As regular readers of this column will know, I rate those who sexually abuse children far below murderers – and I am delighted to see that this dreadful crime, which was for so long blanked out by Maltese society, has got the notice it needs. Yet as usual, we have ended up being more holy than the Pope. There is no way I am going to excuse a young man who “unveils” himself to a child, whether he is drunk or not. It’s inexcusable – but it is not dangerous.

Many girls I know, myself included, got our first glimpse of male genital organs through just this kind of behaviour, which was rampant in Malta and still is, particularly on the beaches. We did not have to go into therapy, nor did we suffer nightmares, and it had the beneficial effect of forcefully illustrating those stranger-danger warnings that we got from mothers and grandmothers.

Now we knew what they were telling us about when they said that we should never take sweets from “strange men”. Another few years went by, and we realised that strange men were all over the place, offering you drinks instead of sweets. That, of course, brought about another spate of warnings: watch your drink all the time; see that nobody puts anything into it – at which we laughed and mocked, until the news broke about Rhohypnol.

Looking back, it’s no wonder so many Maltese women grew up to regard men as creatures with “watch out – dangerous but entirely predictable” stamped on their foreheads. The fields and beaches were thick with specimens ready to unzip their crotch and bring out their dangly bits at the first sight of anything female, possibly even a ewe or a sow.

This behaviour is disgusting and primitive. It has given men a bad name as creatures who cannot control themselves and who have one thing only on their minds for most of the time. It has caused many women to behave towards men as they would towards a black bear: feed him and keep him happy, but be wary at all times. It has taught us not to look at any Maltese man sitting next to us on a public beach in case he has pulled his bits out of his trunks or does so as soon as he thinks we are looking.

Yet there is no way that such behaviour should be put into the same category as that of vicious criminals who are excited only by the perversity of sex with infants, or worse, who get their sexual thrills by watching – either in reality or through film footage – the sadistic treatment of children who are then killed, which apparently provides the greatest thrill of all. It cannot even be put into the same category as that of rapists, who are often surprisingly “normal” people, because the men who expose themselves or masturbate in public are usually the sort to scamper off in a flurry of underpants as soon as you say the word “police”.

How do you compare any young man who pulls down his flies in front of a child, to a middle-aged man who rapes a 12-week-old baby? How do you compare him to the elderly father who regularly raped the five-year-old girls that he and his wife adopted? You can’t. They’re just not the same thing, and in our heart of hearts, we know that.

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Let’s put it this way: any halfway attractive woman in Malta has, at some point in her life if not several times, come across a Neanderthal whose reaction to some remark on her part, or even entirely unprovoked, is “Daqs d..!” accompanied by a thrusting crotch gesture and sometimes even the start of an attempt at pulling down the zip that mercifully keeps it all in. There does not appear to have been any anthropological study of this gesture and what it means, but it was very common when I was growing up and many Maltese behaved as though they had spent all their lives in a remote mountain hamlet.

The difference between nine-year-old girls and older ones, or grown women, is that we don’t stick around waiting for the gesture to be completed. Instead, we tell them where to put their precious thing (preferably, in a furnace) and depart. We are not shocked, and we are not disgusted either – because we have grown up with the primitive nature of many Maltese men and the way they view women primarily and with contempt as inferior things worthy of suspicion, there to provide sexual relief and domestic labour.

Perhaps this is wrong. Perhaps every time one of us got the “Daqs d..!” treatment we should have rushed off to the police. I don’t think so, though. No good could possibly come of parading hundreds of crotch-gesturers through the courts, unless the crotch gesture happens in the workplace, in which case it has entirely different significance and implications.

Prosecute a man for thrusting his crotch at a woman – a gesture of contempt, rather than of admiration or sexual suggestion – and he will express his contempt for women in other ways. The problem here is not one of sexual rapacity, still less of paedophilia, but of fear, suspicion and mistrust of anyone of the female gender. Men don’t hate and fear women any less in today’s Malta; they only know how to control and hide it better – except when they’ve had too much to drink.

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Since Eve – a bible story that embodies the general view of men about women – women have been considered so dangerous, that in almost every society the world over, and throughout history, men have conspired to find ways in which to keep them under tight control. Misogyny is universally embedded in social culture. Yet on close inspection, it appears that men are the more dangerous ones, as large numbers of them cannot control either their sexual impulses, which lead them to fornicate with anything that moves given the lack of anything more suitable, or their aggression, which puts the world into a state of tumult, with wars, mine-is-bigger-than-yours weapons, and constant battles and negotiations about trade, in which men in suits stalk around each other like deer about to lock antlers.

The surprising thing is not that men have seen the need to keep women on a tight and unyielding leash through social, religious and legislative control, but that women did not get in first and do the same with men.