Muscat: spreading private sex videos is fine as long as it’s Cyrus Engerer who does it

The Prime Minister took time out of prime ministerial matters this morning to to talk about a once-private video of two ordinary people having sex that has been doing the rounds for the past few days.

“We must understand that the girl in the video is a victim, not an evil-doer,” The Malta Independent quotes him as saying. “The real evil-doer is the person who disseminated the video. We must ask ourselves: what if it was my daughter, my sister, my wife?”

I find it fascinating that the Prime Minister here discounts the man completely, which reveals a wealth of information about how his formative background may have programmed Muscat to think of women in terms of Madonnas vs whores, whose reputations can be ruined by the simple fact of having sex, while men are unaffected or even admired because of macho culture.

Either that, or he thinks that the man is to blame for taking the video and making it public, when nothing like that has been suggested anywhere. But unless he knows something we don’t, the Prime Minister is wrong to assume that it is the woman (not girl) alone who is the victim.

Does the Prime Minister really care about these matters? Of course not, as his past decisions have shown. Or are we to conclude that the reason Muscat doesn’t feel the same way about Cyrus Engerer and his criminal conviction for disseminating private and compromising sexual images of another man, which conviction was confirmed on appeal, merely because the victim is a man and not a “girl”?

What a shocking hypocrite. Maybe he should seek out the person who put this video into the public domain, and offer him an ambassador-rank post as his ‘sherpa’ in Brussels.