Malta, it seems, is being dominated by an influx of foreigners, not the foreigners some thought would come here to take all our jobs in hairdressing post European Union membership, but foreigners who largely end up on building sites (the men), or in our booming sex trade (the girls, literally).

With the Vatican insisting on celibate priests and hearing about boatloads of Salahs arriving in various destinations in the Mediterranean on flimsy boats, or the many Svetlanas now being ferried up and swooped into court on a Saturday night, collected from now past their prime spots like Qawra and Paceville, it’s made it a sex dominated week, hasn’t it?

Xarabank, on Friday night, too chose sex as its subject, and showed us the two very contrasting sides of attitudes to sex locally. The minority girls and boys who are saving their sexual activity for marriage, or those who treat sex with each other very much on a take away basis. You get what you can. You enjoy it. And you make no demands and forget about it tomorrow. And throw away the packaging of course!

There is also the big mass in the middle who don’t have totally casual sex, but have sex within meaningful relationships who barely got a look in, so we always end up with the mistaken impression that the two extremes dominate, while I think more of us lie, to coin a phrase, in the in-between ground.

And on Saturday night our courts were filled to capacity with Svetlanas or whatever accused of all manner of unbecoming sexual conduct. Whether policing the sprouting of dancing bars cum brothels or whatever is going to make the slightest bit of difference to sexual behaviour locally I am not sure, but we do need better regulation coupled with some more honest and less hypocritical thinking about the whole issue of sex in Malta, and how to regulate those who pay for it or get paid for it.

I don’t frequent these bars but there have been many stories of very young boys being allowed in, of very young girls performing certain services, of free for alls which as per usual revolve around alcohol and some drugs, and I think we do need to do more not to keep young people in cotton wool, but to allow a bit of maturity before you experience certain things.

An interesting statistic revealed to the Xarabank programme was that if you add up all the internet sites together, there are four times as many dedicated to sex alone as there are to all the others combined. So while most of us would like, ostrich-like, to bury our heads in the sand, and believe society is made up of men and women whose sexual gratification is either from each other or the odd fling on the side, reality is very, very different.

I am not sure why so many are so shocked by the arrival of these Russians, the term we use here to describe anyone blonde from Eastern Europe. When I was only in my middle teens, I went to a New Year’s Eve party with my first Maltese boyfriend and his group of friends at a hotel.

All of 17 years old and pretty innocent, we were regaled with these fat, flabby pre-Botox and pre-aerobic middle aged English dancers with G-type strings and tassles on their nipples dancing away. Most of us thought it was a scream. The dancing was as bad as the food, and in that respect not a lot has changed on New Year’s Eve, but I suppose this type of thing has now grown so it is available any night of the week in certain venues.

Last Thursday too I was having a late night glass of wine in St Julian’s when a couple who had been arguing for a while, suddenly both went to the bathroom together. They both emerged around 30 minutes later arranging their clothes and avoiding eye contact with anyone, and it was amazing that this respectable venue was probably being used for toilet sex too? So less than ideal behaviour really is all around us if we open our eyes, and much of it is nothing new, except perhaps that internet is fanning sexual desire ever younger.

While some newspapers reported these foreigners and Maltese being charged in our courts, the Torca yesterday showed us pictures of these young, very young East European babes, dressed identically to your average Maltese girl on her Paceville night out, emerging from police vans. Very many residential areas in Malta are being blighted by these bars and the behaviour that goes with the territory.

We all know what hell it must be to live in certain areas of Msida and Ta’ Xbiex, and do we intend to go on with this policy of allowing prostitution and loitering to spread everywhere? Wouldn’t it be far better to have a totally regulated brothel or two where we could ensure the girls were Aids-free (and the visitors), where the girls were at least 18, where they had a right to be living and working here and where it all happened inside and we stopped exposing our children to all this stuff in our streets?

The sex trade is booming. That may be sad indictment of our society but we need to get our skates on, leave hypocrisy behind, and try to find sensible ways to regulate and control this now totally out of control trade, without wasting the time of 40 police officers on a Saturday night to round up some dancing girls.

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