Malta? It’s one massive sex shop already…

Well, what do you know? One headline reads ‘Sex shops to be allowed in Malta’… and bang, crash, tinkle. Out come all the indefatigable custodians of public morality, weeping and gnashing their teeth at the ongoing decline and fall of the Maltese moral empire.

Thank goodness, I’m so relieved. I was starting to get a little worried. When was the next morality crisis going to hit the Maltese islands, anyway? Isn’t it a little overdue? Up until fairly recently there was one or two (or five or six) every other week: plays banned for ‘offending public morals’; authors prosecuted for writing short stories about sex; billboards featuring Jesus Christ warning us all about the evils of divorce… outrage about civil unions… indignation about unknown fathers… uproar about people going to carnival parties dressed as priests and nuns… the chorus of moral ‘tut-tutting’ just never stopped. 

Then, suddenly, silence. Not a squeak from the morality brigade in months. Could it be that we’ve now grown so squalid and depraved as a nation that there is simply nothing left of our former identity to even cling to? Or did it finally dawn on us that… well, maybe it’s a little late to be decrying the erosion of our country’s moral fabric, when we’ve already consciously transformed Malta into a lucrative European hub for adult entertainment anyway.

Whatever the reason, the silence was becoming eerily uncomfortable. Life is, let’s face it, so much less colourful without a good old-fashioned moral controversy to keep us all fired up from time to time. But then… yay! Somebody at the Justice Ministry must have tapped Owen Bonnici on the shoulder, gently reminding him that he was a little behind schedule in producing an apocalyptic omen for the rest of the country to howl about. And what better issue to suddenly pull out of a hat, too, than a law that would allow the proliferation of sex shops – Sex! The dreaded word itself! Aaargh! - in every nook and cranny of this blessed island?

Genius, I say. And just look at the effect. Life is immediately back to its usual, entertaining, hysterical old self. We’re no longer discussing boring issues like ODZ development, or the imminent collapse of the eurozone with all its consequences for Malta. No, we’re right back to doing what we do best: working ourselves into a tizzy about the ‘introduction’ of something that has actually existed all around us for years.

‘Sex shops to be allowed in Malta’, did I say earlier? Erm… what do they mean, exactly, by ‘to be allowed’? Sex shops are already allowed in Malta. In fact the entire island is fast becoming one great big (‘big’ in relative terms, naturally) adult entertainment outlet in its own right. 

OK, you can’t walk into a shop on the high street, and walk out again with half a dozen pornos and maybe a double-pronged dildo under your arm (as you can in every other civilised and enlightened European member state)… but when it comes to permitting the sex industry to actually operate here, there are few places in the world that have proved quite as liberal and permissive as good old ‘moral Malta’.

Oh, wait… I forgot. The average moral torchbearer in this country probably doesn’t go to Paceville very often: which might explain why so many of the people commenting have clearly failed to realise that their worst fears have already long come true. As it happens, I don’t go to Paceville very often myself either… there is nothing I can think of that can entice me there, except maybe a film at the cinema (which was, in fact, the reason for my last visit)… but when I do go, I can’t help noticing… ah, how can I put this?... a certain steady metamorphosis going on discreetly in the background.

Or perhaps not that discreetly. When I say ‘I can’t help noticing’…. I mean that literally. It is kind of difficult not to notice these changes, when so many of them physically pounce out at you from every street corner, take you in their arms and drag you kicking and screaming all the way to the nearest ‘gentleman’s club’ (which, as a rule, will never be more than five paces away).

My last visit proved a little educational in this sense. When I eventually found a parking place (after around 45 minutes) it was close to the site of the old Misfits venue… which, for those unfamiliar with the place, means that to reach the cinema I had to walk up to the main square, then down the steps towards Bay Street… and of course, back again the same way some two hours later. I tried counting the number of times I was approached, if not downright accosted, by women of various nationalities on both trajectories… only to lose count after around the second dozen, both ways. 

By my calculation, any adult male who is visibly above the age of (say) 30, can’t actually walk more than three paces in Paceville without at least one of these women (usually three or four) latching herself onto his arm, and artfully swivelling his centre of balance so that he suddenly, unaccountably, finds himself heading in the direction of some steamy-named strip-club or other. Though I admit this might be an illusion, because any direction you choose to walk in that place will lead you to one sooner or later. They do, after all, account for every other licensed establishment in Malta’s entire entertainment district...

