Lorella Zanardo’s documentary and book say women are reduced to sexual objects
It is exactly a year since Ms. Lorella Zanardo produced “Il Corpo delle donne” (Women's Bodies), a short documentary critiquing the sexist and humiliating depictions of women on Italian television.
“Women's Bodies” is a montage of semi-naked and surgically altered women who are part and parcel of the country’s television. It is a very intelligent selection of television images that share a common manipulative exploitation of the woman’s body.
It clearly shows that the role of women in Italian TV is to display their bodies, dress in a way that leaves nothing to imagination, to dance and when possible, to strip. They are better seen than heard.
Ms. Zanardo is saddened by the fact that the only type of woman present on Italian TV is a beautiful woman without brain. She says that such an image provides a misleading message to young girls that their success depends on their bodies, not on their abilities and their knowledge.
No wonder some surveys have shown that the most popular ambition among female teenagers is to become a velina (a showgirl).
Watching the “Women's Bodies” leaves one wondering why the public, especially the women have allowed TV programs to give such a wrong image of women.
Ms. Zanardo decided to produce the documentary after realising that women – real women – were and are still an endangered species on television. The documentary proves that there is no place for real women on TV. Their place has been taken by a grotesque, vulgar and humiliating representation of women.
A year after producing the documentary and uploading it for free on the internet (www.ilcorpodelledonne.net), Ms. Zanardo is surprised by the media interest it has generated. The documentary has now been translated in English, Portuguese and Spanish. It has been watched by more than a million people on its website alone, without counting those who have watched it on YouTube.
In the documentary Ms. Zanardo says women’s “Faces become masks after plastic surgery. Bodies are inflated to ridiculous proportions, like those of circus freaks. They give us a false and surreal images of women.”
She says that “Real women’s bodies have been hidden away, instead we are presented with an obsessive vulgar image with silicon lips, thighs, breasts: the truth is removed and replaced with a mask.”
She adds that a woman is “reduced and reduces herself to be just a sexual object, fighting the passing of time, undergoing all sorts of freak transformations, being forced to stay within a frame, mute, or to present TV shows which require no competence whatsoever.”
“Why aren’t Italian women out on the streets protesting against this way of their being represented on TV?” she asks.
In one of her harshest criticisms of women, she says: “We are so used to seeing ourselves through the eyes of men that we can no longer decide what we want and what makes us happy. I mean that we look at each other’s breasts, lips, wrinkles as if we were men….. This current model of beauty doesn’t fit us, and it is somewhat strange that advertising uses images that reflect men’s sexual taste in order to sell products to women.”
Not even older women are spared this type of representation. Ms. Zanardo says: “Emancipated women nowadays have to present themselves in public always as desirable objects, even in a strictly professional context, even when the women on the screen are adults who might actually have something to say. Since the only sign of desirability we are able to recognize is an explicit reference to sex, we have changed our entire imagery into that of a strip club. These images are recorded by positioning the camera before the shot as in pornographic films, starting with the breast, the pubic area, thighs, exactly like a porn movie. But we are actually watching a public broadcasting channel."
In an exclusive interview with Africa News, Ms. Zanardo says that her documentary is not against female TV presenters or showgirls, but against the distorted image of women on TV. “I know that many female TV presenters have watched my documentary but I haven’t received any bad reaction from them,” she says.
Ms. Zanardo says the humiliating use of a woman’s body on Italian TV started with the introduction of private TV some 30 years ago.
“The real problem in Italy is that the public TV could have chosen to offer something different but unfortunately it chose to follow the private TV,” she says.
While many people use Auditel (a research company which carries out the television audience measurement in Italy) ratings to claim that Italy has this type of TV because people like it, Ms. Zanardo who has studied the data from Auditel doubts whether they really prove that the people like seeing women humiliated in this manner.
She says that many people like this type of TV simply because they’ve been watching it for so many years. This could partly be the reason why so many young girls aspire to become showgirls. Ms. Zanardo says that TV has been their babysitters for 20 years so it is not surprising that they want to be like what they’ve been watching for all these years.
Ms. Zanardo is convinced that the Italian TV will one day change the way it represents women. And she is determined to campaign for it. She has in fact made this a key mission of her life.
As a way of fighting for a dignified representation of women on TV, Ms. Zanardo has developed a special media education programme training teachers to help their students become critical viewers of television content.
It is, however, proving difficult to implement the programme at national level because of lack of funds from the Government and other institutions.
For about a year, Ms. Zanardo has been taking the campaign to some parts of Italy, visiting universities, schools, and other learning institutions. During such visits they watch the documentary and discuss its content with students.
Recognizing the important role advertisers play in the production and broadcast of TV programs, Ms. Zanardo plans a public awareness campaign targeting them. “We’ll start to raise awareness and make them realise that it’s a high time they started investing money in TV programs which don’t represent women in this negative way,” she says.
Ms. Zanardo holds that succeeding in convincing advertisers to stop sponsoring programs featuring women in a humiliating way would be key to changing the trend.
She also plans to a create a similar campaign targeting TV producers.
“Women have lost their freedom to be themselves, to be natural,” says Ms. Lara Magrini, an Italian woman after watching “Women's Bodies”. She is worried about many young people who now lack interest in watching serious programs apart from football and highly sexualised programs.
Ms. Zanardo has just published a book with the same title of the documentary “Il corpo delle donne” in which she narrates the reactions she has received since producing the documentary.
In the book published by Feltrinelli, Ms. Zanardo tells what Italian women think about the issue, how they’d like to be represented, and proposes what should be done to stop the degrading use of women’s bodies on Italian TV.
She also explains the reasons why they decided to produce the documentary, how the public reacted to it, the debate it has generated especially amongst the young people. The book has a chapter on media education, providing information on how to watch TV critically.
