The Embarrassment of Italy

“Basta Bunga Bunga” (The New Yorker, 6/6/11)

“La Dolce Viagra” (Vanity Fair, July 2011)

The New Yorker likens Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to an aging Hugh Hefner, but the more appropriate comparison may be between Berlusconi and Charlie Sheen. Both the politician and the actor are train wrecks convinced of their own importance and attractiveness; we can hardly bear to look at them — but then again, we can hardly bear to look away. Sheen has his “goddesses” and his Tiger’s Blood; Berlusconi has his veline (showgirls) and his “bunga bunga” parties, at which he is supposedly serviced by a parade of prostitutes. Both men also have a way of commanding media attention, though the recent profiles of Berlusconi published in The New Yorker and Vanity Fair are a far cry from the sort of television coverage the prime minister receives in Italy, where he is the owner of the country’s largest private broadcaster. Written for American consumption, these profiles not only reveal Berlusconi’s ridiculousness but revel in it. Snark is barely necessary; the casual misogyny and flagrant intermingling of the sexual with the political require no embellishment to make the reader shake his — or her — head in disbelief.

The Vanity Fair piece, by Evgenia Peretz and Federico Rampini, is the less serious of the two articles. What it lacks in seriousness it makes up for in salaciousness, and though Peretz is long on description and quotes heavily from wiretapped phone conversations that seem taken straight from a porno movie, her analysis of the Italian political scene is short and shallow. She makes the major point, the one shared by most American coverage of Italian politics: Berlusconi, who is facing criminal charges for soliciting sex from an underage girl nicknamed “Ruby Rubacuori,” has made a mockery of his country’s political system.

Peretz takes us through the rise of Berlusconi’s media empire and his subsequent entry into politics. Amid accusations of corrupt business practices — bribery seems to have been standard operating procedure among Berlusconi’s companies — the future prime minister launched his campaign not because he “loved Italy so much. He got into politics to keep himself out of jail and his business empire intact.” Peretz writes, “As Berlusconi told the legendary Italian journalists Indro Montanelli and Enzo Biagi, ‘I am forced to enter politics, otherwise they will put me in prison.'”

As far as sins go, Berlusconi’s sexual escapades are secondary to his manipulation of the judicial and political system to aid and abet his own crimes. Peretz points out that, as prime minister, Berlusconi was able to rewrite any law he found troublesome: “He stood accused of tax evasion. Suddenly there was amnesty for tax evaders. He was facing the charge of having bribed a judge: Parliament passed a new law granting immunity to Italy’s highest-ranking leaders.” The prime minister likes to play the victim instead of the puppet-master; the Vanity Fair article refers us to his oft-quoted statement that ““I am the Jesus Christ of politics . . . I sacrifice myself for everyone.”

Whatever sacrifices Berlusconi may have made in his quest to become Italy’s leader, he has certainly not given up his sexual appetite. Even in America, where a semen-stained blue dress is evidence in the trial of a president and John Edwards is accused of paying nearly $1 million in hush money to his mistress, there is still something uncouth about journalists showing prurient interest in politicians’ sex lives. In Italy it is unavoidable; one cannot report on Berlusconi without reporting on the proclivities that have made his reign — and there is little doubt he considers himself a king — such a laughingstock. What an elected official does on his own time in his own bedroom is no one’s business but his own, but this is a country in which topless models, former Miss Italy contestants and sexy television hosts are regularly appointed to plum parliamentary and ministry jobs. Ariel Levy’s New Yorker article notes that, “most notoriously, in March, 2o1o, [Berlusconi] secured a position on the powerful Council of Lombardy for Nicole Minetti, a former dancer on the show ‘Colorado Cafe,’ who is now charged with providing him with prostitutes.” After Ruby, the underage call girl who features prominently in Berlusconi’s criminal charges, was arrested by the police, Minetti was sent to collect — and ostensibly to keep silent — the teenager.

Vanity Fair quotes liberally from the wiretapped phone calls and text messages that have been entered as evidence in the case. The transcripts indeed read like conversations between prostitutes and pimps; two of Berlusconi’s lackeys express exasperation over girls who claim to be too shy to thank the prime minister for his “bunga bunga” parties:

[Fede] passed this tidbit along to Mora, saying, “Fuck that! Shyness?! You should know how to say thank you.”“When they’re taking your dick they don’t seem to be overcome with shyness, right?” replied Mora.

“Exactly!” said Fede. “When they’re taking your dick, in exchange for money, right? Shit!”

Toward the end of the article, under the subhead “The End of Tolerance,” Peretz mentions the recent anti-Berlusconi protests and the general sense that Italians are sick of their leader’s law-bending exploits. The article, however, is largely an explanatory “how we got here” piece that narrates Berlusconi’s rags-to-riches-to-indictment story without probing beneath its surface. Berlusconi is ridiculous, of course, but that was a given before Peretz even began to write. For deeper — and ultimately more compelling — analysis, one must turn to “Basta Bunga Bunga,” Ariel Levy’s examination of the chauvinist, patriarchal culture in Italy that gave birth not only to Berlusconi but also to his opposite: the women who fill the streets of Rome carrying signs that read “If Not Now, When?”

