Jersey-not-so-Licious
I’ve been reading the stories in The Times about parties for kids organised by a man with a sex-offender’s record.
The photographs on Facebook show boys who are clearly no older than 12 and girls who are marginally older but dressed like tarts – which they might well be, who knows – with a couple of young men who have the faces of perverts.
All the people in the photographs are absolute and utter chavs of the worst order. Not even chavs, really – they look like members of some dreadful underclass, which is the explanation you need as to how their parents let them do this and wear that.
Fifty years ago, they would have been doing exactly the same thing in the Strait Street bars, because let’s not forget that girls as young as 12 were whored out there and it was considered normal. In the socio-cultural context of poverty and deprivation, as soon as a girl begins menstruating, she is ready for sex, relationships and even marriage. It had to be the law to ban marriages before the age of 16, because otherwise parents would still be marrying off their daughters at the age of 12 and 13 as they did not that very long ago.
We forget that late marriages are a hallmark of material wealth and relative comfort, and the richer society becomes, the later women tend to marry.
But where there is deprivation, parents push their daughters into relationships as early as possible, to get them off their hands faster so that they don’t have to keep them. In the past, those relationships did not involve sex unless the mother was herself a whore and working with sailors and soldiers, but lots of girls went into steady relatonships at 13 and married just a couple of years later.
Today, when we hear of a man of 20 courting a girl of 13, we automatically assume that something’s gone wrong with his psycho-sexual development, but just a few decades ago it was thought to be entirely normal.
It is quite obvious that what has happened here is that while society has developed and laws on the age of consent and marriage reflect this, there is an underclass which – despite mandatory education and material earnings – remains imbued with the mentality of its parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents.
What you see in those photographs is not contemporary Malta gone mad, but indeed the opposite: a part of society which has been left behind by social progress and continues to behave no differently to the underclass which made its living in certain ways when Malta was a military base, which pushed its daughters into sex and marriage at 12 or 13, and which turned boys into miniature replicas of their fathers from the age of 10.
‘Arah, qisu ragel zghir’ was an exclamation of praise, not of dismay, and among some people it still is. Boys of 12 were dressed like their fathers, accompanied their fathers to work, were taken for a pint or a tazza te with their fathers, and mimicked their fathers in every way. They were expected to be men and to behave like men, and the natural consequence of this was that they also tried to have relationships like men.
The boys in those photographs, dressed and acting like men 10 or 20 years older, are just the 21st-century version of the underclass boys of my own childhood, who helped their fathers in whatever they did to earn money, and who had all the mannerisms, gestures and way of speaking of grown men, not boys.
We forget that having a childhood is associated with social development and material comfort, and that even in Europe the concept of childhood is a relatively recent thing. We only have to look at undeveloped nations to see that where there is poverty and social deprivation, the idea of childhood does not exist.
So it was with Malta, and I actually remember it like that. It wasn’t in the dark ages. Even at my own school in the 1970s, where and when you would assume that there was some level of relative privilege, such as that could be in the circumstances, there were many children who had no toys and who had no idea what playing was. They were treated like mini adults and their bedrooms were devoid of any indication that a child slept there.
Clearly, despite the social changes since then, which are supposed to have swept right across society, the underclass remains unchanged in its approach to the idea of childhood. Infant girls are still forced into instant womanhood, while infant boys are forced into instant manhood.
The difficulty now is that while the underclass concept of childhood (it doesn’t exist) has not changed, the underclass concept of womanhood and manhood have become dramatically different. A generation or two back, the girl forced into early womanhood would stand in for her mother doing the housework, cooking and looking after her younger siblings and her grandparents while dating an older young man to be able to escape into marriage as soon as possible. And boys forced into early manhood would be coerced into apprenticeship with their fathers, dressing like them and working hard at the expense of their education.
Now we have a situation where the mothers are behaving like slags and dressing like they walk the streets for a living even if the sex they’re having with any number of ‘rgiel separati’ is for free. So that’s the idea of womanhood that they’re having their daughters emulate from the age of 12.
