The Women of Berlusconi’s Italy

Serughetti/ Lanni: Italian Women

ITALIAN PRIME Minister Silvio Berlusconi moves back and forth, from one eighteen-year-old girl to another: once the blonde Noemi Letizia from Casoria, Naples, then the Moroccan Karima el-Mahroug, or Ruby the Heart Stealer as she calls herself on Facebook. Italian politics have been revolving around “Sultan” Berlusconi’s favorites for two years, ever since his appearance at Letizia’s birthday party in April 2009 finally started to shed light on his hidden and lively passions. Italians became accustomed to reports of scandals filled with odd characters, both female and male, depicting an almost definitive connection between political and economic power and the abuse of women’s bodies, within a system embraced by Berlusconi’s leadership.

Berlusconi used women’s bodies to pay homage to another “Sultan,” Muammar Qaddafi, during the visit of Libyan leader in Rome at the end of August 2010. Indeed, it is quite hard to forget the five hundred young Italian women selected through a casting agency to attend Qaddafi’s speech inviting them to convert to Islam. Similar episodes must have occurred during the dinners in which the Italian prime minister surrounded himself with young guests (often hired as the female audience for Qaddafi) to celebrate his political successes.

But inquiries into Berlusconi’s private parties in the past two years revealed far more pressing details: pictures from his summer residence of Villa Certosa in Sardinia, where Italian and foreign politicians used to share their time with dozens of half-naked people; a businessman who managed to hire and embank loads of escorts to satisfy the prime minister’s needs and obtain his favors; political sinecures and show business careers for compliant girls, requiring nothing more than a phone call to the headquarters of Italian public broadcasting services.

No wonder Italy has collapsed into the inglorious and severe charges pending over Berlusconi’s head: the prime minister is being tried in court for abuses of power and child prostitution. The case, which opened on April 6, will reconvene on May 31.

“If Not Now, When?”
The entrance of Berlusconi’s personal life into public debate may have at least one positive side effect: it has led Italian women, and some men as well, to a new spirit of commitment. Besides demanding dignity and respect, these people draw attention to women’s issues beyond the bounds of the active yet relatively small niche of feminists groups born in the seventies.

A new political and cultural movement—independent from political parties—has shaken Italian public opinion and called for action in the streets, leading to a large demonstration on February 13 in several Italian and European cities: “If not now, when?” read the slogan, quoting the title of Primo Levi’s famous novel.

The journalists, philosophers, social scientists, and writers who debated prior to the protest revealed the different dimensions of the problem, with echoes of sexual emancipation, utilitarian visions of the body, and the intersection of private and public matters. The liberal intellectual class had to face the phenomenon of young women who, in full self-knowledge and freedom, choose to achieve their objectives (whether enrichment or a career) through sex. Is there a proper way to comment on their behavior, or to judge those who encourage it?

There were two questions in particular that public opinion couldn’t resolve—issues that make dialogue among different political and moral perspectives difficult to achieve. The first issue is political: does Berlusconi have the right, beyond the facts of criminal law, to behave in the privacy of his mansion according to his own standards? Should he enjoy the freedom to have sex parties and pay for the performance of women any way he wants? The second issue is moral: should what is occurring at Villa Certosa or at Berlusconi’s Villa San Martino in Arcore (near Milan) concern us with regard to how younger generations perceive the relationship of the body and sexuality to money—a perception often actively supported by parents’ ambitions for their children?

Unfortunately, the divisions and opposing viewpoints on these issues do little to illuminate the problems they seek to address, and instead hide an inability to unveil the cause of Italian malaise and its real repercussions.

Women Seeking Benefits
Since in many ways the latest scandal is a classic case of a sex-money-power exchange, the debate around it has revived the ancient conflict within feminist groups on prostitution, a practice that enjoys an ambiguous status in Italy, where it is neither prohibited nor legalized. But there is something different about the latest “gender wars.” First of all, some question whether women who serve the “Sultan” are really prostitutes at all. Pia Covre, leader of the Committee for the Civil Rights of Prostitutes, does not believe so; she has argued that there’s a difference between sex workers and women (or girls) who offer “temporary exchanges of sex for gifts or money and careers”—“women who seek benefits through their natural resources, perhaps the only ones that have, in order to improve their social status.” Nor does the sex worker label convince Karima el-Mahroug, who complains that she was treated “like a prostitute” by the media.

