The Giovanni Smile

The archetype is instantly recognizable: curling, confident smile, tight pants, shirt unbuttoned with studied casualness, a flashing medallion nestled in the virile hair of a bronzed chest. He is the heir to centuries of tradition and folklore, the ultimate seducer, the possessor of alchemical secrets of the amorous arts: he is the mythical Italian lover. The myth took a body blow, so to speak, with the recent publication of excerpts from a 400-page study titled Report on the Sexual Behavior of Italians, or, as it was quickly dubbed, "The Italian Kinsey Report." The Italian male emerges from the study as a cursory, inept lover, crippled by a Don Giovanni complex that propels him endlessly toward the conquest of women.

Three years in preparation, the report is based on interviews with 2,150 adult men and women by a corps of researchers headed by Giovanni Caletti, founder of the Research Center for Sexual Education at Mestre, near Venice. Although his study was limited to the Veneto region in the northeast, Caletti points out that it broadly reflects Italy as a whole. Some of those attitudes reveal surprisingly miserable sex lives. Items:

> 22% of the women and 19% of the men admit that their sex lives are unsatisfactory.

> 50% of the women and 25% of the men say that they usually engage in sex "only to please" their partners.

> 46% of the women and 19% of the men admit that they fake orgasms.

> 49% of the women and a surprising 32% of the men report that they were virgins before marriage. Yet 79% of the men believe that their wives were virgins at marriage.

"I am shocked by the high percentage of sexually unhappy couples," laments Caletti. "In other countries the right to sexual happiness has been fully sanctioned, but not here. Our own culture has not begun to deal with it." Caletti, who is married and has two children, puts much of the blame for the country's sexual debility on the overrated Italian male. "The Latin lover comes out of this pretty well beaten up," he says. "He is a bluff. In addition to his wife, a husband wants to possess a steady mistress and a few casual lovers too. The male is cursory and pluralistic. He is not interested in the quality so much as the quantity of his relations and, clearly, it is the women who pay for that."

Selfish Oafs. Female sexologists agree with some, if not all of Caletti's findings. Anthropologist Gabriella Parca calls the new study "antiscientific" because it is limited to the Veneto region. "In the Veneto there is much more sexual freedom than in Sicily or Sardinia," she points out. "It is as though Kinsey had conducted his national study only in New York." But Parca and many other women agree with Caletti's debunking of the Latin lover myth. Parca characterized Italian men in her book The Sultans, published eleven years ago, as selfish, insensitive oafs. Now engaged in preparing a new edition of the book, she says that she has found nothing to warrant a change in that judgment. "It is still piratical behavior, even among the new generation of young men," she says. "Sex without commitment and without affection. That is still the prevailing attitude, and it is the reason for the schism between sex and sentiment."

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