And homosexual men think they're the ones with a problem
Bang on cue, another heterosexual Maltese woman bites the dust at the hands of another heterosexual Maltese man.
I’ve lost count of these types of murders and violent attacks in which the woman survives to be attacked yet again.
And then homosexual men insist that they are the ones with the problems.
Give me a break.
I can think of only two homosexual men who were attacked and killed here, and one of them was killed by another homosexual man.
But the list of women killed, mauled, disfigured or mutilated by men goes on and on and on and on.
timesofmalta.com – 18:35CET
Woman dies after Tarxien stabbing
A woman in her 40s has died in hospital after having been stabbed in Neolithic Temples Street in Tarxien at about 6 p.m. today. The police said her husband, 47, had reported the case and turned himself in at Paola police station. The woman died at about 7.30 p.m.
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Yes, I agree, and that is only the physical side. What about the husband who hardly touches your body but bombards your brain with his cruel words. That is psychological violence and should not be more tolerated than physical violence. It kills from the inside where it doesn’t show.
Christ, you people are soft. Life’s a bitch, and this sort of thing will happen. What led you to believe that you would lead happy lives?
I wouldn’t have thought that psychological violence is the prerogative of men.
The main problem here is that due to our macho Mediterranean complex, our law courts sometime close an eye to such brutalities.
I can never forget the case where a wife was stabbed brutally in the presence of her children by her husband, who got away very lightly by pointing out that the woman was not an ideal wife, or some other drivel.
[Daphne – Diane Gerada. How terrible that was. She was stabbed 40 or 50 times while lying in bed with her toddler, and then when she crawled to the balcony to shout for help, her husband went to the bathroom for a bottle of lavatory bleach and poured it all over her wounds. Sickening, too, was the fact that the killer’s lawyer was a woman, who celebrated with him on the steps of the law courts when he was handed a seven-year sentence “because his wife drove him to do it.” Fortunately, times have changed in the space of 10 years, and I don’t think David Schembri, who stabbed the mother of his child 50 times in a cocaine-fuelled frenzy, is going to get away with that.]
In this democratic, enlightened country, sometimes alleged unfaithfulness by a woman or indeed, anything similar can be punishable by death….and then we look down on Muslim countries…
Yes, terrible indeed. The thought of women suffering in such a manner makes my skin crawl.
But there is absolutely no need for “who suffers more, the ladies or the lady boys?” competitions! I doubt that you have scientifically conducted statistics in hand which prove that there is more violence towards women than there is towards gay men. And even if this were the case, violence is to be condemned anywhere, any time and when perpetrated by anyone, on anyone.
Before you refer me to your spat with the gay doctor yesterday, yes I did follow it so I know what has prompted today’s follow up session! But seriously, let’s just condemn violence rather than using it to prove our arguments.
How very sad indeed. The violence suffered by women who are abused – whether physically or emotionally – has the same roots as that suffered by gay people who are abused: it’s bullying at its worst. It is really and truly the same problem, and it affects women and gay people more than straight men simply because they are perceived to be more vunerable – or less proud. People who are killed by such violence would have silently endured repeated episodes of lesser violence, and lacked the power (and self-pride) to walk away from it.
I once participated in a walk for battered women. It was very similar to the gay pride march in Malta – very sombre and not meant to change things as much as to raise awareness and promote the empowerment of women. Most of the participants were not battered women themselves (some were men in fact), as is the case with pride march – many of the participants are not gay themselves and it is anything but an outing parade. The parallels between the two are so striking that you really cannot attempt to ridicule people (whether gay or straight) taking part in a walk of support for gay people one day and express disgust at the loss of an innocent women to abusive violence the next day, let alone use such a tragedy to dimish the plight of others who have a hard time – because they are gay instead of female.