If it’s not prostitution, how would we define such relationships? Descriptions of the events involving Berlusconi in 2009 often used the term “escort,” a less explicit and more sophisticated word than “prostitute,” since it suggests an informal accompaniment. But euphemisms like this are insufficient; the actual nature of Berlusconi’s relationship to these young women is likely to escape any normal categorization.

A shift in perspective is the only way to address the issue of deciding what can legitimately be sold without establishing undue divisions between “good” and “bad” women. The limits should be drawn not with regard to the “supply” of sexual services, but to the “demand” for services by clients. Apart from his public role and the age of the girls involved in the case, should a wealthy a powerful man like Berlusconi receive the same treatment under law and common sense as ordinary punters, whatever their socioeconomic status? Do standard sex rates, political careers, and show business jobs have equal exchange values?

The prime minister is not an ordinary client. He shares with the common john a passion for variety, and a desire to be reassured about his own power through access to a beautiful female body. But while the typical relationship between client and prostitute ends with the performance (indeed, the lack of “commitment” beyond that is part of the reason for its demand), Berlusconi wants “to make every woman feel special,” to commit to his “guests” beyond a cash exchange through a system of dependent patronage (with the corresponding risk of blackmail).

If we stress the issue of what is marketable and what is not, considering the client (or the not-quite-client Berlusconi) instead of the prostitute (or the not-quite-prostitutes in Arcore), suddenly everything becomes clearer and simpler. We already have a prohibition on bending public affairs to individual whims and desires.

Berlusconi as a Client
This still leaves the second issue open: why shouldn’t an attractive young woman freely use her “luck” for her own purposes? Those who consider this a menace to women’s and men’s dignity are accused of moralizing—of falling into an outmoded, liberal way of thinking that fails to cope with the less predictable outcomes of sexual liberation. Once again, we need to examine the question from another angle. Charges of moralization may hide a larger inability of Italians to relate to a horizon of shared values.

Still, there is no decisive answer to the question above. Girls who tap a bit of money out of Berlusconi’s pockets by virtue of their bodies do not see the problem; they are blind to any moral issue at stake. They argue that what they do is fine because no one forces them to. Their families and partners sometimes even approve of what they do. In this formulation, freedom of choice seems to be the only thing that matters. This is not so far from the feminist slogan, “my body is mine”—in short, the key to everything is me. Retrograde denunciations of the women at issue have only lent more support to this kind of argument. Who are these bigoted and churchy men and women to criticize what younger people do? And thus is reality overthrown, and real sexual liberation said to be found in the chance to visit Villa San Martino.

To understand why it’s difficult to overcome this division, we must acknowledge a context where our common ground has become difficult to discern. Those critical of Berlusconi’s “escorts” describe a loss of dignity, and call on women to recover it. But “dignity” is a dusty old word; it does not belong to our common understanding anymore. How do you encourage young people facing new social restrictions to fight for “dignity,” as if this were a meaningful battle? What kind of currency is dignity where individualism and freedom have often become pure and simple selfishness, where earning a thousand euro a month means that you have finally made it?

It’s doubtful that some new argument alone will lead girls to pursue other ends than those that a visit to Arcore might bring. But a shift in perspective at least gives us an idea of what our common ground should be: in short, a ground where morality doesn’t sound so odd, where it is appropriate to argue over whether a behavior is moral or not. This is an important matter for all those who don’t believe that values come from God, but who also don’t believe in bending values to the volubility of individual desires. If the problem of our moral ground isn’t addressed, we’ll crash once more against the walls of the prime minister’s mansions and miss the opportunity to deal with the values that are at stake.

Giorgia Serughetti works in Rome as a social researcher on prostitution, gender, and migration and is a PhD student in cultural studies at the University of Palermo.

Alessandro Lanni is editor of the Italian magazine Reset and teaches journalism at the University of Rome “La Sapienza.”

(Images: Hytok/Flickr creative commons/2009; Alan Denney/Flickr cc/2011)