Their marriage was celebrated in the manner it naturally would be when a porn star marries this sort of photographer/pornographer/artist and this had been their founding basis. The upshot was “Made in Heaven” (-Oh, yea. –thrilled). That went well on both sides of the aisle, with Italy paying a very real price in the diminution of its TV/politics that would allow a figure like Berlusconi to thrive in an overtly sexist objectifying climate he created for thirty years of television broadcasting over which he gained ultimate control (“90%” – not that he’s the only one.) to the point of facilitating a social climate that allowed him to reward cabinet posts at the courtesan level (9:07, 9:35), -well done! –Which in all likelihood in turn facilitated his home life, a self-referenced, self-perpetuating feedback. (-To a point.) This social conditioning of a nation to gradually orient it to a threshold of a wholesale endorsement of one’s actions is the true defining element of demagoguery, the manipulation of the society to achieve one’s own image for the ultimate benefit of the self, which had the good fortune to coincide with the globalization of consumerism as an American “cultural” export, not to mention the postwar formulation of a polarized Italian political climate (which necessitated undermining a significantly existent Communist Party) made Berlusconi’s ascent very expedient. Indeed he was greatly loved, for the usual obvious reasons.
It’s clear La Cicciolina was merely used as a device that ultimately served one man’s agenda of pushing televised, political, and media thresholds in his campaign to utterly alter the socio-political climate in a manner that would ultimately laud himself. All her arguments as per her personal sexual liberation really just served individual male political power, whom in all probability she serviced on her knees as well. (Note her rise was in conjunction with the elevation of Berlusconi’s illegal private television networks to legal status, and note the comparative social cost upon these respective lives.)
This in no way insinuates a direct association between La Cicciolina and Berlusconi (apart from what she herself has referenced; she had other mentors), this is merely a matter of right time, right place. In light of recent history in Italy, what her self-perception as a vehicle of feminine liberation served in the larger picture was like the arrival of “sexual napalm” at the perfect moment when Berlusconi’s sexist reduction of women took to the airwaves in earnest. It was the opposite of feminine liberation; it was pure individual male idolatry of the self, reducing a nation to his image by social manipulation through blanket control of what was broadcast on television. She provided the context of pushing the envelope at the perfect moment, validating it in a female guise from a feminist standpoint, so obviously she would be lauded. The ramifications are still with Italy. They served not women, but a man, to the wholesale detriment of women as anything other than sex objects, bursting a threshold that allowed Berlusconi to put his female favourites in cabinet positions, where his political position in turn served his media empire. Her pushing of the envelope gave Berlusconi an artificial “middle-ground” that allowed him to sociologically manipulate Italian society, exceedingly effective given where it allowed him to proceed with his own conduct without a meaningful level of opprobrium. It is mindful to remember these cultural manipulations don’t die with their orchestrators. (The propaganda juggernaut is still in full force, with efforts at rehabilitation.)
It is in this light of the larger picture of sociological trending we’d be advised to examine the existing consequences of our own perceived sexual liberation meaningfully, and it is in this light that Rahab was bound to view her own individual encounter with the self-same push of the envelope with a fundamental mistrust. After all, do you trust the surface irony that band members said was actually the whole point to actually be a façade, or did it run one level deeper, effectively eclipsing any meaning she’d happen to feel? If ZOOTV’s deliberate reference to La Cicciolina was actually pointed in terms of a prescient puncture bearing witness to the concerted dumbing down of a society through the individual capture of Italian airwaves, was it really eclipsed by the level it was absorbed thanks to the ignorance of the collective audience (who would have perceived it, naturally, as U2’s teasing sanction of the forbidden), given they had no way of having any clue what was going down in Italy? In that case, what was this specific allusion actually serving, except the reinforcement of ignorance and blanket oblivion, tongue firmly ensconced in cheek?
Just as there are volumes of undertone behind these then perceived “sexual liberation” photos' depiction of coitus in the santimony of a marriage bed, there was the same dimension of question as to just what was intended and really being employed in Bono’s tried and true formula of the mysterious and the forbidden in the context of sexual (and marriage) arch-types (rendering these elements utterly hollow in the deliberate ploy of empty self-serving bombast), -especially considering he mounted a woman from the audience onstage in the middle of a stadium in Vancouver, and these sorts of acts were repeated all over the globe. (-With no knowledge of the frequency, there are just other eye witness accounts. Had there been a YouTube at the time, it would have gone up in flames.)