Amanda Knox: Fascination with 'the evil female'

[seabeyond]

One reason for the focus on "Foxy Knoxy" to the exclusion of the men is the Italian attitude toward women. The story is rooted in a spirituality based in sex and the worship of the female. In Italy, the word "veneration" comes from Venus, goddess of fertility, called in Italian, Venere. The primeval object of "veneration" was the goddess with the power to call forth desire from men, and to make barren women fertile.

In modern Italy, one feminine deity is venerated above the rest: Mary, the mother of Jesus. The young virgin is worshipped apart from God or Christ and the Mary cult is stronger in Italy than in any other European nation. The flip side to Italian veneration of the female deity is her legendary insatiable neediness, the voracious desire and jealousy of females, embodied in the whore, who is also still very much a part of modern Italian culture. Either incarnation carries terrible powers.

All women are assumed to be in possession of bewitching seductive powers, but proper women are assumed to know how to use control and limit those powers. Modern young women visiting Italy might not recognize those limits, though, because the stripper or girly show girl was so mainstreamed in Italy, especially during the years of Silvio Berlusconi's control of Italian television and politics.

Perugia's Madonna delle Grazie in the Duomo is a larger-than-life, clearly pregnant young woman, painted in 1515 by one of Perugia's Renaissance greats. She wears a brocade blue dress, and her pale eyes are strangely distant and slightly uneven. Perugians hundreds of years ago adorned her image with a real crown. Prosecutor Giuliano Mignini, a staunch traditional Catholic, kept her image hanging on the wall behind his desk and spoke of how she had helped his uncle escape from certain death at the hands of the Russians in the 1940s.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/04/opinion/burleigh-amanda-knox/index.html

[hobbit709]

1. When I was in Italy back in the early 70's

The attitude of Italian men as described by a woman I knew there was "All women are whores except for my mother"