Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

If you happen to be a Martian or other alien being and you happen to want to check out earth babes, and coincidently you tune into Italian TV, you could be forgiven for coming away with the distinct impression that Italian women are just about all stunningly beautiful.

The media here loves good looking girls and they are all over the TV. In fact, I've just flicked through the eight main channels and four of them were showing 'bellissime donne', which is Italian for beautiful women with a capital 'B'. While, I haven't got any particular objection to this, seeing as I am a bloke, I do pity the girls on the streets. These lasses are often good lookers and well dressed to boot, but you have to know that they work at their beauty, at least until they get too old for all the make-up and plastic surgery and finally get bored with the step classes, that is. But no matter how hard the majority try they will never get anywhere near the TV goddesses. It must be difficult to be a woman here I suspect, especially if you have not been blessed with diva like good looks. In some ways it makes me wonder how the less gifted of the fairer sex here find mates. Yes, the cult of the beautiful is big here, very big. No footballer would be seen dead without his bombshell of a wife, and of course the best looking babes here end up with footballer husbands or rich non-footballers. They will have children, but these sons and daughters may well be reared by a sort of super nanny costing around 4000 Euros a month – cash in hand. VIP's, as the stars here are known are big business and one so-called news programme on one of the mediaset channels carries a daily feature about some looks-blessed babe or babes, and around Christmas these wannabe VIP's are most often topless whilst being photographed for their obligatory promotional calendar. This is prime time, early evening TV and this particular channel targets, or so I am led to believe, a youth audience. Catch 'em young and get them buying make-up as soon as possible, I suppose. Plus, of course, all the guys are going to grow up convinced that only a supermodel will be good enough. It's all a bit shallow if you ask me.

I suppose I've ended up with a sort of beauty overload. Back in the UK there were comparatively fewer babes on TV and because of their rarity, I appreciated them more. Here I've become a little blasé to it all. I could compare this to all the incredibly ornate churches which exist here. At first I went 'wow' or 'unbelievable', but after a while I started to appreciate these works of art less and less, and now I just go 'Yep, that's nice. Now, where are we going to have lunch?'. The mass of stunning lookers which bombards me almost continually has rendered me a little numb. Strange, I never thought I would feel this way about beautiful women. Now I find that I prefer to see ordinarily dressed attractive women, because they seem more real and interesting. Yes, I know I have another half, but I can't help looking at other women, I mean, all I have to do is turn on the telly, look at a magazine or a newspaper. I cannot avoid it. Tough it is.

Why is this the way it is here? Don't know, but I'm not at all sure that it is a good thing.