Marine Area: “The exclusion of women is a reality and a problem”

I have to admit it, my country sometimes reminds me of the famous movie I start all over again, the one on the day of the Groundhog, in which Bill Murray plays a cynical television meteorologist condemned to revive the same day endlessly until he learned from his mistakes. In fact, what happened last year with the #TuttiMaschi Beauty Festival does not seem to have taught us much, given that certain things keep repeating themselves over and over again.

Last Friday the reporter Rula Jebreal declined the invitation to Propaganda Live after discovering he was the only woman out of seven guests, triggering an enormous controversy which, as often happens when these critical issues are raised, polarizes the discourse instead of reflecting on some dynamics typical of the media world.

Italy is not new to debates with a male majority, Michela Murgia often raises the presence of monogeneral events, to the point that the term was coined manels to define the panels made up of males only, and when this is pointed out the reactions generally oscillate between two statements: “We choose people based on skills and not gender“, Whose subtext smacks a lot of” sorry, women are not competent enough “, and” we called them but they didn’t come “, which however if you limit yourself to calling only one and coincidentally refuses, looking for others is useless because so much of the facade effort has been made. In short, it seems to me that there is an evident difficulty in attributing skills to women that perhaps deserves to be explored.

I was lucky enough to grow up in a family context that provided me with the means and opportunities to access education, and despite the many years of training for most of my life I have always had the perception that authority was a male prerogative. .

It is not a clear or rational belief but more of an unconscious belief, why I grew up in a society that struggles to recognize the competence of women: at university my teachers were both male and female, but the textbooks they advised me were all written by men; within the conversations concerning cinema, art and literature, most of the authoritative names that friends and acquaintances reported to me belonged to men. For a whole life I have studied and learned what was written by men.

Opening my gaze to the other half of the population, not to mention imagining a representation that includes all marginalized categories, has been a long and complicated path.. It has not been easy to understand that there is a real problem of exclusion and lack of access for women in many sectors. If we then go down to lower numerical steps, touching ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability and non-canonical bodies, the media presence is almost negligible.

I borrow Marina Pierri’s words from her book Heroines, published by Edizioni Tlon: «Being a woman means being systemically, and systematically, erased: disappearing from the panels where only expert men are present, not being mentioned when the merit is one’s own, being robbed of intuitions that nourish the ego of others. Vanish from the pages of memory and history. For disabled women, with non-conforming bodies, who do not enjoy the privileges of normative white feminism, who are black and colored, the cancellation generates an incompressible frustration ».

If we are immersed in such a context it should not be surprising then that too notoriously progressive and leftist programs, in any case guided by men alone, they find it hard to understand the reason for certain refusals in situations of disparity. Many think that withdrawing participation is counterproductive, I am convinced that in some cases it is the no that make the difference. And the fact that we’re talking about it I would say proves it.