Also, if you really have to rely on your recollection of violent murders of women and gay men to gauge the relative extent of the problem-S (since you seem to assume they are different problems), then you have to consider your recollections in relative terms. 50% of the population is female; maybe 5% at most are gay men and less than half of these are known to be so – say 2% of the whole population are known gay men (and this probably on the high side). If you can recall 2 known gay men being murdered, you need to recall 50 women being murdered for the problem-S to be of the same relative magnitude.
R.I.P. to yet another victim of extreme bullying.
Dear Daphne…Times have changed? I wouldn’t bet on it. I hope I’m wrong.
I find the way you report this case rather sickening and very inconsiderate considering the fact that this incident happened less than 24 hours ago.
I do enjoy reading your blogs but you go over the top and off the track at times!
What have homosexuals got to do with this case? These are human emotions between two human. There is no difference between homosexual and heterosexual love.
I feel sorry for the woman who died from the injuries and the actual perpetrator. God knows what was going through his mind at the time. He turned himself in to the police which is a call for help in itself. Let’s not judge him now. Let the police and psychiatrists do their work first.
[Daphne – With an attitudes like this one, no wonder these things keep happening. “Let’s not judge him now”. He waited for the mother of his children at the bus-stop at stabbed her to death when she got off the bus after a day at work. He’s hardly Father Christmas.]
One of the reasons he turned himself in to the police could be to lessen his eventual sentence, if any.
Tinsewx li hawn l-ghaqda ta’ l-irgiel imsawwta…..ugwalljanza please fuq kollox.
The majority of the Maltese (or better the world) population are married heterosexuals, so the chances to have a murder stand higher for heterosexuals to be killed by their partners. I am writing “partners” because we also see murders or attempted murders (mostly commited by men) between unmarried couples. Men are physically stronger than women so they use physical violence, while women use different types of violence against men.
[Daphne – Men don’t kill their women because they are physically stronger. They kill them for very many reasons that have nothing to do with physical strength. It doesn’t take strength to stab a woman. Women can easily kill their men, but despite legions of women having been driven to the brink of doing so, relatively few actually have.]
… and then there was Lorena Bobitt.
Marital violence, and yes it’s usually the man is not something Malta has a monopoly on. It happens everywhere.
I might get flamed for this but I just don’t understand why these women don’t get out earlier. I doubt very much this was the first act of violence. Maybe I’m being naive. Maybe I’m a ‘heterosexual male’, and can never understand!
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20090715/local/husbands-responsible-for-four-of-10-murdered-women.
[Daphne – And the rest are, what? Lovers, exes, sex-clients….?]
While being a hideous crime and part of a series of murders that personally shock me to the core I don’t believe that there’s much validity in the homosexual comparison.
Although undoubtedly there are still several men on the island with medieval attitudes towards women, I find it hard to compare Maltese women with Maltese homosexuals. The latter are discriminated against legally, by the Church and sadly by the archaic attitudes of many Maltese. This constitutes a lifetime of ‘abnormality’.
[Daphne – So are women, or hadn’t you noticed? Discrimination in our laws against women in general and married women in particular came to a final end in the 1990s. Discrimination by the Catholic Church and the archaic attitudes of many people here remain. And for the last time: homosexuals are not discriminated against in Malta. Most of the homosexuals complaining are men: ironically, until the 1990s they had rights which married women did not. The law separated us into men and women. It did not, and does not, separate us into homosexuals and heterosexuals. You can’t marry a person of your own gender whether you’re homosexual or heterosexual. Just as the laws on marriage do not examine you to check whether you are homosexual before you marry a person of the opposite sex, so the laws on civil partnership will not examine you to see if you are heterosexual before you marry a person of the same sex. Hence, I can’t see why homosexuals imagine that same-sex partnerships are going to be the preserve of homosexuals. Heterosexual marriage is certainly not the preserve of heterosexuals.]
At the end of the day both are just an awful state to be in for such a nation who proudly still maintain that we are simply the best with regards to hospitality and friendliness.
