Italian women will take to the streets today (tonight Australian time) to demand greater respect for feminine diginity and gender equality, and to condemn the degrading image of womanhood highlighted by the recent sex scandals which have implicated Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi. Not that all the local media are giving the demonstration their support.

“I do not agree”

The Presseurop website says the magazine Panorama devotes its front page to the “women who will not be demonstrating” on 13 February, because “the dignity of women, which is reaffirmed every day, has no need of moralising slogans and discreet political agendas.”

Writing in the pages of the Berlusconi weekly, the feisty director of Foglio, Giuliano Ferrara, and promoter of a counter demonstration “against hypocritical neo-puritanism,” announces that “the real fatal illness that is undermining Italy” has come to the fore in the shape of “a front composed of moral fanatics, judges and a class magistrates characterised by a contempt for politics and a desire to wage war on elected representatives.”