(you might wanna read this essay in the substack website, because it’s quite long and exceeds gmail’s size limit!)
I grew up during the 20 years in which Silvio Berlusconi dominated Italian politics, media and culture. It is difficult to overstate the influence that this man had on the environment of my most formative years, because he owned almost half of Italian national broadcast television and radio -a thing that is very normal for the president of a country and not at all a conflict of interest- but also because his branding of himself as a Good Italian Man™ included a lot of appreciation for the female body. Mediaset -that was the name of his privately owned national television broadcast company, again an extremely normal and good thing for the President to have- bombarded my young and impressionable eyes with a neverending stream of half naked female bodies that seemed to come out of a porn magazine, smiling at the camera, talking very little, flirting with men three times as old as them, and then walking out of stage. We finally figured out where my interest for bimbos comes from, ladies and gentlemen: it’s Silvio Berlusconi’s legacy.
The italian media landscape in the 90s and early 2000s was not shy about the objectification of women: young and toned bodies were on display every night, as Italian mothers cooked dinners and Italian fathers ate them, the hosts of every night show praising the beauty and youth of the subrettes of that episode, their stupidity and ditziness often the butt of the joke. This all, of course, while female politicians were either cast aside because of their lack of beauty -cue the labeling of Angela Merkel as an unfuckable lardass, to this day one of my favorite Berlusconi’s international politics moment- or saw their looks used as an excuse to dismiss them -like Nicole Minetti, which definitely doesn’t have my simpathy as a politician but probably also didn’t made it to the literaly national parliament just by sucking dick. Basically, hot young women were on display all the time for being young and hot, and every other woman was shamed and ridiculed into not being seen in the first place. It wasn’t ideal.
This is the environment in which I grew up: be a hot bimbo or go hide in a ditch. I have reflected a lot on how this media landscape influenced the way I see myself, and how I constantly buy acceptance from my own internalised judge via beauty labor, but I haven’t yet written about how this influences my relationship to other women, especially in the romantic and erotic sphere. I have a little monitor in my head that constantly judges if I’m attractive enough to exist: what happens when that cruel eye turns towards my lover?