The men are behaving like total jerks, dressing like 20-year-olds, partying with ‘chicks’ (sigh), talking ‘cool’ and doing drugs while pretending they don’t. So that’s the early manhood which their sons are forced into.
And that accounts for the photographs that have made the news. All they show, when you think about it, is a story as old as time: underclass children in the exact, precise mould of their parents.
But they also show something else: that when people cross continents and oceans en masse, they take their culture with them, and this culture continues to develop, weirdly, in much the same way that it does in the place of origin they left behind. Whatever it is that makes us what we are must be far more deeply hardwired into our systems than we think. That’s why Malta, which is European, feels much more like Tel Aviv than like Rome which is geographically closer.
Comparisons have been made between the people in the party photographs which made the news on The Times and the people in shows like Jersey Shore and Jerseylicious, which portray the – how shall I put it? – fascinating socio-cultural aspects of working-class New Jersey.
When I watch Jerseylicious, all I can think of is how they look, dress and behave exactly like Maltese chavs. And this isn’t at all surprising because New Jersey is where thousands of Sicilian, southern Italian and Maltese immigrants congregated and stayed. The strange thing is that while the cultures developed separately on different sides of the Atlantic, they did so in much the same way and the people have much the same taste, way of dressing and behaving.
Of course this perception might be affected by the fact that they look physically the same because they are literally our genetic cousins, and are not, say, big, blonde English chavs.
When I watched South Park’s spoof of life in New Joisey, I was in absolute fits. It was like a spoof of Maltese chav culture, complete with cheesy song contests featuring young men with spiked gelled hair, jewellery and tight clothes, calling themselves Vinny B and Mikey C, and women with savagely blow-dried hair (to iron out the Mediterranean kinks), false nails in extraordinary shapes, and super-naff tight Lycra clothes and very high heels, screaming at each other the equivalent of ‘qahba’ and ‘issa nghidlek x’jien jien’.
Incidentally, you should click on this image, make it bigger, and get a good look not at the girls’ bottoms, but at what somebody has written on the partly visible laptop screen beneath.
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I was curious about your take on this. I wasn’t disappointed.
As usual, an excellent analysis of Maltese society.
When mums and dads behave like perfect prats on Facebook, it is to be expected that their offspring will do exactly the same.
Whilst society has evolved, the mentality of some has not.
How often have I heard. on some phone-in, a proud nanna exclaim that her 16-year-old grand daughter left school with no qualifications and unable to find a job, she is now a single mother.
I know of men and women in their 30s and 40s who are behaving worse than their teenage sons and daughters.
For them, Paceville is the place to be, and getting ‘zibel’ anywhere, anytime is cool, as is being held shoulder-high (by an 18-year old muscular hunk full of tatoos and a friend of their kids) wearing skimpy clothes (importanti li t-tanga tidher) and a strapless top, at the ‘marc tal-festa’, posting photos on Facebook in strange, provocative (so they think) poses, showing off new tattoos, and boasting about their nights out in ‘PV’.
A real-life example:
“…lst nite ws awesom!!!!!!!!!!…kem hadna buzzxxxxx!!!!!!…kif sirna zibellllllll!!!!!!!!”
They should be bringing up their kids, the future generation.
What an example.
[Daphne – Actually, it’s a consequence of never having done those things at the appropriate age. Playing with dolls – which they couldn’t do either – would have them committed, but getting drunk in Paceville won’t (for now), so they do that.]
Say no more.
Oh and the pert bum is useless if it comes with a huge nose. Yes, aesthetics do count.
[Daphne – All girls’ bottoms are pert at that age, Baxxter, unless the owners are overweight. A woman can spend half her life at the gym and diet herself down to a six 6, and she will never get that pertness back.]
Yeah well that was my point. That we all look like Lebanese chavs, pert bum notwithstanding.
Go easy, Baxxter! I’ve got a pert bum (kind of) but one hell of a big nose.
Think I’ll sniff you out and give you a thump.
Were you born so? I think not. The sooner this nation confronts reality, the sooner we can move on: We are an ugly people. Life in the EU is that much harder when you’re at the opposite end of the scale from the Grecian ideal.
