In case anyone was still in any doubt, this last week has been a horrific reminder of just how little women’s voices, and indeed, lives matter in Malta. We kicked off the week with a popular local online entertainment website asking the, no doubt invaluable, question of whether or not a married woman should be allowed to model and closed it with the death of a woman who was stabbed multiple times by her former partner.

In between all this, several articles were run about abortion, with comments so vile that I literally wanted to pluck my eyes out Earl of Gloucester style and dance the polka over them.

I want to start by saying that as a woman living in a European country in 2020, I find it abhorrent that I should have to justify and validate my existence through marriage or children. I am not a piece of property to be passed from my father’s hand to another man’s.

I work for my own money, pay my own taxes and vote using my own name. If I choose to get married, one would hope that I’d be doing it to enhance my life rather than to sign up to be someone’s live-in slave. Indeed, if so many women weren’t treated like hired help in their marriages, maybe the success rate of those same marriages would be higher. But all this is completely beside the point.

My genitals shouldn’t define my fate

The abject misogyny in this country is so deep rooted that many seem to see absolutely nothing wrong with the absurd and frankly insulting, from commenting about whether or not a woman should have hobbies once she marries to shamelessly commenting on articles about a bone-chilling femicide with questions such as: “But what did she do to provoke him?” Honestly, if I could, I would put my hand into the monitor and shake the people casually writing off someone’s murder as something that could have been avoided if only a woman had taken the time to toe the line.

It’s not just the comments which are deplorable but it’s the treatment victims of abuse get in general. I have heard of several cases where women who were experiencing domestic violence were instructed to go home quietly and try to fix things. I know of someone who was told to go home and have sex with her abuser to calm him down. I have no idea how most people conduct their sex lives, but I’m pretty sure that the last thing someone who has been beaten black and blue feels like doing is laying with the perpetrator.

Who in their right mind would suggest something like this but someone who himself views women as objects to be pushed around and silenced at will? I don’t know who needs to hear this, but it’s not 1912 anymore and my genitals shouldn’t define my fate.

Even the headlines are messed up by the well-meaning: Chantelle Chetcuti was not just a mother of two and deserving of our sympathy and empathy because she had children, but she was first and foremost a woman who had her own hopes, dreams and aspirations.

We do not get to decide someone’s value based on their life choices and our headlines should start to reflect that. The more we continue to feed this beast of what defines a woman’s worth, the more we are cheapening our individual experiences as humans.

I shouldn’t have to say this, but regardless of what the backstory is to this tragic tale, Chetcuti didn’t deserve what she was dealt. Her children don’t deserve to not have a mother. Her mother and father don’t deserve to be robbed of a daughter because some man could not stomach the fact that his partner didn’t want to be with him after God only knows what she had already put up with.

Women in general shouldn’t be subjected to the vile commentary so many of us endure on a daily basis, where we are reduced to body parts at a meat market.

My gender does not define what measure of respect I get: that’s what character should be for.