Is Italy the last bastion of old-fashioned sexism and male chauvinism? The question asks itself in the wake of last week's controversial Italian Supreme Court ruling which overturned a rape conviction on the grounds that the female (alleged) victim had been wearing jeans. According to the Supreme Court's judgement, it is "common knowledge" that jeans cannot be removed without help from the person wearing them. Since the woman was wearing jeans, she cannot have been raped, the Court concluded, thereby acquitting the alleged rapist.
Based on the above ruling, it would be easy for the foreigner to conclude that Italy remains culturally retrogressive, stuck in a Mediterranean time-set that seems anachronistic and out of touch with the mores of developed societies. Such a conclusion may be over-hasty, if not downright mistaken. The position and role of women in modern Italian society is complex, based on a divided-self type national psyche which seems to have no problems juxtaposing six women ministers in the current government with the national (politically very incorrect) need to use glamorously half-dressed or even totally naked women to promote and advertise everything from beers and cars to leftist weekly magazines, not to mention TV soccer programmes.
The complexity of the issue is revealed by the howl of outraged protest, from women and men across the political and cultural spectrum, at last week's court decision. The very names of those women who have put their names to a public condemnation of the ruling makes it clear that Italy is much more than just a bastion of male chauvinism. Nobel Prize winning scientist Rita Levi Montalcini; Jewish community leader, Tullia Zevi; actress Franca Rame; novelist Dacia Maraini; Olympic ski champion Deborah Compagnoni; former Olympic champion athlete Sara Simeoni; designer Miuccia Prada (Krizia); architect Gae Aulenti; physicist Margherita Hack etc, etc. Can one dismiss as male chauvinist a society which has provided such female achievers and figures in public life such as these?
And yet. . .Italian (both male and female) views of women can be very different from those of their European neighbours. How would German women react if a serious weekly magazine such as Der Spiegel opted to run naked women on the cover every second or third issue? Badly, one imagines. Yet, one of Italy's most liberal and authoritative weeklies, L'Espresso, does just that.
What would English feminist groups make of a beer advertisement which asks if you would like a "bionda" (a pun on a word which means both beer and a blond-haired woman) for life? The advertisement starts with a picture of a man kissing his newly-wed blond wife who then melts and fades to become a beer. Hardly politically-correct.
How many multi-national companies would choose to promote themselves with an annual calendar of naked women? The Italian rubber giant, Pirelli, produces such a calendar and its annual release is always a huge media event. A copy of this year's calendar hangs on the wall of our village butcher's shop. Neither the customers nor the butcher's wife who serves in the shop would understand if it was suggested that the calendar was offensive to women.
The fact that much in the mass media that would be deemed at least politically incorrect if not frankly offensive is tolerated in Italy does not mean that there is not and has never been an Italian feminist movement. On the contrary, the Italian feminist movement of the 1970s was not only one of the most radical anywhere but also one whose pressurised lobbying prompted important legislation including the setting up of state nursery schools (1972), state birth control clinics (1975), equal pay for equal work laws (1977) and, symbolically most important, the right to abortion (1978).
Yet, although Italy has some of the most advanced social legislation in the world with regard to protecting the role and rights of women (e.g. statuary five months' maternity leave on full pay), some social attitudes have changed little. Many Italian women still believe strongly that they have a duty to look sexy and desirable at all times for their men. A professional career woman out to dinner with her husband and another couple can easily juxtapose angry analysis of Indonesia's mistreatment of East Timor with a plunging neckline designed to arouse some basic instincts. The one does not preclude the other, at least for many Italian women who have grown up in a culture in which the importance of being "bella" (beautiful) cannot be overestimated.
Many Italian women, too, simply take it for granted that their husband never cooks a meal, changes a nappy, puts on a wash or makes a bed. Notwithstanding that, many of these same women accept a remarkable level of male dominance or interference in household (and other) affairs which means that their husband decides everything from the colour of the floor tiles to the curtains through to which route she will take on her way to work (on her own).
Historically, the era of the "padre padrone" is recent. Writing about the southern Italian region of Calabria in 1948, journalist Giovanni Russo reported: "Women are above all slaves. A woman is really on the lowest rung of the social scale.
"The heaviest physical tasks fall to her; when her man returns from work, she is the one who follows him, barefoot, carrying the weights that cannot be put on a mule. She is the one who has to collect water from the well, to gather acorns for the pigs, faggots for the fire. By the age of 30, she is already an old woman."
In the 50 years since Russo wrote the above, the position and role of women in Italian society has made a mind-boggling time leap. Much of the outrage prompted by last week's court ruling came from fears that the Supreme Court (420 judges, only 10 of whom are women) was trying to turn the clock back.
Those fears are unjustified. Italy and Italians might not be always politically correct, but neither are they merely male chauvinist and retrogressive.