The world is wrong

by Gerald Warner
Source: Telegraph
Not a Silvio Berlusconi gaffe, but proof Italy is a free country - unlike the UK
Posted By: Gerald Warner at Apr 15, 2009 at 18:08:41 [General]

It was a moment imminently expected. The hacks and hackettes instantly caressed their laptops to call up the 100-gigabyte file named 'Berlusconi Gaffes'. Five minutes and they would have the story up and running. It was not an epic episode, but it was true to form. Silvio Berlusconi, the gaffe-prone Italian prime minister, had just encountered a glamorous woman doctor working among earthquake victims in the tented villages around L'Aquila and said to her flirtatiously: "I wouldn't mind being resuscitated by you."

Gotcha! Sexual harassment! Inappropriate conduct! Politically incorrect speech crime! In this country, some heavily moustachioed harpie from a feminist quango would have hauled Silvio up in front of more tribunals than an MP has houses, before you could say "Harriet Harridan." His diary would have been so full of appointments at compulsory diversity training workshops he would not have had time for any ministerial engagements.

But this happened in Italy, so the scenario did not conform to British PC rules. On the contrary, Dr Fabiola Carrieri took the remark as a compliment. Being Italian, she did not react like a brainwashed Anglo-Saxon femino-fascist, but accepted the fact that the Prime Minister of Italy, still a country of rococo interplay between the sexes, was making it clear, though not in too crude a way, that he found her attractive. She described his remark as "gallant".

As an intensive care specialist toiling among the earthquake survivors, she apparently found it refreshing to be reminded, for a moment, that she was an attractive woman as well as a dedicated doctor. Time was, even in this more reticent, non-Latin country, some similar exchange could have taken place. The ordeal of the Blitz was leavened by flirtatious banter between strangers. Berlusconi's remark - hardly belonging to the eat-your-heart-out-Oscar Wilde category of wit - was the kind of schoolboy compliment redolent of Carry On films that used to be commonplace in Britain.

No more. The PC terror has contaminated all natural intercourse between the sexes. Women have been bribed into rejecting compliments in exchange for financial compensation. A cheery wink-wink, nudge-nudge remark now sets the pocket calculators running to estimate how much money might be awarded for the supposed upset, gender discrimination, loss of self-esteem, zzzzzz...

Silvio Berlusconi is a buffoon. As even this remark shows, his chat-up lines are not the most original or sophisticated. What it also shows, however, is that Italy is still a free country, a grown-up country, where adults decide for themselves on what terms they are going to conduct relations with the opposite sex. Cancel the 'gaffe' story. Does anybody know the Italian for Vive la différence?