Isn’t it lovely to go back in time to the values of old, those tenets cherished by the sages who came before us and that are now sadly being lost to the evils of working women, free speech, and shopping?

We could go back 200 years, for example, to a time when people believed it was quite okay to keep slaves as long as they were black and/or infidels. Or maybe just a few decades, when disabled people were either locked up in home-made dungeons or let loose to roam the streets to crowds of jeering children.

As it happens, there is a trove of ancient wisdom even within living memory. Take courtship. One score and 10 I can just about remember well. And yet, even within this paltry (or so I would like to think) span, I think I have seen a wee bit of change in how people prepare to reproduce the species.

I remember a time when ‘tittanta’ (literally ‘to tempt’) was standard amorous language rather than an entry in the encyclopaedia of sexual pathologies. Nowadays the word is used mostly to describe relations between humans and the devil or Lady Luck. It’s no longer really on to approach members of the attractive sex by ‘tempting’ them, not unless you like your eyes sore and black.

But it is not so long ago since single young things spent their Saturday evenings (afternoons, by current timekeeping) pacing up and down Strada Rjali in single-sex bands, trying hard to tempt and be tempted. The action later moved on to Sliema and Paceville but it was largely unchanged.

Boys approached girls by a variety of methods. The gentlest was to pass comments about looks or clothes and what they concealed, or didn’t quite. There was also a less outright way of making oneself heard by thinking aloud. Add to this a range of astonishingly silly phrases. Someone in her 30s told me that whenever she walked her dog in Birkirkara, young men would shout after her, ‘Ara jaqtagħlek’ (‘Tight on that leash’).

Less gallant sorts would take to catcalls and a sound not unlike the one made by that little whirlpool formed when one drains a bath. The latter being an indication of one’s prowess at kissing and possibly less printable things, presumably.

Joe the Charmer could get physical, too. Groping and pinching (bottoms, usually – that way one had time to beat a hasty retreat if things went wrong) were fairly common and sort-of-accepted ways of saying hello. The dog walker told me how love-struck blokes would tap her on the shoulder and be ready with their lips as she turned her head. Very innovative.

I’m using the past tense because I’m inclined to think we’ve all but lost these values. I can’t exactly put my finger on when exactly the moral decline set in, but I’d say it was sometime around the early 1990s, possibly a bit earlier.

So much so that I know the game via two sources. First, by talking to people and trying hard to reconstruct the linguistic and social context I grew up in as a child. Second, through my fieldwork in India.

There, the type of behaviour I described is called ‘eve teasing’, as in teasing Eve, i.e. a woman. Partly because its more extreme forms tend to make the place unsafe for unaccompanied women, it’s a big issue in India. To the extent that there are victim support groups and separate carriages for women in Mumbai and other big cities.

The point is worth emphasising because I think it contains the clue as to why such behaviour has become the exception in Malta. It’s not that men (the usual suspects) are less flagrant or ‘nicer’. It’s that they can resort to other, less chauvinistic and daft, methods of assault on women’s virtue.

For one, it has become possible for a man actually to make conversation with a woman. Sounds rather trite nowadays, but one should keep in mind that most of us grew up in a society where the sexes were kept very separate indeed. Co-ed schools were unknown and the MUSEUM, Legion of Mary, and such edifying circles where young people spent their afternoons, were zealously segregated. (They still are, but there’s competition.) Even public spaces such as bars and village squares were gendered.

The result was that people spent their formative years longing after something they couldn’t fathom at all. And at that age when the superjuri and various pastoralists finally lost their hold to the charms of Strada Rjali, young men and women found themselves clueless as to how to relate to the attractive sex. Provided there was anything to relate to in the first place. Thing is, lives in general were strongly gendered. Men were interested in hunting or collecting coins, depending on social background, women in babies and luncheons. There was actually little common ground.

Jokes and humour, usually of a witless and unimaginative bent, were one means of going about bridging the gap. It is well known that humour can underwrite ‘difficult’ relations – thus the innumerable mother-in-law jokes.

Another way was to resort to what we now call molestation or harassment. The logic seems to have been: If you can’t talk to her about a wonderful new film, you can at least grope her bottom. Tittanta was simply a way of picking up a partner.

I’m generalising. There were, and are, telling social differences. Bottoms have class too, and women did not equally appreciate the whirlpool sound. In bourgeois circles, baths were meant to hold bathwater rather than be musically imitated.

I’m also probably being optimistic when I persist in using the past tense. I suspect it has to do with the fact that I tend to spend less and less time in Paceville. I also have an acute shortage of friends who are on the tender side of 20 these days.

Caveats in hand, I still think there’s something to the argument. Perhaps it’s not too much to say that fundamental social shifts can be read, not least in such ‘trivia’ as the preliminaries to courtship. Whatever the case, the silliness did the job, and we’re here to disbelieve the tale.

mafalzon@hotmail.com