Friday, February 11, 2011

No Country for Women

Francesca Romana Ammann * I am 25, I do a doctorate in sociology in London and I work on rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, exactly the kind of theme like to discuss in our "beautiful" country meatloaf invoking biblical a Manichean view of sexuality and punishment, and a sacred sense of the ridiculous.

I'd like to talk to say how humiliating it has become to be a citizen of a country openly homophobic, sexist, mediocre and bad government, but rather are other considerations that lead me to write. The other day I was in the gym, weights room television set tuned to the BBC channel for children.

The conductor of the transmission, a pretty young girl, missing an arm. I too am disabled and my first reaction is "wow how these English are ahead," the assumption that the choice was made without pity or compassion for the presenter in question, but thanks. A superficial comment but leaves room for a deeper reflection that we respect the dignity of women, the dignity of the smile that girl is clean, the shameful burden on our bodies, our happiness and our future.

The sordid story of these days, the unrestrained exhibition of the commodification of the body done, even if at best, not "pay" in the corridors of power, clashes sharply with the image of the BBC, with the normalcy and beauty typical of an imperfect world like ours, a world where weakness is part of life and where not everyone can - and especially want to - do aspire to miss, letters and various other trinkets of meat for television.

The example of that girl made me realize that there is a radical way to rebel, a way to get rid of the labels and that perhaps we, in Italy, accustomed as we are by the media continued desecration of the bodies of women, we can no longer see. The women spectators have delegated to others the exercise of beauty and have made themselves obsessively consuming the bodies dismembered in the form of television daily doses of tits and ass.

Submissive, resigned, as if the alleged perfection would make the look more to real life made even smudged makeup, hair a mess, clothes worn at random and dark circles for as little sleep and too much work. That girl, not ostentatious in its simplicity, said a ransom indescribable, to be a woman beyond the looks and beyond perverse vision, drawing upon the eyes of others, over time we learned to have of ourselves.

Maybe I want to stay here, maybe I will get back to scream my outrage for the moment to me Italy is a country for young people and, apparently, even for women. * Italian Embassy in London, a PhD student in Sociology

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