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Woman’s Day began in Malta with the starkest possible reminder of what it is all about: the corpse of a young woman, floating in the sea off Sliema, with a garbage bag wrapped round her head. Of one thing we can be sure – that it wasn’t her mother who killed her. Of another thing we can be less sure but almost certain – that she was killed by a man and that there was sex involved. She either died during one of those nasty sex games that involve near-suffocation – which isn’t likely given that she was fully dressed – or she was killed because she became inconvenient. The news that she was Russian was not surprising. It only served to confirm her vulnerability, and the reason why she was thought of as an entirely disposable commodity rather than a living breathing human being. To be a Maltese woman is difficult enough. To be a Russian woman in Malta is much worse, because you are a thing and not a person.
Woman’s Day is not a celebration to be marked with flowers and fine speeches about the value of women in society. Like Children’s Day, it is there to remind us that the social perception of women and children as chattels, inferior beings and disposable commodities, who can be abused and then done away with, continues throughout the world. Even beneath the thin veneer of civilisation and democracy you will find this kind of thinking and behaviour. It isn’t just about the extreme situations in India and rural China. It is about how women are objectified even in the west, where a strange discrepancy has developed: some women are things, but others are not. The women who are not things are those considered by men (and their mothers) to be worthy of respect: in other words, women who are their own kind, according to their definition. Others – alien women from far-off lands, women from further down the social scale, prostitutes, lap-dancers, women in menial jobs – are disposable commodities, barely human. They are the whores, to be treated as such.
Children end up in this situation too: used and abused, physically and sexually, and then killed and dumped. The common factor is vulnerability. Children are always vulnerable without a strong and loving mother to protect them, but women are vulnerable only when they have no money of their own, little education, and insecure legal status. That puts them at the mercy of a man, or men, which is the very worst place to be if he is the wrong kind. How did this 25-year-old Russian girl, somebody’s daughter, somebody’s sister, perhaps even somebody’s mother, end up in the sea off a Maltese beach, dead with a rubbish-bag around her head? It doesn’t take much imagination to work that one out. Even before the police announced that she was Russian, most people had already made that assumption, or taken it for granted. Subconsciously, we sense the ugliness beneath the surface of our society, even if we are unaware of it on the surface.
The police have said that people are being held for questioning, and that they cannot give out more information because “of the delicate nature of the case”. Delicate? I’m sure that was a mistranslation of the Maltese word ‘delikat’, and what was really meant was that this is a sensitive case. There’s nothing remotely delicate about it. It has ugly overtones of violence and of contempt for women, or rather, for a certain kind of woman. It tells us what we would rather not know – that’s Malta’s seedier side, the side that has made Maltese men prime movers in the sex industry in London, has never gone away. Maltese men divide women into madonnas and whores. Those they classify as whores are barely human in their eyes. They are there to be exploited, spat upon, and regarded with contempt.
I hope that whoever did this isn’t at this very moment having Sunday lunch with his wife or his mother, the madonnas in his life.
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This murder in the early hours of Woman’s Day should remind us that Russian women are human beings, not sub-human creatures. It’s not odd that I should say that; there actually are people around who have objectified these women, either because they regard them as a threat (other women) or because they think of them as talking vaginas (men). I am sickened by the way that Maltese women talk about Russi, a category which encompasses women from all parts of the former Soviet bloc, and the way that Maltese men regard them as sexual objects, there to take them to the far reaches of depravity which, in their Maltese Roman Catholic narrow-minded repression, they have only dreamed about as forbidden activity.
Occasionally there will be a letter in the newspapers, from some woman or other who thinks that all Russi should be rounded up and deported because they pose a threat to Maltese families. I find myself strongly tempted to reply that any husband who runs around shagging other women, be they Russian or otherwise, isn’t worth having, still less worth fighting other women for. What’s the point in having a man like that around, exactly? I’ve never quite got it, unless it’s the reasoning that any man is better than none, which has the stink of desperation about it. I want to tell these women: “Look at your husband, for God’s sake. He’s the shape of a pillow with a belt around the middle. He’s lost his hair. His face looks like a piece of jaundiced pork. He’s got dandruff on his shoulders. He dresses like he’s just pulled his clothes out of a bin. He’s boring, ill-educated, pompous and irritating. He’s the wrong side of middle age. He’s not even remotely sexually attractive. However much you might love him, you’ve got to have eyes in your head. Yet the woman he’s run off with is 28 years old, beautiful and well-educated. What does that tell you? That she’s so desperate she will do anything to survive. So pity her. Having sex with him must disgust her, but she feels she has no other choice.”
The trouble is that many women here don’t know what it means to be so vulnerable. They have been comfortable all their lives in their little golden cages. They are unable to feel sympathy for young beautiful women who are obliged to have sex with hideous aging men with bad breath and slobbering saliva so as to keep from going under. They are unable to feel anger at the ones who are taken out of their country under false pretences then kept in Malta as white slaves, forced to have sex with one man after another every day – ugly, horrible men who disgust them – frightened that they might be found out and deported, terrified that they might be killed for trying to go to the police. They don’t do it because they want to, for heaven’s sake. They do it because they have to. What woman, given a choice, would want to prance around naked being poked and prodded by a bunch of leery, drooling, drunken men? This doesn’t occur to the men, who are notoriously prone to believing that they are desirable, but it should occur to grown-up women with brains between their ears. Every woman’s worst nightmare is being forced to have sex with a man who really, really, disgusts and repels her. Well, some women are threatened into doing it several times a day until they can get away, or are killed.
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Also on Woman’s Day, the newspapers carried a report from the Law Courts, in which a man was given a suspended sentence and fined Lm200 for using his cheap hotel as a brothel. He kept two Russian women, brought them several men every day, or took them to men’s houses, charged the men Lm15 and gave the women Lm5. As a friend pointed out, just 20 f**ks and he’s paid his fine. True, if he’s found guilty of the same crime again within the next two years, he goes to jail for four years – but he should have gone to jail in the first place. This is a serious crime. Boys have been sent to jail for the theft of a handbag or a car stereo, and this person has got off with a tiny fine and a suspended sentence.
No mention was made of the circumstances in which the women were kept, how they got there, whether they had their passports and the freedom to leave, whether they were being threatened. It was as though the women were there of their own free will, for fun, because they liked having sex with lots of different men for Lm5 a go, being taken to strangers’ houses and passed around from pr**k to pr**k, being used as the prodding attraction at men’s weekends and stag nights. When not even the Law Courts respect the dignity and value of women as human beings, what can we expect from the rest of society?
These should have been our thoughts for Women’s Day, as that sodden corpse of a young woman was dragged from the sea.
by Daphne Caruana Galizia
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