You’re not talking about the law, you’re talking about social attitudes and personal prejudices. What you call ‘discrimination’ is actually sensitivity to the prejudice of some – not all – of the people you meet. There is no legal basis for that, hence it is not legal discrimination.
What you call discrimination by the Catholic Church is not particular to homosexuality: the Catholic Church frowns upon behaviour that violates its laws, regardless of a person’s sexuality. Some heterosexual couples are not able to marry in church, for instance. And people who live together but are unmarried are considered to be living in sin regardless of their sexual orientation.
I’m afraid I fail to see your point. What on earth is the use of marrying someone of the same gender if you’re straight? True, like gay people, straight people can’t marry someone of the same sex – but why on earth would they want to?
[Daphne – Lots of reasons. Marriage was originally an economic and strategic union and not a love match, and much of that still holds true. People come to all sorts of arrangements. I know a non-Maltese homosexual man who married a Maltese lesbian before we joined the European Union, just so that he would be able to live here in Malta with his Maltese boyfriend.]
Surely allowing civil partnership would simply be beneficial to homosexuals?
[Daphne – No. It would be beneficial to anyone who decides, for whatever reason, that he or she would stand to gain by marrying an individual of the same gender. The mistake you people make is to assume that marriage is a synonym for love. It isn’t. Very many heterosexual marriages are strategic unions and strangely, they are often the ones which last longest. Let’s say two unmarried women of a certain age own a house jointly and live in it together. They are not lesbians, but merely friends. Unless they are married to each other, when one dies the other is going to have problems with inheritance tax and rights to use of the property. So to solve that, they marry each other. It doesn’t follow that they must have sex. Again, the mistake you make is to assume that a law on same-sex marriages will stipulate that the people making use of it must first be examined for proof that they are gay. It won’t. People entering into heterosexual marriages are not asked for proof that they are heterosexual. It’s basically up to them, though of course if one spouse hides their homosexuality from the other, the other can successfully seek to have the marriage declared null by the civil courts.]
Though while I can’t tell you why it’s mostly men that are making most of the fuss I’m glad that someone is.
[Daphne – I’ll tell you why homosexual men whine ‘unfair’ more than homosexual women. It’s because homosexual women have had more problems as women than they will ever have as homosexuals, so they have a proper sense of perspective.]
I’m sorry to drag this one out – I’m not trying to have the last word, I just can’t understand the logic of your argument.
To me it seems as though your aforementioned statement is hypothetically akin to, say, MEPA withdrawing regulations enforcing lifts in public places for people with special needs because such facilities might be abused by people with no such needs.
True, enabling civil partnership for homosexuals might be a right abused by heterosexuals for their own needs. This, however, is no excuse for not granting homosexuals a basic right such as this which would enable committed couples to have rights similar to our married heterosexual counterparts.
[Daphne – I didn’t mention abuse. On the contrary, I pointed out that people marry for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with love, and that love is not a prerequisite for marriage, nor has it ever been. I merely highlighted a different angle which I thought you might find interesting: that civil same-sex unions are not the preserve of homosexuals, and that nothing in the law will specify that homosexuality is mandatory for a same-sex union – just as nothing in man/woman marriage law specifies that heterosexuality is mandatory. I don’t classify as abuse two heterosexuals entering into a same-sex union, just as I don’t think it is abuse of the existing marriage laws for a homosexual person to marry somebody of the opposite sex. If he/she has lied to his/her spouse, then certainly it is an abuse of trust, but not of the law. People marry who they please for whatever reason suits them.]
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20090715/local/two-men-charged-with-domestic-violence
-A 44-year-old from Floriana this morning pleaded not guilty to assaulting his wife, trying to seriously injure her and harassing her.-
Not guilty? I wonder what he was thinking he was doing. Some newfangled kind of freestyle wrestling, or what?
Your proclaimed sense of logic appears to be escaping you. This article or better ‘note’ from you is a complete non sequitur. How does women being murdered have anything to do with problems gays face legally in Malta?
