France has shown the way and banned beauty pageants for participants under the age of 16. I read the news with gladness yesterday afternoon and hope that the rest of the civilised world, including increasingly uncivilised Malta, follows suit.

That it is France which has done this – France, with its reputation as the land of legendary seduction and sophistication – and not, for example, some Calvinist part of Scandinavia, only serves to make the ban more newsworthy and significant. Of course, you can argue that the more Calvinist, no-nonsense parts of Europe have no pressing need of such legislation because it would never occur to Danish or Swedish mothers to paint their six-year-old daughter’s face as heavily as that of a middle-aged prostitute and dress her up like a paedophile’s dream date, but that’s hardly the point. And the world’s worst offender in the child beauty pageant stakes is, as it happens, the straitlaced and hyper-conservative Bible Belt of the United States of America, where these pageants, and the pushy mothers who sexualised their primary-school-age daughters, came under really heavy fire some years ago when one such mini beauty queen was murdered.

If Malta’s government wishes to be considered truly progressive, this is the way to go, because these are the real problems rather than the old-hat issues that went out with the Ark elsewhere in the free world. Years ago I was writing already about the hyper-sexualisation of little girls in Malta, about how their parents stupidly see it as cute and harmless behaviour, and about the intrinsically sickening and weird culture of dolling up little girls, dressing up little boys as dudes, and getting them to parade and perform on catwalks and on stages. I’m not talking about ordinary fashion shows here, in which it is obviously children who have to model children’s clothes and where it is all done wholesomely with the children looking and behaving like children. This is something else entirely: children got up and make up in entirely inappropriate and hideous ways, then put to perform for the delectation of grown-ups and unfortunately, mainly their mothers, who seem to be living out some frustrated fantasy of their own, with their children paying the price for it.

With Facebook, the problem has got worse. The problem is not with Facebook itself, just as car manufacturers are not the cause of people who down a bottle of whisky and then get behind the wheel. The problem is the general and near-complete lack of sophistication among Maltese adults, among Maltese society in general, with the result that thousands of Maltese have fallen on Facebook like 18th-century Tahitians fell on Captain Cook’s cask of beads and used them in extraordinary ways.

There is plenty of what has been termed ‘iNarcissist’ behaviour by Maltese grown-ups on Facebook, a situation that is aggravated by our particular circumstances of living in what is effectively a large town where nobody ever moves away (or grows up, really) and where you still meet your classmates from infants’ school on a regular basis when you are in your 40s. So the scope for showing off is widened in that you actually have an audience not so much of people who give a damn but certainly people who will look at your carefully orchestrated photographs of fun-staged-purposely-for-Facebook. But let’s stick to the subject in hand: Facebook and the sexualisation of small girls. The problem is two-fold, as I see it. You have the mothers posting pictures of their daughters on Facebook for the patently obvious purpose of generating admiration for these little girls’ physical attractions (yes, it sounds sick because it is sick) and probably in the hope that some of that glory will be reflected onto them as the progenitor.

And then you have the far more pernicious and common affliction of the Rotten Bad Example: middle-aged women who clearly suffer the delusion that they are in their 20s, uploading photographs of themselves and their friends ‘having fun’, posing in revealing outfits and semi-porn attitudes, and on the lash, with accompanying comments, by them and their friends, saying things like ‘Maaaa, I was sooooo wasted!!!!!’ and that classic cringe-maker, ‘Sexy pic, hun! Looking good!!!!!’. If you can’t put this sort of idiotic  behaviour into its proper perspective, then I suggest you try spiralling back the years to when your mother was 45 and you were 20 (or worse, 15) and then struggle to picture her behaving like that and how you would have felt and reacted had she done so.

There are not many sons who react in any way other than negatively to their mother uploading pictures of herself partying half-cut while her friends post comments in the sort of language they expect only their contemporaries to use. Honestly, but what do they imagine their sons think when they see that mummy has uploaded, yet again, a picture of her highly sculpted body in a small bikini, and that Malta’s extensive collection of creepy men who can’t grow up have posted comments like ‘U lukin hot babe!!!!!’ But let’s leave the boys aside, because it’s the daughters we need to worry about here. They look at their mothers behaving like this – behaving as though sex and having a bikini body at 50 are bigger and more worthwhile goals than actual achievements or intellectual development (or even maturity) – and this becomes their model of femininity, of womanhood. Those women are not pushing their daughters into beauty pageants, but they are doing something equally bad: giving them a rotten example to live by.

 

 

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