I was recently having a chat with a foreign woman who has lived in Malta for some time. We talked about dating in Malta and the glaring lack of choice once you hit 30. Two things she said stuck with me: the first was that a number of men appear to have an issue with women who have an opinion and love to label them as “difficult” and the second was that misogyny is so ingrained in Malta that both men and women sometimes can’t even tell when something is very, very wrong in the way that many relationships are organised on the island.
Just this week, I read a comment written by a woman on social media. She said that her husband didn’t want her to work and that even though he earned a good wage, he didn’t give her enough money for her and the children to live comfortably. She had no idea what he did with the bulk of his earnings and was reaching out to people for advice.
As I scrolled through the comments, my eyes widened in horror at the answers till they were probably the size of teacups. Instead of other people empowering this woman, they were telling her she needed to get better at saving money. A few women even told her that her husband knows best and that she shouldn’t rock the boat if she wanted a happy marriage. Not one person told her that she was an adult with as much right to work as her husband.
They all acted as if she were a child who should know better than question the authority of the person who was very obviously trying to control her. I honestly don’t know how the words subservience, submission and conformity aren’t tattooed to the rear end of every female child born in this country.
We still live in a society where feelings are inconvenient and doing something about them is even more so- Anna Marie Galea
The truth is that while you might feel inclined to toss this short story into the box of “stuff people say on the internet”, it’s pretty clear that, even when it comes to subjects like harassment, we are still not yet even at a point where we can see that there is a problem, let alone actively do something to change things.
A few days ago, Times of Malta published an article about businesses being offered free harassment training and not a single one accepting it. This can only mean that companies are either woefully ignorant that three out of every four women have experienced sexual harassment at work or that they can’t identify what sexual harassment looks like. Perhaps the issue is that they don’t particularly want to hold what they deem to be a hot potato.
God forbid we encourage people to speak out about the things bothering them. We still live in a society where feelings are inconvenient and doing something about them is even more so.
Unfortunately for us, there is no quick fix for this. There are no shortcuts that we can take. We need to educate our young from a tender age and equip them to be independent and use the voice they have. The days of silence and papering over the pain for someone else’s convenience have been long gone in most modern societies; we need to start acting like they have for us too.