Levy quotes opposition politician Rosy Bindi as remarking that many Italians see “a metaphor in Berlusconi’s abuse of power, these constant attempts to manipulate everything, to subjugate everyone.” Tellingly, Levy writes, “until 1981 a ‘crime of honor’ — killing your wife for being unfaithful or your sister for having premarital sex — could be treated as a lesser offense than other murders.” She catalogs the ways in which the feminist revolution never quite made it to Italy’s shores. Berlusconi’s carnal escapades thus become a symptom of a greater cultural malaise, one in which it’s acceptable to treat women as objects and to dismiss the sexual appetites of a 74-year-old man as evidence of his virility and prowess. It is an environment in which the prime minister not only compares himself to Jesus but makes cracks like, “We don’t have enough soldiers to stop rape because our women are so beautiful.” This is not a compliment to Italian womanhood; it is an insult, a degradation.

Feminism in Italy is an evolving concept, Levy points out. The bland statement by Rosy Bindi that “Italians are very tied to the idea of family and the traditional concept of womanhood” plays out more poignantly in an interview with the sisters who initiated a recent anti-Berlusconi protest. Old-school feminism, the kind associated with the Communist Party and the right to abortion, holds little appeal for Cristina and Francesca Comencini. They have a response to Berlusconi’s assertion, quoted by Evgenia Peretz, that the opposition among some members of parliament to serving alongside former showgirls demonstrates that “the left has no taste, even when it comes to women”:

“We were attractive!” Francesca burst in. “Berlusconi has always said, ‘I am more attractive than the left,’ and in a way he was right! Because they are sad. We tried to be more attractive. And in fact we are — more modern, more happy.”

Levy identifies this “traditional concept of womanhood,” which she hardly undermines by describing (in typical New Yorker fashion) Francesca Comencini as “glamorous even in sweatpants,” as the root of the culture that has accommodated and even celebrated Silvio Berlusconi. The national obsession with mammismo, or mother worship, means that a woman’s worth is predicated on producing children. It is not, she declares, “a culture that understands women as fully human. You can have an intense case of mammismo and still fail to grasp why sexual assault, or gender discrimination in the workplace, or the relentless depiction of women as bimbos on television is a problem.”

The problem is not restricted to Italian politics; it permeates every aspect of life, and Berlusconi’s boast that ““If I sleep for three hours, I still have enough energy to make love for another three,” does not exist in a vacuum. He is able to say such things because the man on the street agrees, and the woman on the street, if not agreeing, at least does not often speak up. Levy reports that the age of consent in Italy is fourteen. The prime minister is therefore on trial not for having sex with a minor but for paying for it — because prostitution is a crime. A Berlusconi supporter at a recent demonstration is quoted as saying, “If a woman comes with no clothes on, with her tits showing, you can’t say he has committed violence.” This attitude, which excuses and even celebrates domination of women, merges with official policies (like the notion that a fourteen-year-old can consent to a relationship with a man twice her age) to create a perfect storm.

Though Levy’s New Yorker piece is weightier than Vanity Fair’s invitation to goggle at Berlusconi’s corruption and misogyny, it too loses heft from roads not taken. Levy touches on, but does not explore, the feeling in Italy that Berlusconi has humiliated the country on the world stage, what she refers to as “the national anxiety about being perceived as not quite European, not quite a legitimate First World country.” This throwaway statement is fascinating, and offers material for an entirely different article. Is this inferiority complex a result of being seen as one of Europe’s poorer countries, a place more akin to Spain or Greece than France or Germany? It is interesting that, despite Italy’s historical contributions to Western civilization, it is not Rome but Paris and Berlin that are today seen as the capitals of Western Europe. Possibly, however, a backwards attitude toward women is not unique to Italy. In the wake of the rape allegations against IMF leader and erstwhile French presidential candidate Dominique Strauss-Kahn, France’s women are also reevaluating how far their society has come. One woman described in a recent Times article echoes Francesca Comenici when she asserts that “there is a problem with the image of French feminism itself.” She says, “If you’re a feminist, it means you are not feminine.” The Times notes that “the case has also sharpened the debate here about a French way of life, one of tolerance for a male-centric attitude in gender relations.”

Another door that Levy cracks but does not push open is broached in her observation that, “to some extent, what is on trial in Rubygate is not just Berlusconi’s abuse of power but also his decisions about the people with whom he surrounds himself.” Is it fair to judge a man by his friends? There is the chestnut, itself suggesting something about a woman’s reputation, that those who lie down with dogs will wake up with fleas. More convincing is the fact that, while Berlusconi may be in trouble for associating with prostitutes and pimps, he is on trial for adopting their behavior, not their company. Perhaps Berlusconi has awoken with fleas — or perhaps he is one of the dogs. The reality is that people of all countries, not just Italy, feel entitled to judge a leader by his companions. In the United States, palling around with country-club elitists was once a liability for a politician; the Roosevelts and the Kennedys were the exception that proved the rule, until Congress filled up with millionaires, and “elitist” became a codeword for “liberal.” As recently as 2008, Barack Obama was forced to denounce the controversial sermons of his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and Hillary Clinton has been haunted by her college thesis on radical activist Saul Alinsky. On the flip side, former vice president Dick Cheney managed to prevent his energy-policy meetings with Big Oil executives from making the leap from leftist bete noire to mainstream outrage. There is the seed of another New Yorker article in Levy’s treatment of Berlusconi’s allies.

Perhaps the bluntest statement in either the Vanity Fair article or the New Yorker piece is a line from comedian Sabina Guzzanti, quoted by Levy, that encapsulates the feverish anger that follows Silvio Berlusconi wherever he goes. She says, “One cannot appoint someone to be Minister of Equal Opportunity simply because she is sucking your dick.” That, my friends, is speaking truth to power.