The girls and the selfie story

I was born in the swinging 60s. Then sexual taboos throughout Europe were relaxed and norms broken as women finally gained control of their reproductive health. New and safer contraception brought about a sexual revolution.

As mum bundled me up, all this did not matter. That year in post-Independence Malta, my dad euphorically followed England clinch the World Cup, while the Church overshadowed all other aspects of social and cultural life.

We were raised in the fear of God: girls remained virgins until they were given away in Church; marriage was consumed to procreate. Sexual frolic was duly and flagrantly probed by priests during confession. Unmarried mothers were few. Shotgun weddings protected the family name. Shamed girls suffered isolation; some were brutally kicked out by pious families and sought refuge in nuns' homes. Others were sent on clandestine trips to Gozo or overseas, first to give birth and then to give it up for adoption. Others embarked on even more clandestine trips to London or elsewhere to seek legal abortions. In our state of ignorant bliss, illegal abortions were rumoured to take place on this holier-than-thou soil. Gossip was not just an important form of social control; information travels fast through the grapevine even in the case of some of the most repressive taboos.

Growing up, my sexual education started the day mum fumbled to find the right words to announce that girls menstruate. This was followed up by stern warnings from both parents and grandparents. At school we caught the first glimpse of unborn babies in our science book. Those pages suffered a lot of wear and tear as students immediately skipped the rest of the book to examine those pictures closely, even when the subject was almost always conveniently skipped by teachers.

Sexual education in Malta had a very slow development and children learnt very little about sex and much about the reproductive system. Some parents even reserved the right to pull their kids out of these lessons, because they insisted they wanted to protect their daughter's innocence. As a result, most of our sexual education came from girls' and women's magazines imported from Britain, magazines that presented another way of life and other lifestyles.

In my teenage years, more fire and brimstone came from Malta's very own versions of Mary Whitehouse. They invaded the media and girls' schools. They shocked and scared us out of our wits with explicit pictures of aborted foetuses. Such tactics were then not deemed unethical and so information was not sanitised for the consumption of girl children.

As an adult there came a time when I decided to live independently. I will skip family opposition and the hard time obtaining a bank loan to buy property as a single woman. The hardest time came from estate agents, mostly men with clear preconceptions: "She is either a lesbian or a whore," they assumed. It was hard work finding a respectable agent whom I trusted and who took me seriously.

By that time, in many parts of the world there were calls to slow down on wild sexual excesses because of a very real new threat. The spread of AIDS and the death of famous figures like Michel Foucault and Rock Hudson helped spread awareness. Everywhere campaigners were advocating "safe sex" but not in Malta. Until the early 1990s on state television any reference to condoms were blocked by Ministerial intervention, as I personally learnt when I was producing a feature on this theme. AIDS awareness campaigns in Malta mainly revolved around fidelity between couples or abstinence.

But Maltese society was changing very fast and by the noughties the internet had become central for human interaction. In their bedrooms and offices people were chatting and making new acquintainces and friendships, which started in virtual space and sometimes led to real life encounters. It impacted the way we communicate, work, entertain ourselves, meet people etc. It  made the old censorship regimes absolete as filtering became difficult in an era where people gained access to everything.

New forms of personal communication helped shake old moral strictures. When Malta began to swing, many began to whinge, citing moral reasons. Others warned that we needed to sober up to embrace reality and deal with the consequences.

With the rise of the social media the boundaries between the private and the public are becoming increasingly blurred, just when a new generation unshackled itself from the repressive codes of the past. This is the context that led to the story of the girls in the selfie pictures.

These women somehow intended to communicate their sexuality. It might be that men and women are now inhabiting a hyper-sexualised scenario but theirs can be interpreted as an act of defiance against the restraints of the past. Yet, as they stepped out of the old codes something backfired because they failed to see that in the process they gave too much power and control to someone who did not deserve it.

I am sure that when they took and shared their selfies, the girls naively assumed that their privacy and intimacy would be respected. Nevertheless the selfies gave the gilted individuals the power to take revenge by subjecting their women to shame. To me this sounds like a very old story by new means.