'Whore-ocracy': Show Girls, the Beauty Trade-Off, and Mainstream Oppositional Discourse in Contemporary Italy

Abstract

Women on Italian television are objectified more frequently than on other European television networks. However, a moral panic in contemporary Italian culture about the figure of the 'velina', or television showgirl, perceived as dangerously akin to the scapegoated prostitute, has become shorthand for debates about Silvio Berlusconi, his media empire and political corruption. In this article I will begin by showing how a preoccupation with female performance and prostitution has in fact defined Italian culture since the Second World War. I will refer to the idea of 'the beauty myth' and how this has been used to keep women in a certain place in Italian society, showing how it has been further inflected in the Italian context by a beauty trade-off, namely the equation between female beauty, stupidity and sexual incontinence. I will then show how this history has informed the debate about the 'velina', 'velinismo', and women in public spaces to a point that seriously undermines criticism in the mainstream media, due to the terms used in the debate, the splitting of women, the beauty trade-off and problematic visual representations. I will suggest that in order to introduce some nuance into the 'velina' debate certain theoretical models require further development in the Italian context. These models stem from feminist media studies and the work of Rosalind Gill in particular, including postfeminist theory and subtler understandings of female subjectivity, pleasure and spectatorship.keywords velina, prostitute, female beauty, Italian television, postfeminism 1 I thank family, friends and colleagues: Dominic,

‘The pictures I really dislike are those where the girls are naked!’ Postfeminist norms of female sexual embodiment in contemporary Italian digital culture

“…Several scholars have discussed the gendered imagery fostered by ‘Berlusconism’, by interrogating the politics of sexuality (Albertazzi, Brook, Ross and Rothenberg 2009; Crowhurst and Bertone 2012; Hipkins 2011; Bonfiglioli 2015), the production of gendered representation supported by the mainstream media (Virgili 2014) and also the postfeminist models which commercial TV has sustained (Giomi 2012). The sex scandals that accompanied the decline of Berlusconi have had a great impact on the national media, and they were the catalyst of a women’s and feminist movement that has questioned the gender violence inherent in the sex-power system and in the sexist and objectified representations of women supported by commercial TV.…”

Je ne suis pas Catherine Deneuve. Reflections on contemporary debates about sexual self-determination in Italy

“…Contrary to the ‘good’ woman, who renounces any form of sexual-economic exchange and settles, instead, for a normal job, the ‘bad’ woman takes advantage of her sexual power in order to get higher on the social ladder. In doing so she transgresses the rules and norms ‘that “control” women morally and socially’ (Hipkins 2011, 419), and is then attributed the title of prostitute. As Danielle Hipkins has observed with regard to the press coverage of the scandal around Silvio Berlusconi’s private parties, certain newspapers described the women who attended the parties in a moralising way, dividing them into ‘good’ women, who rejected offers of money, and ‘bad’ women, who did not (422).…”

“…As we argue in the introduction, the battles to regain control over and knowledge of women’s bodies and sexuality proved a great challenge to institutions, which sought to steer feminism into calmer and more controllable waters, for example through legislative reform and the institutionalisation of feminism, which continued in the 1980s and 1990s (in particular in terms of equal opportunity policies). The idea of a postfeminist world took shape, where gender equality had supposedly been achieved and feminism no longer seemed necessary, or indeed was cast off as old-fashioned and moralising, in stark contrast to the increasing sexualisation of girls and the proliferation of new forms of hyperfemininity (Hipkins 2011, 416). In this postfeminist world, sexual-economic exchange was considered a conscious decision, and female power presented as stronger than that of men, as taking advantage of the ‘weaknesses’ of men: ‘a power which always expresses itself in terms of seduction, and which manifests itself in the freedom to assign one’s sexuality for one’s own purposes’ (Gribaldo and Zapperi 2012, 72).…”

Of postfeminist girls and fireflies: Consuming Rome in Un giorno speciale

“…The figure of the girl, here named as Noemi Letizia, and her looks is a particular focus for the older woman’s anxieties. 3 I have written elsewhere of the problems relating to the reading of women involved in the Berlusconi scandals that do not take into account and understand the dramatically changing conditions within which feminism operates, seeking instead to resurrect the models of a previous generation (Hipkins, 2011). Libere bears evidence of this in its nostalgic hearkening back to the female spaces of 1970s feminist consciousness-raising, while fully aware that they have not been sufficient to fully transform women’s position in the cultural landscape.…”