Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Silvio Berlusconi's Girls

http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1940229,00.html
Monday, Nov. 30, 2009
Silvio Berlusconi's Girls
By CARLA POWER
Standing in their uniform miniskirts and stilettos, three young women 
bend over ironing boards, pressing men's shirts before a live studio 
audience. They're competing to be schedine, young women who dance a 
little, wear little and say little on Quelli Che ... Il Calcio (Football 
Fans), a popular Sunday afternoon show on Italian state TV. "Schedine 
have to be beautiful, but they've also got to be practical," grins the 
show's presenter. "Let's see how they do!" An ex-footballer descends to 
judge the ironing contest, awarding the prize to a lissom blonde.
There's nothing new about breasts, thighs and silliness on Italian TV. 
They have bedazzled viewers since the 1980s, when the television 
stations of Silvio Berlusconi, a mere media mogul before entering 
politics, revolutionized the airwaves by putting Italians on a diet of 
American soap operas, football and sex all over his Mediaset empire. But 
the formula was about more than TV ratings; it also boosted Berlusconi's 
political fortunes. (See pictures of Berlusconi and the politics of sex.)
More than 20 years after he transformed Italian TV, Berlusconi is Prime 
Minister for the third time; he has already served longer in the office 
than anyone since 1946. Of late, to be sure, he's taken some lumps. 
Italy's Constitutional Court overturned a law granting Berlusconi 
immunity from prosecution while in office, clearing obstructions to 
trials in which he is accused of bribery and illicit accounting at 
Mediaset. But even were he to be turfed out tomorrow, Berlusconi would 
leave a lasting legacy. His TV shows have seen to that. "Berlusconi 
changed the culture of Italy before he changed the politics of it," says 
Alexander Stille, author of The Sack of Rome, a book on Berlusconi's 
power tactics. "He introduced a culture of luxury and sex, one entirely 
different from the traditions of austerity promoted by Catholicism and 
the communists. His control of commercial television meant that he is 
the only politician in the world who helped create and shape his own 
electorate before it elected him."
At the heart of Berlusconi's culture is the velina, or showgirl, who is 
served up to Italians every day, like pasta. Some veline merely stand 
mute while male presenters talk. Some give on-air lap dances to 
chat-show guests, as did one earlier this year to Inter Milan coach José 
Mourinho. Others play the funny little games producers devise, posing as 
table legs, or braving cold showers in tight dresses. Some simply strip: 
Mediaset's homepage recently featured a clip of a blonde clad in a black 
garbage bag, slowly lowering it to reveal her breasts. Degrading? 
Undoubtedly. But there's no denying the status of the showgirl in 
Berlusconi's Italy. "We used to get 10 or 15 applications a week," notes 
Gabriele Bertone, an agent at a Milan talent agency. "Now we get 
hundreds." A recent poll among young girls in Milan showed their top 
choice of profession was to be a velina. "Sure, everyone wants to be 
[one]," shrugs Anna Depoli, a Milanese secretary waiting to take her 
seat in Quelli Che ... Il Calcio's audience. "If you're a velina, then 
you have the chance to get to know football players, and if you marry 
them, you could end up with a lot of money." (See Berlusconi's top 10 
worst gaffes.)
The velina has become more than a mainstay of Italian television; she is 
the rock on which Berlusconi built his political career. In the 15 years 
since he began dominating Italian politics, Berlusconi has created a 
seamless weave of entertainment and power. The Taliban may use the 
virtue of their country's women as a rallying cry; Berlusconi has used 
Italian women's beauty. Americans should invest in Italy, he once told a 
Wall Street audience, because it had the comeliest secretaries. (Read 
"Photos of Nude Partygoers Add to Berlusconi's Woes.")
Playing the Game
Increasingly, the velina is a political player as well as a sexual one. 
Though just 18, Noemi Letizia — whose relationship with Berlusconi 
spurred feverish speculation in the Italian press this summer — knows 
how the game works. "[I want to be] a showgirl," she told an Italian 
newspaper. "I am interested in politics, too ... I'd rather be a 
candidate for the Chamber of Parliament. Papi Silvio would take care of 
that." Last year, Berlusconi formalized the politics-showgirls link, 
appointing Mara Carfagna, 32, a former velina and topless model, as his 
Minister for Equal Opportunities. This summer his party nominated four 
young starlets as candidates for the European parliamentary elections. 