And that, please note, is just Paceville: which is small and easily avoided. Meanwhile, it seems to have also escaped the morality brigade’s notice that every town and village in Malta (not too sure about Gozo, to be honest) is now the proud owner of at least one – sometimes six or seven – Chinese massage parlours, with entirely innocuous names like ‘Honey Girl’ and ‘Happy End’. The latter being particularly appropriate, incidentally, considering that ‘moral Malta’ is very clearly the stuff of fairy tales anyway.

But never mind all that. Who cares if the entire country has already willingly transformed itself into a floating brothel in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea? The important thing is we’ve all been given a new horror to get our moral knickers in a twist about. People will now be permitted to buy their sex toys and pornography legally in shops all over the island… instead of virtually over the internet, which is what they’ve all been doing for years anyway. 

And of course, we all know what will happen next: it’s pornography today, Satanism tomorrow, and next thing you know, we’ll all be eating our aborted foetuses for breakfast.

So thanks, Owen, for your ongoing efforts to make this country such an interesting and entertaining place to live. Thanks, too, for your particular choice of controversy this time round. Not only has it spectacularly illustrated the extraordinary hypocrisy we all live each day… whereby strip clubs and handjob joints are all perfectly normal, while sex shops selling dildos and adult lingerie are ominous portents of our country’s downward trajectory towards moral oblivion… but it has exposed the precise reason for these double standards, too.

I have often wondered why so much moral outrage even exists, in a country which has never really exuded any discernible morality of any kind whatsoever. The “gentleman’s club” phenomenon alone illustrates this to perfection: what started out as a loophole exploited only by one or two establishment owners in Paceville, quickly snowballed into a situation where anyone with a licence to operate a club there could (and therefore, in most cases, did) transform it into what the Americans would respectfully call a ‘titty-bar’… only without any form of special ‘titty-bar’ permit, as would be required in America, or indeed anywhere else in the world. 

That so many of these establishments would suddenly sprout up, just because a loophole in the law permitted them to… well, what does this actually tell us about the ‘moral fibre’ of the nation, whose decline we so often and so bitterly lament? 

What it tells me is that it doesn’t really exist, and probably never did either. Given half a chance, any typical Maltese entrepreneur would avail of any possibility to willingly engage in a line of business that the morality brigade would describe as ‘depraved’, ‘degenerate’, etc. The simple truth is that ‘moral concerns’ don’t actually count for toffee in this country, if there’s money to be made (and plenty of it) from any given activity.

And this, I suspect, is part of the reason some people get so upset about ‘moral issues’ like sex shops and pornography. It’s not so much that they genuinely believe Malta to be a moral place, and therefore automatically ‘above’ such decadent things… on the contrary, it is because they know perfectly well that the very opposite is true: that all it takes for their cherished illusion of ‘Maltese values’ to evaporate before their eyes is the mere whiff of a few extra euros. 

And this thought inevitably forces such people to confront their own illusions about national identity, and all the mythology that has been patiently built up around it over the years. It forces them to conclude that they are actually caught up in a delusion.

Looking at it from this perspective… I can fully understand their panic, too. Going on Malta’s experience with gentleman’s clubs and Chinese massage parlours, it is perfectly safe to predict that a new law permitting sex shops will have roughly the same effect. Very soon, there will be one at every street corner of every town and village, next door to the local grocer and across the road from the lotto booth, with maybe a couple of massage parlours in between. You won’t be able to walk down your own street, without bumping into someone stepping  out of a curtained doorway with a multiple-pronged dildo under his arm. And everywhere you look, a sign saying: “Warning. Persons passing beyond this notice will find material on display which they may consider indecent…”

How can people possibly go on believing in the myth of Maltese morality, when there is so much visible proof of its non-existence all around us? No, this is a vision that must be fought at all costs. The only alternative is to just accept that we are actually just a nation like any other – with our own warts and blemishes, alongside our own advantages and assets – and that there is simply nothing ‘special’ or ‘magical’ about us at all.

And we can’t exactly have that, now can we?