The dreadful fuss about erotic dancing in clubs for men is dangerous because it could lead to the obfuscation of the real issue here, which is white slavery. There are eastern European women in Malta who have been brought here under false pretences of regular employment, and who then have their passports seized by their “employers”, and are kept in slavery, farmed out for sex. Men pool together to “import” a woman and then takes out shares in her, renting her out for a month to this man, for four months to that man, or just hiring her out on an ad hoc basis, to all-comers, including those who want something extra for a stag party. The women are trapped. They are here illegally, they have no passport or papers, and they can’t go to the police because they are never alone. Some of them rationalise it by saying that going to the police would mean immediate deportation, but if they endure their hard labour in the sex camp for a little while longer, they might be freed. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens when Romania and Bulgaria join the European Union very soon, and all the Romanian and Bulgarian white slaves no longer fear going to the police. I imagine that the nasty types who run this kind of cottage business will turn to Russians even more than they do already.

Dancing, though – whatever the state of undress and the use of props like poles, tables and men’s crotches – is something else. It is not a crime. Dancing round poles and on laps is the 20th century Western equivalent, now carried on into the 21st century, of what Salome was doing a couple of thousand years ago in the Old Testament, and which survived in Middle Eastern belly-dancing and variations of the Dance of the Seven Veils. The curious thing is that belly-dancing – which when correctly performed is extremely erotic – is now looked upon as the

oriental equivalent of Maltese folk-dancing but with jiggling breasts in a sequinned top, and something for the tourists. Yet the original purpose of this form of dance was to liven up the proceedings at feasts attended only by men. Closer in time and place, there were no poles in the Strait Street bars, but I imagine that there was plenty of sitting and wriggling on laps – only now they do it to music and call it dancing – and plenty of naughty prancing, by women in barely-there clothes and by what in Thailand are known as “lady-boys”, wearing stockings, suspenders and high heels. Lap and pole-dancing would be illegal only when it is performed by underage girls and boys for men – even though, to judge by the reports I read in the news-papers about the sexual preferences of some men here, a club like that would be packed at the seams every night.

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I rather suspect that much of the pressure for the clamp down on lap-dancing and pole-dancing is generated by feelings of distaste for something that is considered “dirty” or corrupting of Maltese Roman Catholic society. And of course, if something offends our sensibilities, we imagine that it should be illegal, forgetting that the natural conclusion of that line of thinking is a totalitarian state or the return of the Inquisition. Sex is only criminal when children or non-consenting adults are involved. We have moved on from the days when the state sat in the bedroom and banned any form of non-standard intercourse between married couples, any form of sex between men, and adultery.

Erotic dancing by women who are paid to do it, in order to lure into clubs men to whom they then sell horribly expensive drinks, is not illegal. For a woman to have sex with men of her own free will, in exchange for money or goods, is not illegal either. If it were, there are many otherwise respectable women who would fall into this category. There are marriages and other forms of sexual partnership which, when boiled down to their very essence, amount to little more than the tacit agreement to provide sex (the woman) in exchange for financial support (the man). That is the crux of the matter. When prostitutes are arrested and prosecuted, it is not for having sex in exchange for money, but for loitering in a public place with the intention to do so. That’s why so many of them in Gzira hang around in their doorways and windows, rather than on the pavement. Pimping women, living off their earnings as prostitutes, and forcing them into white slavery is, on the other hand, highly illegal and that is what we should be looking at. It is illegal because it involves the cruel exploitation of others.

What consenting adults do between themselves is their own business, if it does not infringe the rights of third parties or harm them. This principle is so firmly entrenched in democratic thought that when it was tested at the extreme limit, in the trial in Germany of a man who killed and ate another man at his own request, the judges were flummoxed. In the end, he received a relatively short sentence, and that for manslaughter. The entire case turned on whether it was true that the man who fantasised about being eaten – and who searched on the internet for somebody with a cannibalism fetish to do it – had really asked for this to happen. It was decided that he had. Horrible, yes – but when a principle is established, you can’t start cutting bits off it here and there, to suit personal taste, because then the entire principle is severely compromised and undermined.

There are people who don’t like the idea of near-naked women twisting themselves round poles or grinding themselves in men’s laps, in order to extract as much money as possible from these men. Most of these people are women, and men think that it’s because we’re envious. This shows, in yet another way, how little most men understand women’s psychology. Women dislike lap-dancing and pole-dancing not because it demeans other women (after all, the greatest pleasure of many women is to see other women brought low). It’s because it demeans the men. The dancing women have the upper hand in these situations, and the men are reduced to salivating idiots whose brains migrate south. They are plundered and manipulated while they goggle and snigger, making utter fools of themselves. This is very off-putting to women – including, it has to be said, to the dancers themselves – because women in general are most attracted to men they can respect and admire, and are completely turned off by fools.

Decency is seen as the hallmark of masculinity and is a quality even more magnetic than liquidity. Coupled with liquidity, it is irresistible. Men don’t know this. They think women are attracted by good looks, cool (for which read, desperate) behaviour, and displays of sexual prowess. They should ask themselves why the men who have been married for years without straying, who are staid and “boring” and who are raising children, who would never dream of going to a lap-dancing club or running off with a Russian prostitute, are the heaviest targets for single women and for unhappily married ones. Women do not compete over men who tuck money into the G-string of somebody gyrating on their cocktail table, or who pay for sex with eastern European white slaves. They compete over men who don’t. It’s the latter who send women all the right mating signals, and men think it’s the former. It would be funny, were it not so sad.

Women pick sexually stable men because they are attracted to their perform-ance so far, but the cruel irony is that successful achievement of their goal in getting their married man means that he is not so admirable after all. They find out too late that the man who leaves the mother of his first lot of children for another woman will not agonise too much about leaving the mother of his second lot of children. Of course, this is a general rule, and I am talking about women who deliberately prise men away from their marriages, and not the natural demise of a first union and the development of a second one. Whenever I hear a woman claim with pride that she has succeeded in getting a man to leave his wife for her, which is a way of boasting that theirs is a Great Love and that she is Cleopatra and Theodora rolled into one, I can’t help thinking: “Watch it, darling – 10 years down the road, it will be you who’s being left.” I suppose these women know this, which is why second wives or partners (given that we have no divorce) tend to be so much more suspicious and possessive than first ones.