My Italian TV Hell

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.

Read “My Italian TV Hell” here.

Read “Naked Ambition” here.

New York Magazine: “The search for Malia and Sasha look-alikes to sell products”

Excerpt:

Madison Avenue is scrambling to adjust to a new era, when the most admired people in America are a black family. To reflect this reality, talent scouts are on the hunt for models who look like the Obama children, Sasha, 7, and Malia, 10.

[...]

Marlene Wallach, president of Wilhelmina Kids & Teens, says the First Daughters are tough subjects to match. “It’s a very specific age and a very specific ethnicity, so there aren’t that many girls that would necessarily fit the bill.”

Full article here.

On the one hand I’m deliriously happy to see that thanks to Barack Obama’s election racial minorities may get more visibility in the media – it’s about time!!! During my research for the docu “The Illusionists” I was positively surprised to see, in women’s magazines from the 1970s and the early 1980s (Vogue, Cosmo, Mademoiselle), lots and lots of black models in fashion/beauty photo shoots, advertisements, and on magazine covers. Why had they disapperared all of a sudden? The fashion industry had seemingly turned racist in the last 15-20 years. So: visibility of racial and ethnic minorities: awesomely positive.

On the other hand, though, I’m saddened that such a moving, historic milestone (the first ever black family in the White House) may get immediately mixed up with the usual base commercial interests – Sasha and Malia dolls with already developed breasts, photo shoots with Sasha and Malia lookalikes – to sell products. On top of that, the article above highlights a desire to see more Obama girls lookalikes – not more black children in fashion / advertising / mass media.

Don’t know how to feel about this…

Dept. of Manipulation: Ooops!

via Jezebel & Photoshop Disasters:

In the September 2008 issue of an international edition of Marie Claire, some of the staff at the top of the masthead — creative director, photo director, deputy editor, associate editor, acting features director — posed for a photo in what looks like the office conference room. They all look fresh-faced and wrinkle-free. However, as Photoshop Disasters points out, the reflection in the conference room table suggests a different reality.

And the Award for Most Deceptive Magazine Cover Goes To…

Life & Style Magazine!

Take a look:

“Jessica Alba lost 40 lbs. in three months.”

Compare the photo above with the one below:

They used the retouched photo!!!

via Jezebel.

OttawaCitizen.com : Mommy Makeovers Inspired by Celebrities

“Forget facials and pedicures. Today’s new moms want tummy tucks and breast lifts.”

Excerpt:

The fact that more women are turning to plastic surgery worries Shari Graydon, author of In Your Face: The Culture of Beauty and You.

“Apparently, the pressure on new mothers to care for the every need of a completely incompetent and utterly defenceless newborn while stumbling around in a perpetual state of sleep-deprived hormonal overload isn’t enough,” she says.

Giving plastic surgery a name like “mommy makeover” is just clever marketing to women whose body image is suffering, Graydon says. “Calling cosmetic surgery, whether it happens two years or two decades after a woman gives birth, a ‘mommy makeover’ is a cynical attempt to normalize medically unjustified radical intervention.”

Graydon also says mothers who have plastic surgery send a mixed message to their children.

“You can’t convincingly tell your kids, ‘You’re beautiful just the way you are,’ if you’re risking major anesthetic yourself to remake your body after it does what it was biologically designed to do.”

Full article here.

Yet Another “News” Report about MyFreeImplants.com

… which sounds more like a commercial promoting the site… leaving out all discussions of potential side effects and additional costs…

My favorite quote:

The website was a testosterone-, alcohol-fuelled idea hatched by two Bay Area buddies at this bachelor’s party in Las Vegas.

Dept. of Manipulation: Jennifer Aniston Admits GQ Cover was “Photoshopped”

From US Magazine:

 

Yoga isn’t the only reason Jennifer Aniston looks good naked!

The actress made a confession about her sexy GQ cover when she appeared on The View on Wednesday.

“What happened to the girl next door from Friends?”Barbara Walters asked, holding up the January issue, where Aniston appears wearing only a tie.

“She’s there! Photoshopped!” Aniston, 39, replied.

 

Debra Winger on Hollywood and Ageism

From The Guardian (full article here):

“Yeah, those boiled faces!” she says, when I bring up the tricky subject of her female colleagues’ waxwork skin. “Scary. They go in [to see their doctors] saying: make me look like myself – or like myself 20 years ago. But you know, I have a movie out now and I can’t bear to watch it. I see myself up there, and it’s not normal to scrutinise your own face on a screen this big; it’s like opening a vein. So I do have some compassion for Nicole Kidman, or whoever, who has obviously looked at her face and sort of dissected it, like it’s a thing. I don’t want to be the poster child for wrinkles, and that’s what they make you if you speak out about that whole culture. So I don’t, mostly. But it has gotten so ridiculous as a job. [At the film festivals] the celebrities are dragging their movies in, going ‘look at this!’ instead of the movie being the thing, and they’re just there to support it. It’s a case of: ‘Look at my dress, at my hair, at my face and … oh, by the way, there’s a movie here, too!’ I have this character in my head. She keeps appearing places: on trains, in the city, on the highway. I see her out there. She is heroic, but not like any hero we’ve ever seen. Society makes women of a certain age invisible. It’s convenient. Remember our mothers? How inconvenient they were to us? It’s like that, on a grand scale. In the early part of my life I carried the flame for fiery women: perky women who were not dumb. And now I feel like I could be the woman to play this role: the invisible woman.” Only no one is writing these kinds of parts. “Roles for women. There aren’t any. They’ve been saying that since the 1920s, and it’s true. [My theory is that] women don’t write enough. Because who do they expect to write these roles? Men?”

via Jezebel.