"The idea was to make the party younger," says Elisa Alloro, a 
33-year-old television presenter who was initially proposed as a 
candidate, and is the author of We, Silvio's Girls. "It was the first 
time in Italy that people were interested in the European elections — 
just because we were veline! " Berlusconi's soon-to-be ex-wife, Veronica 
Lario, was less impressed, decrying the tactic as "entertainment for the 
emperor."
See pictures of Berlusconi's women on LIFE.com.
Read "What Berlusconi's Obama 'Jokes' Say About Italy."
Entertainment is central to the political genius of a man who started 
off as a crooner on a cruise line, and who christened his party Forza 
Italia after a national football chant. He's anything but gray. "When 
[former Prime Minister Romano] Prodi was on TV, I had to turn the sound 
way up," snorts one middle-aged Berlusconi supporter. "Prodi speaks like 
a priest." Ask an Italian what they think of their current leader, and 
chances are they'll chuckle — but most go on to say they voted for him. 
For many of his countrymen, Berlusconi's appetites are central to his 
appeal: "He is a real Italian," shrugs Alessio de Mitri, a youth 
coordinator for Berlusconi's party, now called Il Popolo della Libertà 
(PDL). "He likes to eat. He likes parties. He's going through a divorce, 
like a lot of people. He's going through company problems. He's really 
normal."
Sort of a normal superman — at least as his story is told on his own 
stations. Mediaset shows will tell you Berlusconi has boosted the 
economy, brokered peace in Georgia and built new houses for the victims 
of the 2009 L'Aquila earthquake, whereas the opposition would, as one 
Milanese Mediaset viewer quipped, "still be arguing about the density of 
the cement." When the Prime Minister handed out the keys of new homes to 
quake victims in September, two popular shows were bumped from other 
channels to avoid a clash. Italy is now the only country in Europe whose 
leader owns the media: Berlusconi's Mediaset stations, and his 
government's control of the state-owned RAI, means he has cornered 90% 
of the television market, in a country where an estimated 80% of the 
population gets its news from television. Criticizing Berlusconi can be 
costly. Since the stories about Letizia and alleged dalliances with 
prostitutes broke this summer, the newspaper La Repubblica has been 
covering them aggressively. The paper faces a libel suit from 
Berlusconi, as have foreign magazines and journalists who have 
criticized him in the past. "There are newspapers which have gone past 
the limits, have been too invasive of the Prime Minister's private 
life," says Carfagna. (Read "How Has Berlusconi Survived His Sex Scandal?")
Berlusconi's media empire began with the local TV station for Milano 2, 
a subdivision Berlusconi built outside of Milan when he was a young 
construction entrepreneur in the 1960s. A pioneer of private commercial 
television in Europe, he then sidestepped Italy's antimonopoly laws 
banning national private television by buying up scores of local 
stations. With assets spanning Italy's largest publishing company, an ad 
agency and the AC Milan football team, Berlusconi built up his Fininvest 
empire to become Italy's richest man. In 1993 he entered politics, 
declaring his newly launched party to be a "pole of liberty" — though 
for many, his sudden political awakening was a transparent effort to 
protect his own business interests.
There's little doubt of Berlusconi's appeal. In a country weary of 
political wrangling — it's on its 62nd government since the war — 
Berlusconi has successfully "tapped into nonpolitical sentiments," says 
Fabrizio Tonello, a political scientist at the University of Padua. 
Against the backdrop of the aspirational consumption shown on his 
television stations, Berlusconi's blend of ordinary Italian guyhood with 
the image of fabulously wealthy Don Juan is a potent one: "It's an 
entertainment culture," says Tonello, "the direct opposite of a 
political culture, in which only politicians who are celebrities can 
compete in the political market." (See pictures of Italy.)
New Faces! New Ideas!
After Berlusconi, Mara Carfagna is Italy's biggest politico-celebrity. 