No, Baxxter. However, I was once told that, as one grows older, everything shrinks, except your nose.
These kids are not bothered about furthering their studies and choosing a well paid career, and their parents don’t have any such vision for their children’s future. They are probably big advocates of the living wage.
As you said, this part of Maltese society has always been around, but I feel that their position in society has changed. They now feel they can dictate my future by discussing and having opinions on the things that matter, that their opinion is as valid and reasonable as the opinion of somebody who actually knows what he’s talking about.
That is the really tragedy. As for sending their kids dressed like whores with pervs ogling their 13yr old butts before actually f****ing them, I really don’t give a damn. Iam sure they are so proud of themselves and their kids, so why should I bother.
When I was 13, the underclass wore fluorescent pink or yellow T-shirts with the word LONDON on them. The underclass 11 year old macho “men” now wear similar T-shirts with F.B.I. and no it’s not the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
@Tony
Your second paragraph describes most of the participants in each and every Xarabank edition. And Affari taghna. And…
When are the media ‘gurus’ going to realise what a huge responsibility they have?
“furthering their studies and choosing a well paid career”
What the fuck are you on about? You can make shitloads of money as a party promoter, DJ, or even exotic dancer.
And thanks to the pic, we can also assume that the organisers of the party in question left school without any qualifications. They cannot spell għandkom.
Amen and Amen and Amen again!
And the practice of denying childhood is unfortunately so widespread.
There is a particular church school where I would never send my daughter, and since I don’t think anyone else should, I speak my mind when needed.
Recently a friend of ours told us she was sending her daughter to that school, and I told her that maybe she should reconsider. She didn’t and bought all the gear. Two weeks into the first term she has pulled her out.
Reason? The little one was asked by the teacher to talk and behave like an adult, apart from tons of homework.
I’d agree that a lot of this outrageous behaviour is the inevitable reaction of a culture trying to shoehorn itself into new societal norms.
However, what is there about working class culture in Malta that isn’t attacked? Almost all of the traditional, community based pursuits that characterise this class of people (the band clubs, the festas, the village songs, fireworks etc) have been scorned.
The fact that they haven’t transformed themselves into viable members of the middle class is taken to mean that they’re either too lazy, or too stupid, to make the effort.
[Daphne – You’ve got the wrong end of the stick, there. It’s not working-class culture that’s attacked, but evidence of lack of enlightenment, for want of a better word. The things you mention – add bird-shooting – are not the result of being working-class, but of having a small mind and narrow horizons. You don’t have to be interested in those things just because you are working-class, and plenty of working-class people are not. It just so happens that there is a disproportionate number of uneducated people in the working-class (by definition, for socio-historical reasons) and so their tastes and interests define their entire class, which is unfair on the rest who are not like that. It’s like saying that all tal-pepe women are dense, unschooled and vacuous, because they sit around all day doing nothing much but fill their time with a single protracted errand, and that they talk in braying voices with a limited vocabulary. True, many are like that, but not all.]
Nothing about their cultural artefacts is seem as innately valuable, or not in need of radical reevaluation. At best, they’re an embarrassment and at worst a dangerous obstacle in Malta’s path to becoming a half-decent place.
I would even go so far as to say that this sort of alienation from the mainstream (even if that mainstream is a minority) leads to things like rampant racism (closing ranks to secure social identity based on “Maltese ethnicity”, not personal achievements).
What seems to be the major stumbling block here is that rather than rise beyond the confines of class, many people are still happy to rise within their particular social circle – but fail to respect any distinction beyond that. I remember that, at school, people would staunchly self-identify as “pepe” and have since met people who are proudly “hamalli”.
[Daphne – At school, people seek out the familiar. They don’t consciously seek out ‘people from their own class’ but people who they recognise as having the same habits and speech. At my school, the many girls from Rabat and Mellieha all stuck together and didn’t mix with the rest of us. They were more comfortable with each other, had their own social system and habits, and that’s all there was to it. It didn’t mean there was no interaction, or that there was snobbery or whatever. They didn’t relate to a way of life that involved going to Neptunes or Sliema Pitch or hanging about at Fortizza or going to films at the Alhambra (now Zara) – that’s all. Life was different then. People stuck to their own towns and villages and the only people hanging about Sliema were people who lived there and in the outlying areas like St Andrew’s and St Julian’s, who came originally from Sliema anyway.]
