Howard Jacobson: To find only exploitation in prostitution is a failure to honour the complexities of sex

Feminism still finds it inconceivable that a woman could enjoy turning her body into brisk business

I always think it insulting to women, myself, that the moment a racy account of life as a hooker or a dominatrix appears in book or blog form, our first suspicion is that it must have been written by a man. Or if not written by a man, written by a woman, cynically, with what a man would like to believe in mind. The latest example of this faux-genre, as we would have it, is ITV's The Secret Diary of a Call Girl, based on the much-read (by men, of course) online diary Belle de Jour. "It's a fantasy," writes Madeleine Bunting in The Guardian, "but it helps buttress men's sense of entitlement to use a prostitute." So these blogs and books and spin-off telly series don't just indulge male fantasy, they encourage men to go one stage further and activate that fantasy into heartless not to say brutal transaction. Not "visit" a prostitute, notice, but "use" her. In other words, depersonalise the woman and do actual or emotional violence to her. Which, to my mind, makes assumptions that insult men as well.

I can't say the latter ploy surprises me. No one's had a good word to say for men's sexuality for decades. But it does seem strange that feminism, for all its liberating energies, still finds it inconceivable that a woman could actually enjoy turning her body into brisk business – enjoy the money, enjoy the independence, and sometimes even enjoy the sex. "I always loved sex, always enjoyed meeting people," Belle de Jour writes, before describing that melancholy and yet oddly invigorating sensation of waking next to a stranger and then "wandering back out into the world – blinking at the sun, dressed in the previous night's clothes". Blinking at the sun has the ring of truth about it to me; but biographi cally true or not, it evokes something of where the adventure of promiscuity lies. An adventure that might well be compromised by money having changed hands, but just how compromised only the all-night hooker herself can tell us.

Except that we appear not to want to trust a word she says. "If you were to believe the world of Belle," writes Rosie Boycott in the Daily Mail, "it's one of the best career moves for a young girl with her heart set on making money in an easy way. There's just one problem with all this: it's nonsense." And then off we go to the statistics – five prostitutes killed in Ipswich last year, 75 per cent of the women selling themselves are under 18, 95 per cent have drug problems, and so on. I don't discount these statistics. There is, however, always another story to be told. Even from the front line of a war we hate, reports of heroism reach us.

Belle de Jour offers to report from the front line of prostitution. Not street prostitution of the sort that provides the statistics of violence and misery, but prostitution all the same. Whether her report tells it how it is we cannot know unless we do it ourselves. And even then we will not know for sure because we are not her. But to call it nonsense out of hand, because we happen on gender-ideology grounds to disapprove of the profession and the desires it serves, is to close our ears to what we do not want to hear. It's not much of an argument, is it? Prostitution is a miserable profession, and when any prostitute tells you otherwise she's lying. So how do you convince Madeleine Bunting and Rosie Boycott that there might be more to be said on the subject – more to be said about prostitutes and more to be said about the men who "use" them? You don't.

I'm not defending what ITV has done with Belle de Jour. Facetiousness being the tone of the hour on telly, facetious is what they've made it. Ill-written, badly paced, without sensuousness, seriousness or wit, the series has even succeeded in doing what the recent televised Mansfield Park couldn't, and turned Billie Piper into an awkward frump. That she had more sex about her as Fanny Price is to her credit. She was clearly more at home speaking Jane Austen's lines, and more comfortable in a pelisse and spencer than in the underwear the designer of The Secret Diary of a Call Girl chose for her. Why, the poor girl even manages to look unappealing in black stockings, and no woman looks unappealing in black stockings.

But then it's just possible, though they have defended themselves stoutly against the criticism of Bunting and Boycott etc, that the women who made the series secretly share their detractors' concerns and kept it light and obvious to avoid having it to confront it dark and subtle.

The sexual instinct is a hydra-headed beast. It would be wrong of me to deny the violence which attaches to prostitution but there's more than one way of being in denial, and those who see only oppressive exploitation in the transaction between prostitute and client also fail to honour the complexities of sex. Some men might go to prostitutes to "use" them, but not all do. The exchange of money is freighted with meaning, and part of what it entails is the man's desire to hold himself cheap, to put himself at the pleading end of the power exchange, to abnegate his masculinity. Without doubt some men go to prostitutes to do them harm; but some go to harm themselves. Others, of course, go because they're desperate, and if paying money is the only way they'll find erotic company for a night, an hour, or just five minutes, then they'll pay it. And some simply go because they can, because they've nothing else to do, because they're bored and feeling hot, want nothing other than an uncomplicated good time, and intend no evil or disrespect by it.

That a prostitute might occasionally be touched by a man's shyness, or made curious by his need to hurt himself, or softened by his loneliness, or just amused by his idle pleasure-seeking – that she might, without being a fictionalised tart with a heart, find something for herself in any of these conditions – does not seem to me impossible. If you don't accept that – if you won't have it that a man can have any motive for visiting a prostitute other than the exercise of brute power – then yours is as vile a view of human nature as the pimp's or pusher's. And if you can't imagine the prostitute being humane enough, sometimes, to be intrigued, softened, engaged or even aroused, then yours is the low view of woman.