The real reason why gentlemen prefer whores

Why get into tangles that could involve unwanted sprogs, shrill, weepy phone calls and general hassle?

Most probably it was the come-hither blonde wig I was wearing on Saturday night (explanation: I was asked to represent Finland at a Eurovision Song Contest party) which started me thinking about how I would feel if my husband was found out after spending precious time and energetic effort with a tart.

It would be a shock, and I would worry about diseases and things, but I think (or thought then) I would mind less than if I discovered he'd had a one-night stand with a woman he fancied or couldn't resist because he was drunk. Worst of all, of course, would be that searing experience of finding out that your bloke has a long-term lover.

I blurted out a little too confidently to my husband that Angus Deayton's nocturnal adventures with a sex worker didn't feel as grave or wrong as they might have done long, long ago when we were too ready to be judgmental. Deayton's partner of nine years, the 44-year-old scriptwriter Lise Meyer has ­ for now ­ forgiven him because she too, like the acrtress Liz Hurley, doesn't think it is the most calamitous thing to happen in a relationship. She told a journalist: "I am not getting some totally life-changing bit of news that I am never going to recover from."

Are we right to be so sanguine? Or is this yet another area of life where there is more confusion and complexity than we can handle? The world in which we live no longer knows how to evaluate anything to do with sex, mostly because to express any anxieties on the subject feels old-fashioned and censorious.

Prostitution is as old as walls and wells, and has featured in every major civilisation. But each time and place produced its own moral framework to accommodate or declare war on this near-universal human activity, always leading to varying degrees of humiliation, deceit and hypocrisy.

Have we got rid of any of these in our modern times? Have we so broken away from past values about sex and propriety that nobody cares about such secret passions any more? Is any kind of disapproval relevant in the current situation where a successful, handsome dandy had a romp with blonde call-girl, Caroline Martin, who is keen to show that she is nobody's fool or victim?

Well yes, and I have to thank my husband for talking me through the reasons. The reason I wouldn't find prostitutes a threat is because, like Ms Meyer, I don't consider such women could seriously affect my relationship. They are so low-life, so unworthy, that no real middle-class man would take them up as a proper partner.

Ms Martin's vulnerability becomes more obvious when you read that she says she fell in love with Deayton, which may or may not be delusion or manipulation. There was no money exchanged, so maybe there was some Pretty Woman fantasy at play here. But for Angus and his missus such aspirations would be laughable. As they are for people like us.

So, far from being tolerant, my early reactions were morally flawed. I was only interested in my own interests. I assumed that lower standards were OK for prostitutes, that they can have things done to them without any emotional engagement, that they live and have sex like bestial creatures only in the realm of physicality. Men being men will need their services and it saves everyone much drama if this is done by filleting sexual need from all those other qualities which make men what they are.

Many people ­ feminists included ­ believe that such views of the prostitute as victim have become dangerously outdated. Indeed, many sex workers say that they are powerful, happy and rich and furthermore that they resent the patronising campaigners who question the whole trade. But can this be true?

Prostitutes provide a product. They are no more powerful than a greengrocer who sells onions. Do we think a greengrocer is immensely powerful because he or she has goods which consumers want? Neither has much choice in whom they serve ­ the good, bad, sad, ugly or violent can all make demands if they have the right money in their pockets. The truth that some punters who go to prostitutes are inadequate and weak doesn't make their service providers intrinsically more powerful. A barmaid who serves slurring and disoriented drunks isn't powerful either.

Then the question remains of why gentlemen prefer whores even these days when all is unzipped for free. Could it be that our new male celebs need to know that their money can buy them anything? It is obviously less risky for a name to go to such ladies than to have affairs where they may get into scrapes like the awful Brian Aldridge in The Archers. Why get into tangles which could bring along unwanted sprogs, shrill weepy phone calls, and general hassle? Was Mr Deayton going to tell his patient lady of his antics or did he have to because it was all exposed?

Prostitution is still wrong because of all sorts of other lies and hypocrisy which it generates. In Northern towns, or in Neasden in London you often meet wise religious mullahs and Hindu temple priests who tell you that prostitution is an evil that does not exist in their communities. They never talk about the long courtesan tradition in India and Pakistan or discuss the spread of Aids in the slum whorehouses of Bombay.

In the very heart of these "virtuous" enclaves in Britain you find the cruellest, most greedy and hateful pimps who deliberately target white girls because they are "trash" anyway. In Africa, black women prostitutes in urban centres are sleeping with the ruling classes and businessmen of all backgrounds, men who would kick away a black baby if it came crawling playfully into their doorways. Even those who claim a kind of affection for that soil and its peoples describe the carnality of black prostitutes (Paul Theroux, for example, in My Secret History) which hurts to read.

One of my favourite books in the Sixties was Okello Oculi's Prostitute, part poem, part prose. He wrote of the raging desires and pain in the heart of a sex worker: "I want to love I want to fall in love To forget myself To immerse myself in emotional madness... Dogs, big black dogs with fat lips and very red eyes Rush forward to bark and spit at me They bite hard."

That was way back when times were slightly more benevolent than they are today in the sex trade. The enslavement of girls and women for the sex industry is one of the biggest businesses in the world. Old and new Mafia gangs find it much more lucrative than selling drugs in some areas and only last week an exposé was made of how such entrepreneurs imprison helpless and hopeful young women from eastern Europe, Africa and Asia into lives of degradation.

Fast-living Deayton probably believes his two nights of illicit sex with a prostitute have no connection to these sordid realities. But they do, of course they do. And the scandal is that, because he is so admired, all of us have made excuses, or have chosen to laugh and joke about the farce, preferring to make light of what happened. After all, it was only a sexy harlot, of some use but no value whatsoever. Not the sort of person who would get invited on Have I Got News For You?