The facts of life: the sex industry

Over the past 30 years, there has been a huge increase in the number of pornographic films made. In the late 1970s, only 100 35mm adult feature films were made per year; now more than 10,000X-rated films are produced annually.

The UK's first mainstream lap-dancing club, For Your Eyes Only, opened 13 years ago. Today there are more than 300 such clubs in the country twice as many as four years ago.

According to official estimates, there are around 80,000 people working as prostitutes in the UK. Up to 70 per cent were coerced into prostitution as young people and 90 per cent of these have Class A drug habits.

A recent Mori poll on British adults' attitudes to paying for sex found the vast majority of men and women would find it "unacceptable" if their partner paid for sex, while around half would back a law to decrease the number of women trafficked into the UK.

A recent survey of the London off-street sex industry, Big Brothel, commissioned by the Poppy Project, was the most comprehensive study ever conducted into UK brothels. It gathered information from 921 brothels and found that prices for full sex range from 15 to 250, with more than a third of brothels offering unprotected sex. The brothels' combined earnings were estimated at between 86m and 209.5m.

There are around 90 licensed sex shops trading in the UK.

According to the Durex global sex survey, 21 per cent of people in the UK make use of vibrators and 34 per cent use lubricants in their sex lives. A fifth would like to try an orgasm enhancing gel, 14 per cent would consider aphrodisiacs or pheromones and 13 per cent would be interested in a spray to delay male orgasm.

The world's oldest known dildo is a 20cm siltstone phallus from the Upper Palaeolithic period (30,000 years ago) that was found in Hohle Fels Cave near Ulm, Germany.

Vibrators were produced commercially several years before either the electric vacuum cleaner and the electric iron. Doctors used to use them to treat female patients suffering from "hysteria". The first vibrator, invented in 1869, was steam-powered (the engine was in a separate room). An electro-mechanical version appeared in the 1880s, and a battery-powered model, for "self-treatment at home", in 1899. A 1918 Sears catalogue of home electrical appliances included a portable vibrator with attachments. It was billed as "very useful and satisfactory for home service".

In Australia, the vice industry is growing at a rate of about 8 per cent a year: the country spent $11.3bn on prostitution and strippers last year.

The first ever pornographic film is believed to have been 'A l'Ecu d'Or' (also known as La Bonne Auberge), which was made in France in 1908. This was after the first Path newsreels, but before the first Western feature film. It depicts a weary soldier who has a tryst with a serving-girl.

In Ancient Greece, hetaerae were courtesans with a special status in society. Independent women, they had to pay taxes and wear distinctive dresses. They were known for their achievements in dance and music, as well as for their other physical talents.

In a poll published this month, for Channel 4's The Sex Education Show, 27 per cent of 14- to 17-year-old boys in the UK admitted accessing pornography at least once a week.