[Daphne – It doesn’t. But from time to time I like to remind homosexual men that they really have very little to complain about compared to women. They are, at the end of the day, men – and our culture accords superiority to men over women whatever their sexuality. This superiority was enshrined in the law until the 1990s.]
Let me spell it out clearly for you. I have no desire to go down the wedding aisle in a dress or something – all I want is to have the same rights as straight couples, nothing less and nothing more, call it marriage, partnership, contract or covenant. There is an enormous legal deficit for gays in Malta and women being murdered or lack of divorce does not change this. Since when should we console ourselves because other people have it worse?
[Daphne – I do have a logical mind, Holland, and a legalistic one, too, and there are times when I see this as a curse rather than a blessing. Sexuality is not a factor in same-sex marriages, just as it is not a factor in marriages between men and women. When you notify the marriage registrar of your plans to marry (six weeks ahead of time, because of the banns), you are not asked to tick the boxes for gay or straight. You are asked only for birth certificates, identity cards and the names of the witnesses. Many homosexuals have married a person of the opposite sex, and under civil partnership legislation, there is/will be nothing to preclude heterosexual people from marrying a person of the same gender if they wish to do so. Your assertion that ‘straight couples’ have more rights than ‘gay couples’: rights are individual and do not pertain to couples. Hence, when it comes to the absence of civil partnership legislation for same-sex pairings, I am as much at a disadvantage as you are, because I can’t marry somebody of the same gender, either. The law does not consider whether I would wish to do so or not, but whether I am able to do so or not. Should Malta ever have same-sex partnership legislation, then I will be able to marry a woman, just as you will be able to marry a man. But unlike you, I will have to get a divorce first.]
Let me remind you of an article you wrote some time ago where you boldly said that you are not the type who looks at people worse than you and console yourself, but rather more the type to constantly try to improve yourself, and that in this you are not typical Maltese. Wise words indeed and I fully agree with such attitude in life, but this note from you seems to say the opposite.
[Daphne – No. See my comment above.]
You lost me here. You are at a disadvantage as much as me, because should you want to do so you also cannot marry a woman? There is a basic difference here. You married the person you presumably wanted to.
[Daphne – Marrying the person you wish to marry has nothing to do with rights, and you should know that. Plenty of people can’t marry the person they want to marry, and they’re not all homosexual. The right you have in mind is the right to form a family. Nobody is stopping you from living with whomsoever you wish to live with, as long – of course -as he reciprocates the sentiment or merely wants a meal ticket.]
I would not be able to in Malta, even though both are single and over the age of consent, which were the only requirements in your case. The law should be about people and making our lives better, and not law for the sake of the law.
[Daphne – Don’t you live in The Netherlands? So go ahead and marry him then. What exactly is your problem here?]
And on this topic, x’tak dan l-ahhar? You remind me, not totally, of one Marie Benoit back in the late 90s when she decided, only god knows why, to write a tirade of absurd and clueless letters to the Sunday Times about homosexuality.
[Daphne – The difference being that I am far from clueless about the subject, have a disciplined mind and belong to a completely different generation. It’s a subject which interests people, as can be seen from the fact that this post shot to the top of the Most Active and Most Comments lists immediately. And finally, I absolutely CANNOT STAND the total absence of logical reasoning in the ‘gays have fewer rights’ arguments. There is NOTHING in our laws which distinguishes between homosexuals and heterosexuals.]
On this one you are clueless.
[Daphne – Of course, because one has to be homosexual to know about the rights of homosexuals.]
Daphne…even worse then.
”Bang on cue, another heterosexual Maltese woman bites the dust at the hands of another heterosexual Maltese man… “And then homosexual men insist that they are the ones with the problems”.
Spot on, Daphne – I bet those marching at Gay Pride can’t wait to be granted their right to be beaten to a pulp at the hands of their partners.
[Daphne – ?]
