Labour MP Marlene Farrugia’s criticism of Education Minister Evarist Bartolo, for not doing the necessary and getting rid of Employment & Training Corporation CEO Philip Rizzo, has really drawn the boondocks billies out of the woods. There they are, all over the internet, laying into her and asking what might be so wrong with Rizzo’s remarks because it’s just office banter (and everyone knows what that is) and Olivia Farrugia wasn’t upset but seemed to like it.

So much ignorance is on display that it is really quite upsetting. Of course Marlene Farrugia is right, and it is not surprising that most of those who are mocking her for saying what she said are Maltese men. Farrugia and I are just a year apart in age. We belong to the generation of women that was the first to begin entering the workplace and public life. Before us, beyond the usual teachers and secretaries who stopped working when they got married, there were just the odd exceptions. When I began working as a columnist and interviewer for The Sunday Times of Malta, Allied Newspapers did not employ women in the newsroom. Newsroom work was not considered “fit” for women. “It’s our policy,” the editor who engaged me explained, “People in the newsroom have to work on shifts, and the shift might include a political meeting that is not a suitable environment for a woman.” This was not in the Dark Ages. This was in 1990. I think it is one of the main reasons my Sunday column had such a visceral impact. People had never seen a woman’s by-line in a Maltese newspaper before, unless it was appended to a piece about fashion, pets or cooking. I’m sure it was the same for Marlene Farrugia. There weren’t that many women dentists around back then.

The upshot of all this is that women our age were the first that Maltese men had to contend with outside the context of the kitchen, the home, the secretarial pool or the classroom. And they didn’t know how to behave. Many of the older ones, like Philip Rizzo, still don’t. It doesn’t help that all men in Malta over the age of 32, without exception, were schooled entirely in an all-male environment and never really learned how to behave around girls and women. But they didn’t bother to find out, either. Every day brought a fresh (literally) sexist comment, patronising remark, crass gesture, overt pass or covert come-on. It was intolerable. Clearly, those men thought two things. The first was that it is completely acceptable to compliment a woman on aspects of her physique. (Do women compliment men about their legs or bottom while standing around with drinks at a formal reception? Obviously not.) And the second was that any woman “forward” enough to forge out into the public arena or even just the non-secretarial workplace must be fair game and asking for it.

As a civilised substitute for emptying my glass over countless men’s shirt-fronts or, given my height, their heads – and some of those men were old enough to be my father and married with it – I developed a nice line in icy facial expressions and frozen tones. And when you did that instead of flirting back or giggling, they marked you down as a lesbian – because, of course, only a lesbian would turn down the thrilling prospect of leaping into bed with some sleazy creep 15 or 20 years her senior with a wife at home.

It is no coincidence that every woman in public life in Malta who is over the age of 40 – more so if she is over the age of 50 – has an extremely tough personality. We may all be very different in other respects and not share an education, social background, profession, morality or political views, but considering the situation now it’s impossible to overlook the fact that we all have that one thing in common: we’re super-tough and brook no nonsense. We had to develop what is essentially a male persona to cut through the dross.

Is it because we were born that way? Perhaps, but I think it’s more a matter of having had to become that way to survive in an environment where men were forever trying to undermine us and do us in, if they weren’t trying to paw us or get us to do their typing or make their coffee or play with their ding-a-ling. Running the gauntlet of male chauvinism and socially entrenched misogyny was, not to put too fine a point on it, a brutalising experience for women in their 40s and 50s who are in Maltese public life today. There are no women in their 60s.

I am totally with Marlene Farrugia on this: Philip Rizzo should be taken out and shot (metaphorically speaking, it should go without saying) for behaviour that belongs firmly in the world of Mad Men, the television series that showcased offensive behaviour of this very nature in the office… in the 1960s.

 

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