No naked mannequins please, we´re Maltese!

(Please note: Mannequin pictured is not the actual offending article)

It´s a bit like playing snakes and ladders is Malta. One day - as was the case last Friday when I read about univeristy students being  pro-gay marriage, divorce etc - you think, "oh good, things aren´t as bad as they used to be", and see a feint glimmer of hope coming through. Then, having taken a weekend off from your computer, you turn it on on a Monday morning to be confronted by a   a piece such as this on The Times website (http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20091018/local/police-get-shirty-over-nude-mannequins) which makes you think, "then again, maybe not!" and also want to cry and wail and pull your hair out in despair at the sheer pig-ignorance (no offence to pigs intended) of some of the people who hold authority on that little rock in the Mediterranean we call home.

So a shop owner with a conscience decides to use the windows of his Mosta shop as a means to get a message across, and highlight the plight of millions of sex slaves all over the world who are in their situation as a result of sex traficking. He does this by placing two naked mannequins - one male, and one female (and if I remember correctly, mannequins have no genitals, so there isn´t even a case for "obscenity" here) tied together together by a chain. This is no kinky S&M set-up, please note, but a symbolic scenario in which the female slave is tied to the male (though I have to ask the question here: is the man a fellow slave, or the trafficker? If it´s the latter, then why is he naked? But that´s not really relevant to this argument, so I won´t bring it up).

Now if someone would have told me that the guy´s shopwindows had paint splattered over them at night, or perhaps someone had thrown a stone at them and shattered them, I would have thought, "OK, so someone involved in sex-trafficking is not happy with what this guy´s doing, and is sending him a not-so-subtle message to back off". Which, let´s face it, would be a pretty much predictable situation. But no, it was no seedy trafficker who objected to the windows, but "someone influential" who found the naked mannequins so "explicit" (a mannequin? explicit?), that he or she actually wasted the little energy left from being so influential (or perhaps being so influential, he or she might have got a secretary to do it)  to report the display to the police, who - seemingly having so little to do with their time -   promptly marched  to the shop to instruct the owner to cover-up the offending display.

Scary isn´t it? Is this a country that claims to be living in 2009?

There is a happy ending to this story (or so I hope). According to The Times report, the owner doesn´t seem like a man who takes what influential people with serious sexual issues object to very seriously , and has decided to stick his middle finger up to the authorities and leave his display. I´m sure that this "someone influential" will persist in his or her attempt to remove the offending articles (perhaps he or she might try using another street) but it seems like this shopowner is not one to bow down easily to authority, and I´m hoping that he´s not going to let this one pass easily.

The revolution has to start somewhere!

To find out more about the campaign against sex trafficking visit  http://www.dnaemporium.com/en/sex-trafficking .