Raise your hand if you are a woman reading this and you have been either talked over, interrupted, or shut down while speaking to a man.

How many times were you called hysterical or told to ‘calm down, dear’ (I’m looking at you, David Cameron), just because you have a point of view and are not afraid to air it?

This week, we were regaled with the disgraceful spectacle of supposedly liberal and progressive news websites referring to Kristina Chetcuti, a columnist of this newspaper and book editor, as ‘Simon Busuttil’s partner’ or ‘former PN leader’s partner’.

I kept shouting: ‘Her name is Kristina Chetcuti’, the same way I shout ‘Her name is Daphne Caruana Galizia’ whenever I see her acronym written anywhere.

It is not easy being a woman in Malta, and worse, it is not easy being a woman with an opinion. It sometimes becomes dangerous in Malta if you are a woman with an opinion and will not shut up on demand.

This is a universal phenomenon but it is even more pronounced here because our Maltese culture considers women only in reference to the men in their lives.

You know how conditioned you are to think in this way when you are still bemused when a woman does not take the husband’s name upon marriage, for example. The casual sexism, even among women, is astounding and should make us pause.

Today, Occupy Justice, the women-led resistance movement protesting the impunity surrounding the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia turns two. Hello there, Joseph Muscat. How do you like our megaphone?

It’s 2019 and we are women. We have an opinion. And if some men ignore us, we will just talk louder. You cannot shut us up

This movement is the brainchild of two women who looked on aghast as the men running the country either ignored the assassination or celebrated it, and the elected women agreed with the men in government and Opposition not to discuss Daphne’s killing in parliament mere days after her assassination.

Who can ever forget the government’s consultant calling us ‘whores’ for camping in tents in Castille Square, for defying the deafening silence? For having the gall to tell the men how to do their job? By calling us ‘whores’ Tony Zarb was reinforcing the Madonna-Whore Dichotomy (MWD) that views women either as ‘chaste’ or ‘promiscuous’.

Whereas prior theories focused on unresolved sexual complexes or evolved psychological tendencies, feminist theory suggests the MWD stems from a desire to reinforce patriarchy. No doubt, Zarb was reinforcing the idea that a woman’s place is in the kitchen making him a sandwich, not out, at night, neglecting her chores while wearing her pinny. This attitude of dinosaurs towards opinionated women is universal.

Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old climate change activist was lamented by old, male, French intellectuals as not being ‘sexy’ enough. When some old men (especially on benches) don’t like the message, they attack the messenger. It must be said, however, that our most ardent supporters are enlightened men.

We were women mostly by accident not design – however, the first people to step up were women and this was poetic justice for Daphne who was a strong woman who terrified the men she went up against, and was viscerally hated by women because she went against the stereotype that a woman’s sole job is to prop up the men in her life.

The only thing that Daphne propped up in her life was the computer she balanced on her lap whenever she happened to write outside her home.

We might not be called ‘whores’ in public anymore, but we are still regarded as incapable of taking our own decisions. We are referred to as ‘the wives of rich lawyers’ or ‘disgruntled Simon Busuttil supporters’.

In one court sitting, Daphne writes that she was described as a woman who stays in bed writing on her iPad thus reinforcing the idea of indolence and dependence on her husband. It’s not difficult to guess what she wrote in reply to this slur.

“Would they be saying this, in this tone and with this attitude, would they be saying these things specifically, if I were a man?”

This question was asked by Daphne in one of her posts about embedded misogyny in Malta. Keep this in mind whenever you feel penalised for speaking up.

It’s 2019 and we are women. We have an opinion.

And if some men ignore us, we will just talk louder. You cannot shut us up.

Alessandra Dee Crespo is a civil society activist.