At a September conference in Cortina of Berlusconi's party, fans 
thronged to pose with the Equal Opportunities Minister as their friends 
clicked away furiously on digital cameras. "There is only one person in 
Italy who has had the courage to put young people and women in 
politics," said Carfagna. "Thank you, Berlusconi!" Where his opponents 
sneer at Carfagna's appointment as a crude appeal to Italy's libido, 
Berlusconiani see it as a democratizing act in a country that's been run 
by old men. "Carfagna is a strong sign that the PDL wants to change 
something," says Franco Vendramin, a silver-haired ad executive at the 
conference. "New people means new brains, new faces, who'll bring new 
approaches and new ideas." Carfagna herself, he grins, "is very nice." 
"He's just like Berlusconi," sighs his wife Daniela fondly.
See pictures of Berlusconi's women on LIFE.com.
Read "What Berlusconi's Obama 'Jokes' Say About Italy."
Carfagna is keen to emphasize her ministry's accomplishments: a law on 
stalking, for example, "has made Italian women feel more secure." The 
government is committed to tackling domestic violence, she says, and to 
helping women achieve equal opportunities in the workplace. She has her 
work cut out for her: Italy has the lowest percentage of working women 
in Europe. Only 2% of top management positions in Italy are held by 
women, less than in Kuwait. In last year's Global Gender Gap report from 
the World Economic Forum, Italy ranked 67th out of 130 countries. Such 
figures are particularly shocking for women like Elisa Manna, who is old 
enough to remember Italy's muscular feminist movement of the 1970s. 
"Back then, young women wanted to become doctors, lawyers — professional 
people," says Manna, director of the Department of Cultural Policies 
Centre for Social Studies and Policies (CENSIS) in Rome. "It was 
terrible to get ahead in your profession because you are beautiful. Now, 
it's absolutely the reverse: if you use your body, your beauty, you're 
clever. You're pragmatic."
Quite so. For Elisa Alloro, a former Mediaset presenter who was tapped 
for the E.U. election, "Silvio's" suggestion that she go into politics 
was a welcome attempt to close the age and gender gap in government. 
She'd met the Prime Minister back in 2005, when she was 28, and was 
interviewing him for a Mediaset program. Alloro missed her plane; he 
offered her a ride on his jet. As they flew, she recalls, he quizzed her 
on his policies, on that morning's newspapers. By the end of the 
afternoon — some of which was spent strolling in the natural museum 
section of his Sardinian villa, looking at olive trees that were a gift 
from the Israeli Prime Minister — he had asked her to join his new task 
force on Europe. "He chose people who already work in TV, because they 
are usually better than others at talking in public situations," Alloro 
says. "Because politics is a show." (See pictures of Italy.)
Will the velinization of Italy continue? There are some signs of a 
backlash against it — and Berlusconi. Earlier this year, two women 
parliamentarians argued that he had breached the European Convention of 
Human Rights for his "repeated statements that offend female dignity." 
Lorella Zanardo, a management consultant and former Unilever executive, 
grew so disgusted with the scenes of degradation on Italian television 
that she made her own video to raise awareness of the problem, splicing 
together clips from shows. The closing shot, from a show called Joking 
Apart, shows a woman in a thong hung on a hook in a meat locker, next to 
the bloody carcasses. "Women come up to me and say, 'Listen, I've been 
watching television for a long time, but I didn't realize,'" she says, 
her eyes welling with tears. Zanardo says that some Italians have opted 
out of their society. "People like me are guilty," she says. "We're well 
educated, so we traveled, or worked abroad. Italy was left completely in 
the hands of [Berlusconi's] media." And after Berlusconi snapped on 
national television at Rosy Bindi, 58, a gray-haired, opposition 
politician, that she was "always more beautiful than intelligent," La 
Repubblica launched a petition declaring that his use of women's bodies 
undermines democracy. "This man offends us," it reads. "Stop him." More 
than 100,000 have signed. (See Berlusconi's top 10 worst gaffes.)
But it will take more than that to challenge Berlusconi. Italy's 
center-left opposition is in disarray, as usual, having just elected its 
second new leader in six months. And for most Italians fed Mediaset fare 
for 30 years, Berlusconi's cultural outlook runs deep. Midway through 
the ironing contest on Quelli Che ... , the would-be schedine look up 
from their ironing boards to watch a comedy clip, in which three fat, 
old women compete in a beauty contest. The audience laughs, as do the 
presenters and the schedine.

 
http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1940229,00.html
brutta bestia l'astinenza...