Italian media and its image of women

Perception is reality, according to a popular adage. As far as Italian media is concerned, how does its view on reality--or, the real experiences of women--impacts public perception?

Not too long ago, pornographic performer Ilona Staller, more famous as Cicciolina, hogged global headlines as she flaunted her sexuality en route to a position of power in the Italian legislature. As much as it offered an opportunity for the marginalized in society--such as women and commercial sex workers, etc.--to make their voices heard in the hierarchy of Italian governance, it remains debatable if Cicciolina's fame and influence has dignified the social status of Eve’s daughters since Adam.

In the Italian context, women still have a lot to complain and commiserate with their counterparts elsewhere in the world long woeful with its age-old constraints in enlightenment and equality. This reality, purveyed by popular media, still looms with shadows—largely distorted or lamentable with disproportion that whittles down the dimension of female experience to the level of fiction.

In fact, as feminist scholars argue with theories on “gendered mediation” and “symbolic annihilation,” Cicciolina’s antics may only impede the process of progress toward fairness in media representation. Last the Italians looked, Cicciolina seemed to have spawned an electoral peculiarity that fuses pornography with politics.

Invisibility still defines the issues of women, and their concerns/viewpoints remain characterized with a lack of layered and more nuanced news coverage. Formidable, indeed, is the male-dominated beast of bias. In the 2002 elections, for instance, Italy’s six television channels spent less than 80 hours (7.5%) of focus on female candidates compared to 999 hours (92.5%) on male contenders. Another Italian report in 2004 indicated the extent of imbalance that tips the favor for the preservation of gender stereotypes in infotainment talk shows: “Female presence had primarily a representative value of at least five or six men versus one woman in a talk show… Women were both underrepresented (quantitative analysis) and marginalized (qualitative analysis) compared with men in the category of “potenti” [the powerful] that included politicians and political and spiritual leaders…”

Hardly surprising, therefore, that Italy ended up with the worst ranking (84th out of 128 countries) within Europe in the 2007 Global Gender Gap drafted by the World Economic Forum. In the face of inequality, some Italian women decided to stand their ground against the sexist image in Italian media as they amplify their protest against the "commercialization of Italian women...and a model that damages female identity."

One of the most vocal advocate among these women is Lorella Zanardo, a management consultant on equal opportunity and diversity, who came up with a documentary called "Il Corpe delle Donne" (Women's Body) to show there's more to women than their obscurity and their onus of shame under the status quo or in the framework of patriarchal chauvinism.