NEWS - The Florentine

14
Thursday 30 June 2005
Culture & CUSTOMS
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Sex and Our City:
“Italian Girls are Easy Too!”
by Tova Piha
“No, you’re wrong,”
a friend recently told me. “Italian
girls are easy too.” I countered with
a sceptical look. This was news to
me. And I’d certainly met un sacco
di gente who would be equally incredulous.
“So why is it that I’m always hearing
about the girls here being so dificili”
I ventured, trying to get to the
bottom of the disparity in opinion.
“They’re difficult, yes, difficult to
meet, difficult to get to know.”
I nodded. That I had heard.
While female students studying
abroad here rarely complain about
a scarcity of Italian men, their male
counterparts lament the seeming
absence of Italian women on the
prowl. “Where are they hiding” a
friend from home, studying here for
a few months, threw his hands up,
a third in jest, two thirds in frustration,
when I met him for a drink.
Well, for one, he certainly wasn’t
going to find them in the studenty
Irish pubs he frequented for their
5-euro pitchers. But even if he did
zone in on the “right” places, the
“Italian” nightspots, he would only
be able to admire these beautiful
women from a distance. And not
because he’s American, but because
Italian women generally don’t go to
bars to meet guys. They’re just out
for a drink with good friends, often
in a mixed boy-girl group that has
been tight for ages, known in Italian
as a collettiva, and so they are
impossible to approach. Not that
they wouldn’t chat to a colleague or
someone they’d been introduced to
at a party the previous week, should
they run into them, but meeting
strangers for potential hook-ups,
dates, and relationships is not on
the agenda.
In Italy, there’s a “way” to do
most things, a come si fa and a come
non si fa, and meeting boys at bars
falls neatly into the latter category.
In the States, a single girl dresses up,
goes out with one or two girlfriends
on a similar mission, scans the bar/
club/lounge for someone she finds
attractive, and then proceeds to
smile at and make seductive eyecontact
with said guy until he moseys
on over and buys her a drink.
The possibilities are then endless,
though admittedly limited both to
the types of guys at bars and to the
scope of their intentions. Here, on
the other hand, to meet each other,
an Italian girl and an Italian guy
need to be properly introduced by a
mutual friend or acquaintance, they
need to be presentati, presented to
one another. Apparently, even a
potential mate need be racommandato.
Once the proper introductions
have been made, I imagine the
possibilities are endless for them as
well. This difference in customs may
Dear Readers,
not seem significant, but while we
foreigners complain about how hard
it is to meet people in our respective
countries, Italians have it that
much harder. They have to wait to
be introduced. They have to wait to
be met.
In college these days, girls putting
out at frat parties ruin it for the rest of
us because guys, not having to take
girls out on dates anymore to get laid,
simply don’t bother with the “effort”
of dating while at school. (You’d
be shocked at the number of coeds
who have never been on the classic
dinner and a movie date.) Similarly,
we foreign girls ruin it for Italian
women, and just as my Jewish friend
due to the normal summer slow down in
Florence, we have decided on a limited
publication schedule as follows:
July 7th
July 21st
August 4th
September 8th
Audrey gets upset every time she
meets a nice Jewish boy who’s got
an Asian girlfriend, I imagine Italian
women are none too pleased. My
first Italian teacher here, obviously
in frequent contact with foreigners,
understood the problem, and, being
in the unusual situation of having a
boyfriend as well as a bevy of male
friends, had taken upon herself the
crucial responsibility of introducer,
of matchmaker. Little did she realize
that her nickname, Miss Match,
did not bode well for the matches
she was making!
At the end of the day though, it’s
all well and good to talk about meeting
people not in bars, but these
nightspots have become collectively
designated as contemporary
meeting places not without reason:
people were having trouble meeting
each other elsewhere. For the most
part, gone are the days of dance
halls and small, tight-knit communities,
in which you married your high
school sweetheart or the boy next
door. And while Italian guys think
it sucks that Italian girls are so hard
to meet, it’s not exactly peachy for
the girls either. Indeed, they, just as
constrained by the “wait to get introduced”
custom, tend to begrudge
the fact that the foreign girls who invade
their city don’t have to play the
game by the same rules. Then again,
at least they’re not widely known
as “easy,” even though, according
to my friend, they are, once you’ve
surpassed the difficulty involved in
meeting them.
Tova Piha, a 22 year old New Yorker and
a graduate of Washington University in
St. Louis, has been living and working
in Florence, exploring the city’s ins and
outs, for the past 9 months.