What this rift in our social consciousness means is nothing short of collective schizophrenia, compounded by the issue of language as a class identifier, and a materially driven culture that thinks it can replace decency and honour with expensive “stuff”.
The worm turns, and I think it’s middle/upper class arrogance, as much as it is working class boorishness, that’s to blame.
[Daphne – I can’t agree with you. I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, with hyper working-class arrogance and middle-class fear and submissiveness, so I am bound to have a different opinion. I am also old enough to be able to track the transition from the high value which working-class families placed on education, manners, being well-turned-out and the sort of achievements that get respect, through the promotion of the idea that working-class people should not emulate the middle-class or seek to become middle-class ‘trash’, instead getting things by right, to near-complete deterioration in which education is dismissed out of hand and working-class values prize things that cost money without prizing the legitimate means to that money. Also, don’t confuse the working-class with the under-class. There has always been an underclass. It is the working-class which has changed.]
Yeled – You find this social chasm in every nation.
Similar classes from different countries relate with one another more than with their own compatriots at the lower ends of society.
In every nation there’s an Establishment and an elite that betray the lower classes, especially in aspects of ‘internationalism’ and ‘globalism’ that hit the working classes hard. This betrayal goes all the way up the supranational ladder. It’s good for globalists and mega-corporate, supranational control.
It’s what’s rendered the whole concept of ‘nation’ into an illuion. It’s what killing the nation state and what’s left of parliamentary democracy.
Glad you said that. Doesn’t it however place some responsibility on the established left? Especially when you mention internationalism and globalism?
I’m trying to fathom whether you’re talking to or at Yeled Shovav.
Yeled also asks why local traditional pursuits have been scorned, I put it down to a successful attempt at politicising these as well. Any cultural artefacts seen as innately valuable have been re-proposed as belonging exclusively to the lower classes. The best example was tampering with carnival, regulating it, prohibiting any political satire and even changing its date. The end result was a fancy dress May day parade. Not exactly Venetian and its use of masks allowing nobility to interact with the working class, allowed all year round.
Any occasion for social interaction and subsequent development was closely monitored.
Our festi in their present manifestation have nothing to do with similar religious festivals in Spain, Italy or southern France. A morning band march in Malta is in no way comparable to the Santa Rosalia pegeantry at the Quattro Canti in Palermo or the gitanes celebrating Mary Magdalene in the Camargue.
The latter are about roots and community, ours are about pique and the barbarisation of our Latin creativity.
Daphne, your words ‘more comfortable’, I feel, are key, even internationally.
I once worked for a large multinational as their chief economist. I, therefore, presented the economic outlook at the annual sales conferences. Sales representatives were invited from all over the world. The best description of
the gatherings would be a mini UN,
At lunches, dinners etc., I always found it remarkable how difficult it was to separate the representatives from each country from each other, even though English was the working lanquage.
Although all were loyal to the corporation and it’s goals and targets, we could never get them over that comfort factor of being with their ‘own’.
I grew up in the 1990s so my perspective is, I think, slightly skewed. My perception of Malta during my childhood and teens (glossing over personal struggles) was pretty darn utopian and the people I knew were in that boat too.
There wasn’t a sense of perceptible struggle, all the wars had been won, and (barring 1996-8) the sense of social cohesion was a force to be reckoned with. Everyone was “on side”. And it took a while to realise what dangerous mythologising that was.
I’m sure that everyone has a tendency to look back nostalgically at their childhood and adolescence, but the reinforced bubble that became somehow normal throughout that decade (and into the early noughties) has, I think, coloured my generation’s perceptions in some fundamental ways.
I’m not sure it’s just a youthful sense of “seek(ing) out the familiar” that made people cluster together. It was a commonality of experience that cut across certain barriers and sharpened divisions which would have otherwise never been an issue. If our parents hadn’t gone through the substantial trauma of Labourite excess, we wouldn’t have been formed in that very peculiar way.
