So Paceville bosses don’t pay their lap-dancers. Typical.

Chris Cardona, Minister for the Economy but known as the Minister for Lap-Dancing because of his fascination with – some say unofficial business involvement – the sector. Lap-dancing club owner Ronnie Axisa, quoted here, is one of his associates.

Lap-dancing clubs are going to be regulated by a specific law. What in-put did Minister Chris Cardona and ex-Minister Manuel Mallia have here?

Chris Cardona has a long-term fascination with lap-dancing clubs, and Manuel Mallia’s birthday party this year was hosted by his client Frankie Grima, a long-time Paceville boss (he shot a man dead at his Bamboo Bar in 1992) and owner of a lap-dancing club.

It’s good that they’re going to be regulated, if only for the protection of the employees.

Did I say employees? My mistake. On TVM tonight, TimesTalk was about this proposed law, and one of the guests was Ronnie Axisa, who owns a lap-dancing club. The women who dance, he said, are all from eastern Europe and many of them are here with their husband and children (which only goes to show just how desperate they are, is my view).

They’re not paid, he said. They’re ‘freelancers’. The only money they get is in the form of tips from customers.

That’s not freelancing, Mr Axisa. When I freelanced for newspapers, it was the newspapers which paid me, not my readers.

Yes, the women in Malta’s lap-dancing clubs work for free but keep their tips. The club-owners get their labour for free.

This is double exploitation: the exploitation of workers and the exploitation of desperate women. “They’re there because they want to be,” Ronnie Axisa said. “Nobody is forcing them.”

Oh, right – like refuse collectors and street sweepers are there because they want to be and nobody is forcing them.

Maybe Axisa is so deluded as to believe that every woman dreams of dancing naked or half-naked in front of a bunch of repulsive, pathetic men who they would secretly love to stamp on and scrape off the soles of their shoes even as they smile at them and gyrate hard so as to get the tips they desperately need to put food on the table and pay the electricity bill.

I don’t think men fully understand just how disgusting women find them in situations like that – yes, even the women who dance for them. Especially the women who dance for them.