In the last few days there have been further appeals to save Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, the 43-year-old mother, convicted of adultery, first sentenced to death by stoning and then by hanging and currently being held on death row in Iran.
We have followed Sakineh’s vicissitudes on the news throughout the summer, we heard the appeals launched by her children and signed the petitions (and we can still sign them) asking the Iranian authorities to save her, yet Sakineh remains in grave risk as recent news announced her name is on a list of people whose sentence will be carried out in the next few days.
Teheran is at present accusing Europe and the USA of using Sakineh’s case to put pressure on Iran’s government and on its policies, but Sakineh shouldn't be considered as an abstract entity, a symbol or a metaphor, she is a real woman and her story is tragically similar to that of many other women who are at present languishing in prisons, who have been tortured and raped or are victims of atrocities such as sex trafficking.
As I wonder what can still be done for Sakineh, I’m also thinking about another Iranian woman who often appeared in many gossip magazines between the '50s and the '60s, Princess Soraya Esfandiary Bakhtiari, the second wife of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.
Afte a fairy tale wedding complete of sumptuous Dior gown, the Shah divorced her in 1958 because she was unable to bear children and Soraya moved to France, while pursuing for a very short time an acting career and starring in a couple of films, I tre volti ("Three Faces of a Woman", 1965), a movie divided in three different episodes - “Il provino” (The Screen Test), “Gli amanti celebri” (Famous Lovers) and “Latin Lover” - directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, Mauro Bolognini and Franco Indovina (her partner - he died in a plane crash) and Robert Day’s She (1965).
While in Antonioni’s episode Soraya was portrayed during the night of her screen test for this film (will maybe dedicate to the film an entire post in future since it's worth analysing it fashion-wise) and in Bolognini’s she starred as a married woman trapped in an affair with a failed young writer, in the last episode - a short comedy featuring Italian actor Alberto Sordi - Soraya played the role of a business woman, too focused on taking care of her job and her immaculate look to be distracted by the gigolo hired by her travel agency to entertain her.
Throughout the film Soraya looked sad and serious: apparently the contract with producer Dino De Laurentiis forbade her to smile to make sure the image of the "sad princess" the media had created around her was somehow preserved. Yet there are bits and pieces in the last episode where Soraya almost smiles, taking around her annoying gigolo.
Soraya and Sakineh are different women, living in different times and leading very different lives, but pondering about them also led me to think about Italian women.
I was born in Italy and I have an Italian passport, but I’m truly ashamed of being represented by the current Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi.
His actions, jokes and behaviour have indeed turned into a cause of embarrassment for the entire Italian population.
Last week, Mr Berlusconi was involved in another sex scandal (we have by now lost count of his sex scandals with under age girls, escorts, showgirls, beauty contest winners and such likes…).
This time he put pressure (the incident occurred in May) on Milan’s police asking them to release a 17-year-old girl of Moroccan origins, Karima Keyek, also known as "Ruby Rubacuori" (Ruby Stealer of Hearts).
The girl, who recently turned 18, was arrested on suspicion of stealing €3,000 from a friend.
Apparently, Berlusconi told police officers Keyek was the granddaughter of Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak, causing an embarrassing international incident.
Then he sent Nicole Minetti - a showgirl (yes, another one…) turned dental hygienist (she allegedly took care of him after the flying Duomo accident…) turned regional councillor for Berlusconi’s Freedom People party - to rescue her.
The Italian Prime Minister stated he just tried to save a young woman in need. But “the young woman in need” – involved last year in an investigation about prostitution in Milan – wasn’t new to Berlusconi's circle.
Introduced to Berlusconi by celebrity agent Lele Mora (yes, the dubious guy interviewed also in the documentary Videocracy) who is currently investigated on suspicion of aiding and abetting prostitution, Ruby was invited to one of Berlusconi’s wild parties during which she witnessed after-dinner sex sessions (also referenced to as “bunga bunga” parties that recently even inspired tracks interspersed with Berlusconi's samples). During the same party, the Prime Minister gave Ruby a necklace and €7,000.
If this weren't enough, yesterday Berlusconi dismissed calls for him to resign with one of his offensive claims, “It is better to like beautiful girls than be gay”, obviously enraging the international homosexual community and also getting some comments from the actors invited at the Rome Film Festival (an edition riddled by the protests of the film industry workers against the government's cuts to culture...).
Julianne Moore - invited to collect a lifetime achievement award and speaking at a press conference following a screening of Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right - stated the Prime Minister’s comments were “unfortunate, archaic and idiotic”.
But decadence is an Italian sport the Prime Minister loves, so at the moment there is also another investigation going on involving Big Brother-wanna be contestant Nadia Macrì, 27, (note: Big Brother is broadcast in Italy by a channel owned by Silvio Berlusconi) who claimed she had paid sex with the Prime Minister a couple of times.
Apparently, Macrì also prostituted herself with other politicians, receiving money, jewels and designer clothes as payment and, when she was invited to the Prime Minister’s villa in Sardinia with other young women, she claimed all the girls found a joint awaiting them in their rooms (the drugs were smuggled on the island on the Prime Minister’s private plane).
Immoral Berlusconi and his attitude to women always disgusted me: I find extremely offensive the way he doesn’t seem to be able to talk to a woman without making some comments about her physical attributes that wouldn't sound out of place in a third-rate Italian sex comedy from the '70s.
The Italian Prime Minister can definitely be held responsible for the moral decadence ruling in my home country at the moment and for having turned Italy into his own private harem and brothel. But Berlusconi is responsible also for something else that is almost even more perversely tragic, and that's the fact that, in Italy, many men still see women as sex objects while many women see prostitution as a way to obtain money or even get a job.
Berlusconi & Co. think it is easy to buy women with money, jewels, designer clothes and accessories (Ruby was allegedly given also a black and white Valentino dress), but they also find women who are willing to sell their bodies for such things, thinking sex is an easy way to get to a TV show and become famous or simply get a job, maybe enter into politics or even just pay the bills.
There are hundreds, even thousands, of women like Ruby, sexually exploited by powerful men who treat them like meat and I guess that in a way there are some similarities between a woman languishing in a prison in a country ruled by a regime and a woman living in a "democratic" country where she is still treated by men like a sexual object: in both cases there is a violation of vital human rights.
You could argue that, like Berlusconi, the fashion industry is surely not giving a good example, putting pressure on young women, promising them they can become models, creating fake icons of style and telling women to buy extremely expensive designer clothes and accessories because they are so trendy (I’m afraid, girls, most of us will never be able to afford such lifestyles…).
It looks like the only free woman in all this story was the one interpreted by Soraya in the last episode of Three Faces of a Woman. But isn't it sad that only in a fictitious story taken from a film shot 45 years ago a woman could be a powerful and free entrepreneur who chose not to sleep with an insistently annoying, fake and vapid Latin lover whose only skill was to continuously boast about all the women he conquered in his career (in perfect Berlusconi-style)?
That, as I said, was forty five years ago, but things don't seem to have changed: women are still the victims while men can still rape, stone to death or convince an entire generation of women to prostitute themselves in the name of money, jobs and designer clothes. And what's worse is that they can do so with the utmost immunity.
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