Anyway, I’m not sure this has anything to do with my previous comment, or your blog post, so excuse the ramble. I think it was prompted by your remarks about school identities, and the sudden shift from a “submissive” middle class to one ready and willing to bare its teeth (playfully or not) at a conquered enemy.
These 12-year old girls would have been done up and put through the Little Miss Tal-Hanxa Housing Estate when they were four.
But what is the point here? How does this talk of chavs and underclasses help minors who are being abused in these circumstances?
What is the State doing to protect minors in those cases where parents can’t fulfill their role properly? In advanced European countries there are laws which regulate access to clubs as regards minors. Why not here?
[Daphne – It’s not the clubs which are the problem, Albert, but the attitude. If they don’t have access to clubs, they’ll just do the same thing in the open air, at some playground after dark. ]
In advanced European countries, children don’t want to go to clubs in the first place, because it’s abnormal. That sort of thing is done later on in life. But we’ve yet to reach that level of sophistication, and I’m not holding out much hope.
Baxxter you are wrong. No group of countries can be so elitist that all their young citizens are perfectly balanced in their requirements from life. Always bear in mind that this fish bowl of an island exposes all our bumps and warts because of its size. Some members of society are absolute crap and I believe that they are evenly distributed over the globe .
Not true. We ARE abnormal. We are a tiny country, for a start.
We have a sense of historical entitlement because we are now an independent country whereas before we were always part of something else.
And genetically, we are the pits.
I mean we’re not properly European – we already speak an Arabic dialect – and it’s not just because we’re not Nordic blondes. Latinos, we ain’t. We’re not even black, or Berber (they produce their fair share of athletes and models). No.
We’re short, pudgy, Semitic mongrels.
This isn’t a fish bowl. It’s a cereal bowl, with everyone crawling up everyone’s arse.
You can’t move for the sheer mass of bodies.
In your average committee everyone will have slept with everyone.
It’s no wonder jobs and positions are handed out on a “per quim” basis.
The best budget measure the government could enact this year is to distribute cyanide tablets so we could end this charade.
Or buy up some dictator’s stock of chemical weapons and gas us all to death.
Baxxter, easy man – drink something soothing, a camomile tea or Horlicks. You will feel better.
Why should the state do anything to protect ‘ these’ minors? They are the responsibility of their parents and no one else.
If the parents approve of what their children are doing, to hell with them.
When I was young we used to say ‘If they ask for it, our job is to make sure they get it” ( the IT is what you are thinking of)
The duty of the state is to see that they are punished, if they break the law.
Daphne is right: if they didn’t have these clubs to go to, they would make all of Malta a F…..Bordello.
As is quite apparent, there are many times where the state needs to protect children from their parents as well. It doesn’t take a black eye or broken bone to abuse a child.
Silvio, those who are older and wiser should know that it is wrong to take advantage of the young and inexperienced, however skewed their dress sense is. If you are of the same age and mental outlook, then good luck and have fun.
You should see two Pepè 16 year old scantily dressed girls htting out at each other in Paceville last Saturday.
”That’s why Malta, which is European, feels much more like Tel Aviv than like Rome which is geographically closer.”
I always defined 70% of Maltese as being ‘Catholic Arabs’. With no offence to Arabs – yet indicating the social and cultural influence…
I agree with your article yet I also think that the club in question and organiser is fully exploiting these children. Organising such an event under the excuse of it being ‘alcohol free’ is no justification and the ticket price to enter these parties proves this.
[Daphne – Yes, in fact Joel Caruana, the organiser, is just 20 years old but has bought a Mitsubishi Evo and is boasting about it on Facebook. I guess when your average person sees ‘Mitsubishi’ they don’t think anything of it because they don’t know what an Evo is or how much it costs even if imported second hand from Britain.]
With the type of music being played and the club set-up, these kids are just being exposed to the wrong environment which is usually exposed to an older teenager.
The owner’s (No. 1 Jerk) justification on the Times was also pathetic and he was better off not commenting at all.
A brilliant analysis of part of our social make-up. A sharp and clinical look at what makes some our fellow islanders tick.