Using violence against women as a way of understating the need for equal rights for gay people muddles up two completely different things. I’m sure gay people would love it if someone told them to shut up because heterosexual women were being beaten up.
[Daphne – That’s exactly what I’m telling homosexual men: enough already because you haven’t got any real problems. And until the 1990s you had more rights than women. Now women at last have the same rights as homosexual men, but it’s been a long time coming.]
”Haven’t got any real problems” is pushing it. Have you ever accompanied a gay man to a blood drive?
[Daphne – And in your mind that’s a real problem. I’m all for encouraging homosexuals to raise families. It might help them understand what real problems are when compared to not being permitted to donate blood. If that’s the sum total of your problems, you’re lucky.]
What I’m trying to say is that ”enough already” is just too sub-optimal to be a proper outcome for anyone, regardless of whether you’re gay, or being beaten by your husband. Your comparison understates one type of discrimination in a bid to elevate another.
[Daphne – The Blood Bank refusing your blood perfectly understandably because you’re in a high-risk group for HIV hardly compared to living with a wife-beater who doesn’t give you money to feed your children with.]
Daphne, sorry to “contradict” you… but ‘high-risk group for HIV’ is not an appropriate argument. The facts are that as a proportion, homosexuals tend to go to the GU clinic for testing more than their heterosexual counterparts. This doesn’t make gay people more high risk than anyone else.
[Daphne – It is not ‘gay people’ who are considered a high-risk category for HIV, but gay men. Gay women are not really at risk of HIV. In fact, they are a lower-risk group than heterosexual women. It is not because they are gay per se, but because anal sex and promiscuity are high-risk activities. Men in general tend to be more promiscuous than women, whether they are gay or straight, but so as to be promiscuous, hetero men must find and seduce women. Men looking for men don’t have these problems. Yes, lots of gay men are in stable relationships, but…]
Sexual carelessness is bountiful, and in everyone’s opinion, everyone can get HIV. The fact that gay people find it harder to commit to one person only (in a dating/marriage sense) is true – but could this be the cause of not having the appropriate legal instruments to allow such behaviour?
[Daphne – Gay women tend to have stable relationships. The problem with gay men is not that they are gay but that they are both men, and so commitment doesn’t figure enormously high on their agenda. Hetero men usually only settle down at the insistence of a woman.]
I think that the bond between a man and a woman is never stronger than that between a man and a man or a woman and a woman. What we as humans accept (or are made to accept) cheapens such relationships. So, you are right in believing that gays/lesbs are high risk HIV individuals. You’re right in a sense, because that is the result of crass cultural ignorance. Now go ahead and show this comment!!
[Daphne – I don’t think lesbians are a high risk group. They are in fact a lower risk group for HIV transmission than heterosexual women – and there’s no need for us to get graphic as to the reasons why.]
ma fhimtekx!!! naf naqra don’t worry… but your answers do not address my punch line (crass cultural ignorance).
Daphne, one other thing that i think you are not really conscious of, is that gay men produce feminine hormones more than hetero men. this is what generates the feminine behaviour of most not all gay men. this effectively makes them more feminine to the average man, hence less manly, hence more subject to having what you called as commitment on the agenda… do you see you are getting this the other way round? in psychology, this is called animus (male behaviour) and anima (female behaviour), and that is where the idea of a 50:50 came from. because no-one is 100:0 or 0:100. an average man is about 75:25, and an average female is 25:75. then the closer you get to 50:50 is what distinguises between homosexual and heterosexual.
Lesbians, like nuns (and other women that knoweth not man), are extremely unlikely to get cervical cancer. So there are advantages. On the other hand, the fruit of not having borne children is the higher likelihood in later years of producing uterine fibromas.
As for the comment that two people living together as friends having problems with property inheritance maybe the solution would be by making a will and testament.
[Daphne – It isn’t. The inheritance situation of spouses is different to that of non-spouses.]