Sangiuliano-Boccia case: the evidence, “I am a man”, “I am a woman”

PWhy did Maria Rosaria Boccia record the conversations with Minister Sangiuliano? In the interview with Press the woman explains it clearly: «Because the minister said something to me that really struck me. He said: “I am the minister, I am a man, I represent the institution, and in the future no one will believe anything you say”».

From the beginning of the Boccia-Sangiuliano affair it was clear that the woman was taken “seriously”, or as a real threat, only after she demonstrated that she had in her hands some materials to display. First, he denied everything. When last August 26 on Instagram he published a photo with Sangiuliano in which he thanked him for having appointed her “Advisor to the Minister for Major Events”, for the world she was just a 41-year-old woman that the ministry staff stopped like this: “Dr. Boccia is trying to gain credibility without having any reason to do so”. Then we had to listen to the opinions on the matter of the usual Feltri, Sgarbi, Mieli in the media: the analysis of who she was and why he had fallen “into her trap”. So far, everything as usual. As Sangiuliano would have explained to Boccia: they will believe me. Too bad he had not taken into account the evolution of the species (and besides, the government did not want dinosaurs to be studied at school).

This story is interesting for two reasons.beyond the political gravity of the issue and beyond the judgment on Boccia’s intentions: the first is that for the first time a woman involved in dynamics of sex and power is protecting herself. The second is that we have a woman at the head of the government. Who claims to have broken the glass ceiling and to represent the revenge of all the others, as the dem Valeria Valente explained well on Facebook. How can Giorgia Meloni continue to defend these dynamics? Doesn’t her proud “I am a woman” inevitably clash with Sangiuliano’s “I am a man”?

Yet he defends it. With the usual pattern: he says that there is a “hidden direction” behind the Sangiuliano-Boccia case: «She is lucid and diabolical, there is a plot to bring us down». The usual chauvinistic (and victimist) narrative that takes us back to the beginning of the story, and it is even more serious because the attack on the person who is not an institution, is not a minister and is not a man is evidently made by another woman. But Meloni can always cling to the fact that this is “the woman’s version” told to a newspaper, did Sangiuliano really say that sentence? And what other sentences did he say? This second question is fundamental: because if Boccia, in fact, cannot provide other “evidence”, other “compromising materials”, the version of the gossip and the plot against the government can still hold up, and triumph, in the natural and Pavlovian machismo of all the actors and the public. If instead she recorded something more, then Giorgia Meloni will perhaps have to take it into account, as it was with Antonio Ricci for the Giambruno case. Let us remember, however: the sexist issue had never been addressed there either, everything had been dismissed as a “personal matter”.