It doesn’t matter what gift will buy your silence (or tales) – if you’re a young woman and you go to Emperor Silvio’s party you can be sure he’ll try to accommodate you. Do you want to be the MP or the velina*? Fancy a butterfly-shaped diamond? Or maybe a blank cheque – no strings attached and it goes well with everything. Arcore’s** Daddy is just the peak of a sexist culture that has infected all of Italy: Right and Left, Giornale and Repubblica***, families, political parties, and so on. We’ll have to face it at some point: it’ll take much more than just changing our PM!

In the meantime, outside Arcore a different show is on air: One where women try to juggle three-month contracts, “collaborations”, unpaid placements, blackmailing, stress. It’s to tell these tales that we’ve decided we need to get out on the streets too. There are questions that touch us all and that we want to take to the streets: Rights, Home, Services, Sustainability, Desires and Pleasure.

We are women; tough, brave, free and beautiful women. We’re not interested in separating saints from whores, good women from bad women. Relationships, complicity, change: these are the things we want to talk about. We want rights and respect of diversity. We want freedom and autonomy of choice – in our lives and our sexuality.

The Emperor is already naked, even if they haven’t published the pictures yet!


* A velina is a woman who plays the role of ‘eye candy’ on many popular TV shows - veline do nothing else but showing off their almost naked bodies.
** Arcore is a small town in Northern Italy, where Silvio Berlusconi resides in a scarily huge villa which, among other things, includes a specially-built mausoleum. Arcore has been in the news a lot in recent months, after a veil of Orgies was uncovered: Read this article for more info:  http://www.repubblica.it/politica/2010/10/28/news/ruby_and_berlusconi_my_nights_in_arcore-8523576/. A demo in Arcore on 6 February was brutally repressed by the police.
*** These are both popular newspapers.