Malta: a southern Mediterranean sink-pit of misogyny
The Nationalist Party is completely correct is not letting this go. And Marlene Farrugia is completely right in not sitting down and shutting up and getting in line like all Maltese women are trained to do from birth.
What are we teaching women and girls?
That they’ve got to look like something scraped off Jersey Shore.
That men don’t like it when women are smarter than they are so best not to get an education and if you do, play stupid so that men don’t feel threatened. Always let him have the last word and make him feel he’s won the argument, even if he hasn’t.
That you have to show men ‘respect’ at all times, otherwise your behaviour is considered a slur on their honour and their outbreaks of narcissistic rage, vengeance and threats of violence are not only considered entirely normal psychology, but somehow justified.
That you must always get in line behind the men and wait for them to speak first, giving them lots of positive reinforcement and praise as you would to a toddler in potty-training, so that they feel more important than you are.
That you should always let men think that your ideas were actually theirs, in every situation from choosing a bathroom with your husband to planning a marketing campaign with a colleague, otherwise you will be called ‘bossy’ and ‘a bully’, and the man will dig his heels in and sabotage the idea even if he thinks it’s good.
That if you don’t behave in a manner which is consonant to that expected of women in Malta, you will be systematically pilloried, attacked, torn down, called all the medieval names under the sun, but especially ‘witch’, and exposed to vicious displays of misogyny, the sole purpose of which is not merely to tear YOU down but also pour encourager les autres and to stop other women getting ideas on behaving as you do.
And it works. Women stand by as other women are treated badly by men. Worse still, they even join in as a form of social control, because they don’t like it when other women break ranks. It puts pressure on them to think about doing the same, to stop sitting in line. Then they can tell themselves, “Look, see, I’m better off the way I am, obeying the unspoken rules. Look at her, miskina, how they’re attacking her. I don’t want to be in her position.”
It’s perfectly evident to me that even those few women who make it into public life in Malta are somehow seeking the approval of men, and it acts as a control on their behaviour. Maltese women always focus on the man/men and ignore the women when it comes to working out who they most ‘need’ to influence in any social, political or business encounter.
This comes from early training in a society where men controlled all access to resources and you could only get those resources through them, starting with the home, where mothers traditionally teach daughters how to wheedle things out of their father as they do themselves with their husband, and moving into the workplace where Maltese women adopt a thoroughly non-professional approach of flirting with the boss as a matter of course, and are totally flummoxed as to what to do when the boss is a woman, and every part of daily life in between.
