Moira Delia has discovered the truth about Maltese misogyny

As a result of this referendum campaign, Moira Delia has made an edifying discovery: that the minute a woman drops her coy, eye-lash-batting, flirtatious, make-up-wearing, cute popsy image and flies directly in the face of what a particular kind of Maltese (generally, Labour-voting) man wants, she becomes the object of verbal violence and hideous misogynistic abuse of the worst kind, much of it feeding into and straight out of violent and sadistic porn and snuff movies.

There are many other comments in this vein, many of them flagged up by Ms Delia herself, but I won’t reproduce them as they are just too disgusting.

Ms Delia now knows a little bit – just a little bit – of what it means to be me. She couldn’t stand a couple of months of this kind of abuse in the referendum campaign, so maybe that should give her pause for thought: I have had 25 years of it, relentlessly, all of it because those who run and support the political party she does are intolerant, abusive and, at root, despise women at a profound level except in terms of their basic functions and unless they stand in line and obey.

Moira Delia doesn’t seem to understand – but I can explain it to her because I have 25 years of experience at the receiving end of just this kind of this – that those are not hunters she was dealing with. Those are Labour Party supporters who also happen to hunt.

Ms Delia should remember, too, that when I made a polite telephone call to Saviour Balzan a few months ago, I got a mad stream of exactly this kind of violent sexual abuse from the man with whom she shared a close campaign platform.

The facts are not indivisible, Moira. There is a clear Maltese male personality type that you need to identify, and hunting is not the identifier. Balzan does not hunt. Many Maltese men have very serious problems with women who they perceive to be ‘defying’ them or confronting them in whatever context, even a generalized one. They will respond immediately with violent verbal abuse of a sexual nature, aggression in which you can tell they are struggling not to strangle you, and at the more pathological extreme, a hate-soaked obsession. This spans the socio-educational range, but is more common the further down the scale you go.