President marks Women’s Day with talks on make-up and beauty tips

There’s going to be a special event for Women’s Day, under the President’s patronage. We are promised (with random capital letters where they shouldn’t be, but that’s a detail) “many interesting talks ranging from Make-Up and Beauty Tips…Aromatherapy, Women’s rights and empowerment, leading up to a fashion show.”

When I started out, in my early 20s, I campaigned relentlessly through my newspaper column against this stupid and insulting mentality.

I never dreamed that 25 years later we would be back to square one, with make-up advice, “beauty tips” and fashion shows considered a suitable way to mark Women’s Day, and under the patronage of no less a personage than the head of state, herself a woman.

Women’s Day exists for one reason only, and it’s not to celebrate women with flowers and Hallmark prose.

It’s there to mark the fact that even in 2015 the world is full of women who are treated like dirt, murdered, raped, trafficked and obliged to work for hardly any money.

While our head of state is discussing ‘beauty tips’ with a horde of inane women who need to join the 21st century, women are being burned alive in Syrian villages along with their children, and sold into slavery after being taken to market in cages, by Islamic State.

And that is to say nothing of what happens routinely elsewhere.

Beauty tips, indeed. Make-up advice? The only make-up advice Maltese women need is to stop wearing so much, and use the time spent applying it (with a palette knife, apparently) to read up on the news instead.