’s funny boys — Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, and Jonah Hill — “recreate” the sorta-famous Scarlett Johansson/Keira Knightley nude photo shoot for Vanity Fair this month, with Paul Rudd playing the role of the creepily lurking Tom Ford. Except, of course, they’re wearing nude body stockings. Because, of course, we wouldn’t really want to objectify them. It’s supposed to be funny, see.
The post’s author goes on to discuss the issue of female comedians and the debate on whether or not women can be funny. And the issue that some celebrated female comedians, who have recently become household names and received lots of acclaim (Tina Fey in primis) have actually been featured in Vanity Fair, wearing next to nothing and snapped in overtly sexy poses.
The post concludes:
So that leaves us with this: Men being objectified is so silly as to be hilarious, but it’s better if funny women are also hot. Or maybe it just leaves us to conclude that Vanity Fair has a lot of conflicted feelings to work out in magazine therapy. What do you think? Would you like to see the Apatow crew baring all? Would it be as funny a parody if female comedians did it?
I had yet to write about the issue of female comedians, so this is the perfect opportunity. Something that terribly saddened me was the recent Vanity Fair issue (yeah, again, same culprit) with Tina Fey on its cover.
What does a hardworking, funny, brilliant – yet average looking – woman have to do to be taken seriously, get better and better assignments, and eventually be openly embraced by the mainstream? But of course, she needs a makeover!
Before:
And then, after the makeover is complete, she needs to show off her Most Important Assets.
After:
Could the Tina Fey of the “before” photos ever been featured on the cover of Vanity Fair, just as she was?
Pregnant pause.
Think.
Did it take you more than a nanosecond to come up with the answer “of course not”?
Because that is the obvious truth.
Because a female comedian cannot be appreciated just for her brains.
On the other hand, these two beauties (first on the far left and the guy between Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd) got a golden ticket to a Vanity Fair cover:
[The] women who people today’s romantic comedies seem to have three main obsessions. There’s shopping, of course, as seen in Confessions of a Shopaholic and Sex and the City. There’s babies, as witnessed in Baby Mama, Juno and Knocked Up. And there’s marriage, which was front and centre of the noxious recent release Bride Wars, featuring Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway fighting over their dream wedding – described by Purkiss as “what some drunken bozo who never got a date in high school thinks women are like”. Marriage is also at the centre of Made of Honour, License to Wed, The Wedding Date, The Wedding Planner and 27 Dresses.
[...]
Now, at a time when 70% of women are in the workforce, career women in romantic comedies are generally either portrayed as incompetent, cruel, or both. Dr Tamar Jeffers McDonald, an academic at the University of Kent and an expert on romantic comedies, says that she finds it “quite insulting that a career woman now is something that is so frowned upon. You see depictions of women who are supposedly at the top of their game, yet they can’t walk down a corridor in a white suit without pouring coffee on themselves or walking into a bush. The films are not very subtly saying ‘yes, they may be at the top in their jobs, but actually what they really need is a man. In fact, a husband.’”
Hollywood is monstrously, demonstrably sexist. It’s sexist in a way that must make industries like construction and engineering take off their hard-hats and whistle with admiration. According to the Celluloid Ceiling review, of the top 250 films of 2007, women made up just 15% of key behind-the-scenes roles. They were just 6% of the directors, and just 2% of cinematographers.
In front of the camera things appear to be slightly better: you can see women, they’re all over the place. But actually, with all those male directors, directing films about men, the women really don’t get much of a look in. Of the 6,833 speaking characters in the films nominated for the best picture Oscar between 1977 and 2006, only 27.3% were female (only one woman director has ever been nominated for an Oscar: Sofia Coppola, in 2003, the same year that Fernando Meirelles was nominated for City of God without his female co-director, Katia Lund).
In Alison Bechdel’s cartoon strip Dykes to Watch Out For, the character Mo explains that she only watches films in which 1) there are two female characters, who 2) have a conversation which is 3) not about men.
Think of your top 3 favortite films… Do they pass the test?
Some men may view scantily clad women as objects rather than as people, a recent study found. The research, conducted by Princeton psychology professor Susan Fiske, Mina Cikara GS and Stanford psychology professor Jennifer Eberhardt, was performed on 21 undergraduate male students at the University who identified themselves as heterosexual. Fiske’s team used an MRI machine to scan the brains of the students while they viewed a series of photographs of men and women, some of whom were fully clothed and others of whom wore only swimsuits.
The pictures of bikini-clad women activated brain regions associated with objects or “things you manipulate with your hands,” Fiske said. The students also remembered the photos of the half-naked women better than they did any of the others, she added, noting that the subjects remembered the bodies, not the faces, most clearly. Fiske said the results indicated that some men may objectify or dehumanize partially clothed women, though further research is needed to confirm these findings.
[...]
“I think [the study] does relate to the effects of having pornography and sexualized images of women around and in the media because they spill over into how people treat women in general,” Fiske said, adding that these images may dehumanize women and encourage men to see them as objects. “You have to be aware of the effect of these images on people,” Fiske explained. “They’re not neutral. They do have an effect on how people think about other women.”
