Ricky Caruana — Malta’s biggest podcast sensation and, apparently, the man PBS thought best suited to lead the nation’s serious conversations — has gone one unpolished musing too far. The self-styled philosopher of the people, a man whose confidence has long outpaced his syntax, now finds himself accused of misogyny for saying what was, at best, a clumsy truth and, at worst, a truth delivered clumsily.

The Women’s Lobby is outraged. Social media is aflame. The controversy? A video on Ricky’s personal profile, one of his regular unscripted musings, in which he argued that families might function better if one parent, ideally the mother, stayed home with the kids, and that mixed workplaces make fidelity trickier. Cue the chorus: medieval, sexist, dangerous.

And yet, context matters. These were off-the-cuff remarks — rambling, crude, but not calculated. Ricky didn’t deliver a policy manifesto; he vented a familiar frustration in the language of someone who’s never had to consider how a sentence might sound outside his own circle. The comments were clumsy, not sinister.

Let’s start with the obvious. Ricky shouldn’t be doing prime-time politics. He’s an entertainer who’s wandered into the grown-ups’ table without learning the difference between conviction and conjecture. He’s more than qualified to comment on Maltese society; he understands the mood, the culture, and the frustrations that most “experts” only pretend to hear, but that doesn’t make him a political analyst. Like Joe Rogan and his many internet cousins, Ricky confuses conversational chemistry with critical thought.

Still, for all the outrage, there’s an uncomfortable truth buried in Ricky’s muddled delivery. Once you strip away the pub logic, what remains isn’t misogyny — it’s a set of observations about how modern life has quietly restructured the family.

You can quibble with parts of it — segregated workplaces are unworkable and absurd — but the underlying point is valid. Couples are exhausted, sexless, and time-poor. Economic pressures have made it almost impossible for one parent to stay home, and social pressures have made people afraid to suggest that maybe, just maybe, not every couple wants to or benefits from both partners working full-time.

The family life we grew up believing was normal is now barely financially feasible. People delay having children until the fear of missing out, or a rare moment of stability, forces the decision. For many, that moment never comes. The energy, instinct, and purpose that once went into raising families get redirected elsewhere. For some, it’s a career; for others, it’s travel or self-development; and for many, it becomes a cause. Everyone is some sort of activist now — whether for the climate, animals, the next cultural frontier, or indeed feminism. These pursuits are valuable, but they’ve replaced something fundamental: a sense of rootedness. When something becomes your whole identity, it leaves little room for compromise or effectiveness.

Ricky’s bluntness has collided with a generation conditioned to mistake discomfort for oppression. Modern feminism, especially its online strain, has become a sport of creative victimhood. The women who fought for equal rights grabbed society by the scruff of the neck and insisted they were just as capable as men; their descendants post that equality hasn’t gone far enough because someone looked at them on the bus. The backlash to his comments says less about his ideas and more about a culture that demands constant affirmation of grievance.

A movement that once demanded equality of opportunity now demands equality of emotion — a world scrubbed clean of offence, friction, and biological reality. Feminism’s online echo chambers treat men as the default oppressors and women as perpetual victims. In the process, they’ve alienated many who might otherwise be allies. Most men today were raised to respect women, share housework, and support their partners’ careers. They aren’t patriarchal overlords; they’re overworked partners in the same broken system. But if you constantly tell them they’re the enemy, don’t be surprised when they stop listening.

The social-media engine thrives on outrage. Algorithms reward anger, not nuance. Each year, the digital mob optimises itself for quicker offence, shorter attention spans, and sharper claws. Feminism, like every other movement plugged into that circuit, has mutated into an identity-based competition for moral superiority. It’s no longer about improving society but about performing righteousness. And because victimhood sells better than victory, progress has to be denied. The result: a movement that once liberated now infantilises.

The deeper issue, though, is that men have the luxury of being whatever they want without facing hostility from their own gender. A man can be a stay-at-home father, a high-flying executive, a romantic, a workaholic, or a mess; and while he might be mocked, he isn’t disowned by other men for it. Sure, men have their hang-ups — our awkward relationship with gayness, our defensiveness about success — but we’ve generally adapted. What you don’t see are men creating entire online movements against other men for sleeping their way to the top, or for marrying women who earn more than they do.

Am I oversimplifying? Of course. But the point stands: many women today are being conditioned by a cocktail of cultural pressure and ideological overreach. They’re told they’re oppressed but also expected to win; taught to see every imbalance as proof of patriarchy but never encouraged to consider that some outcomes might simply reflect difference, not discrimination. Feminism today too often feels like a crusade that can’t end until women make up 50% plus one of everything — politics, boardrooms, opinion panels — as if equality were a scoreboard rather than a social balance.

This isn’t, to be clear, an endorsement of the other extreme — the genuinely misogynistic corners of the internet that trade in ragebait. But it’s equally dishonest to ignore that much of what provokes today’s online virtue-signalling is designed exactly for that purpose, or that it often emerges as a crude reaction to how self-righteous and unbearable digital activism has become. The media, meanwhile, tends to take sides: it rarely questions feminist outrage but never misses a chance to crucify anything that sounds remotely “problematic.” The imbalance is visible to anyone not paid to pretend otherwise.

Equality isn’t arithmetic. It’s a mindset — one that Malta, like much of the modern world, has already legally enshrined. Many feminists will argue that there are still problems women face that men don’t, from abortion to catcalling. Most of these fall broadly into two categories: those that benefit society as a whole and could be reframed as egalitarian issues, and those that arise from seeing the world through victim goggles.

The more feminism insists that everything can be explained through power structures and patriarchy, the more ordinary people — men and women — tune out. What we get is fatigue, not progress.

When someone like Ricky stumbles through a half-formed idea, the instinct is to destroy him, not debate him. Yet the effect is the same every time: the middle goes quiet, the extremes get louder, and real conversation dies.

The problem isn’t Ricky’s views on women. It’s that we’ve built a culture so obsessed with being right that we’ve forgotten how to be honest, and in that silence, the loudest, least precise voices are the only ones left being heard.