Monday Media Watch, Edizione Internazionale

But before we all clamber aboard that bandwagon, is it possible we misunderstand?

 Hey, that is one promising start, Mr. Brinkley–because certainly lady people have noticed a disturbing trend to judge us by our sexual escapades rather than the substance of our scandals! In fact, we often get judged on our “sexual escapades” in the absence of any other “scandal”! Let’s take a look at Mr. Berlusconi’s issues:

After all, as the prime minister explained at a recent news conference, “to my male colleagues present here I say: Raise your hand and tell me you don’t think it’s nice to rest your eyes on pleasant and enjoyable feminine presences – rather than sitting at a table with people lacking aesthetic qualities.”

Oh. I see. I think I can diagnose these difficulties. He’s a douche.

Now, “pleasant and enjoyable feminine presences” by its very nature is enough to make me do a Radfem Stomp. But for the sake of my blood pressure, and the possible edification of a dudebro who stumbles upon this site, let’s unpack that: first, only feminine presences are pleasant and enjoyable–this comes as a surprise not only to big ol’ bisexual me, who has been known to find masculine presences both pleasant and mm-hmm-hmm enjoyable, but it also pretends that there are no men who might agree with Your Duckmistress about said pleasant and enjoyable masculinities.

But let’s dig, Starbuck, to the little lower layer: you can’t just utter a sentence like that without it seeping context. And the context for it is that for men in power, women have far too long been seen only as, well, pleasant decoration and the occasional useful sex object. One would presume, just from his saying such an asinine thing, that a room with Chancellor Merkel, Baroness Thatcher, Secretary Clinton, and Secretary Albright would not be one of “pleasant and enjoyable” presences, despite all the named presences being female. So to sum up, on the Berlusconi scorecard of douchiness:

Female Heterosexual Desire…………………………………………….Inconsequential
Male Homosexual Desire………………………………………………..Invisible
“Plesant and Enjoyable” Males…………………………………………Ignorable
Women Who Aren’t “Pleasant and Enjoyable”
by virtue of Silvio’s Lust………………………………………………….Inconceivable

Okay, I know what you’re saying: I’m making some leaps of logic here. Maybe his (very debatable) Excellency isn’t a douchebag–maybe he’s just a man of his time, well-meaning but saying douchey stuff. Allowances should be made, etc. And maybe you’re right; maybe I haven’t given him a fair shake…

Certainly that must be why he showed up at 18-year-old Noemi Letizia’s birthday party last spring. It’s probably a coincidence that Letizia, a model, poses for provocative photos in her underwear. That couldn’t have been why he gave her a nice birthday present, a gold necklace worth about $10,000.

Berlusconi’s wife was angry. She left him, saying his visit to the birthday party “really surprised me because he has never come to the 18th birthday parties of any of our three children, despite being invited.”

Come, now. Berlusconi is the prime minister of Italy. He has a busy schedule. Even a young Noemi Letizia understands that. “I am in awe of him,” she told an interviewer. “He calls me, and I go to him.” But only “if he has time.”

 Right. Well-meaning guy who can make time for underwear models but not his own children…como si dice “douchebag” in italiano?

But let’s not stop at Italian heads of state–there’s plenty of members of the doucheoisie right here at home!

For example, two newspapers, Corriere della Sera and La Stampa, recently reported that [businessman Giampaolo] Tarantini told police he lined up 30 women for Berlusconi and his friends, “if the need arose,” and brought them to 18 parties in Berlusconi’s homes in Rome and Sardinia in 2008 and 2009.

“I wanted to meet Premier Berlusconi, and to that end I spent a lot to get into contact with him, knowing his taste for women,” Tarantini told the papers. “I merely accompanied to his house young women who I introduced as my friends while keeping quiet about the fact that I sometimes paid them.”

You’d assume that all of the press coverage, all of that back-room business, would spell Berlusconi’s political demise. Think of Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina and Sen. John Ensign of Nevada, both of whom are accused of covering up extramarital affairs. The South Carolina legislature is considering impeachment, and Ensign’s re-election prospects in 2012 appear to be slim.

What about Berlusconi? Do we misunderstand? If the public opinion polls are an indicator, we do. His popularity among Italians, in recent polls, stands at 63 percent – a figure any chief of state would envy.

What do Italians know that we don’t?

Well, Joel, first off, maybe Americans do know something about this–President Clinton had approval ratings at or near the 60% range all during l’affaire Lewinsky. And you conveniently ignore the fact that in the case of Urbin and Sanford, a huge part of the scandal is the hypocrisy of a candidate who deliberately cultivates an image of being squeaky clean and virginal (outside the God-sanctioned marriage bed) being caught metaphorically with their trousers down. Neither Berlusconi nor Clinton built their image around their presumed superior morals, and more importantly neither routinely made political hay out of condemning other people for their presumed moral failings.

And of course the article ignores, or minimizes, the fact that Berlusconi is the richest man in Italy, someone who routinely throws bushels of money into his various political campaigns (he owns his own political party) and has been mired in controversy, legal actions, and charges of criminality pretty much from the inception of his political career. With Berlusconi, his sexist actions are just the tip of the iceberg. Which could have been an interesting jumping off point for an article that might look at how hidebound belief in personal superiority (such as sexism) might also be revealed in other aspects of someone’s personal dealings (such as rampant corruption from within the government.) But that wouldn’t be as fun to write as a “Europe good sexy fun, America evil Puritanical morals police” article, which continues to get written whenever any scandal remotely sniffing of sex heaves into view–witness how often people have taken this precise tack over the Polansky arrest, even when European opinion is hardly neither uniform nor even close to the perception of the writer.

And besides–writing about how a European leader who is both sexist and corrupt, and whose sexism reveals things about his corruption, might force you to consider the same things about American leaders–and then who would invite you to the cool parties, or give you op-eds in local papers?