It's time to reform the sex laws and our minds

What business is it of ours if someone wants sensuous tea with Jilly rather than a tedious bonk with an over-familiar husband?

If you visit the website of the company "Complete Excellence", based somewhere in Dorset, you will be invited to buy something more exotic than country crafts. Jilly and Mike, you soon discover, "are happy to welcome you to their quiet, discreet and beautiful cottage deep in the West of England". For just £220 you can enjoy a "special happening" with the pair of them in the evening, and just in case you are after the authentic English experience, they throw in "sensuous tea in bed with Jilly" the next morning.

Well, they did. For the moment, however, sensuous tea may be off following a police raid. According to the local paper, the Western Gazette, the fuzz moved in on an address in the Dorset town of Shaftesbury (sic), just behind the Somerfield car park (I wonder it it's pay and display), and very close to Gold Hill, where the Hovis advert was filmed. Residents had complained to the newspaper, reporters had visited the flat, which was next door to the offices of a prestigious firm of architects, and the police had been called. "Jilly" (a Ms Julienne Dean) was indignant. "I am a masseuse and therapist," she told the paper, "with a qualification in counselling. I am discreet and have been commended by the police for the way I run the business. I am not a prostitute and nothing I do is illegal."

I am endebted to fellow journalist Rod Liddle for pointing me in the direction of this story, which seems to conclude with Ms Dean lamenting that (in the words of the Gazette) "she was a single parent putting her daughter through school". Her protests coincided with the publication in The Spectator magazine this week of an account of a conversation at a birthday party – somewhere in the sticks – between John Gibb and a woman also known as Jilly. Gibb's Jilly was a middle-class fortyish countrywoman who, it transpired, was a prostitute. Her daughter was at boarding school, the fees were 20 grand a year, and this Jilly and her husband agreed that the best way to cover the expense was by getting into the sex business. Once there, Gibb's Jilly discovered two things. First, that offering sexual services wasn't so bad, and second, that there were other women out there doing the same thing for much the same reasons.

In my book, whatever the situation is said to be in London schools, private boarding education in the countryside is a luxury, not a necessity. Gibb's Jilly was not "driven" into the sex business by penury, by the need to feed a drugs habit or as the result of an abusive relationship with a pimp. She was earning good money, doing a job that she didn't mind, and that she may well have convinced herself was actually therapeutic. Which, in a way, it was.

Back in Shaftesbury, the local vicar doesn't see it that way. He told the Gazette that prostitution was degrading and against the church's teaching. "Sex should always be within marriage," he said, "Acts of sex for profit or manipulation have to be sadly wrong." Then, remembering that he was an Anglican, he added: "It is not for me to condemn how people make their money, but all our lives and natures are God-given for a special purpose and this is not for sexual prostitution, which is a degradation of something so beautiful in the right context." The law seems to agree.

Surf the Net for a few minutes and Jillys are everywhere. Jade in Gloucestershire tells you that her hobbies include "riding my thoroughbred chestnut gelding, swinging parties and erotic sensual massage". Pamela in Chelsea is a 21-year-old model who, with sufficient warning, is available for international travel. "When not busy with my modelling career," reveals Pamela, "I love to socialise, eat out, go to the gym or shopping (especially Agent Provocateur underwear and Gucci shoes), and driving my new BMW convertible." Poor, old Pamela. Who would want to live like that?

This April this newspaper reported on research which estimated that three-quarters of a billion pounds are spent every year by prostitutes' clients. If the average cost of each session was £50 (with massage parlour hand jobs balancing out the sensuous teas), then there are something like 42,000 visits to sex workers every single day.

You may have noticed the change of nomenclature there. The word "prostitution" is now a classic "sex-negative" word. The prostitute is someone who behaves badly and acts immorally for money. The client is somehow sad, and the sex he (occasionally she) seeks is second-best. For both sides it is, as the vicar said, a "degradation". And we treat it that way, harassing those involved in the sex trade and, sometimes, their clients.

The consequence of this attitude is almost wholly unfortunate. As the EU-funded European Network for HIV/STD Prevention in Prostitution recently pointed out in a report, while accepting that many sex industry practices were abusive and exploitative, "sex workers can engage in prostitution through choice". It continued: "We also perceive that many law-enforcement policies increase vulnerability, abuse and exploitation." Covert prostitution made contact with health workers more difficult, actions against parlours and bars sent sex workers onto the streets, closing brothels meant closing the safest environments of all for sex workers to operate in. Laws preventing people "living off immoral earnings" undermined private relationships, without discriminating between the abusive and non-abusive. Nor would formal registration help.

These laws, far from having stopped the exploitation of illegal immigrants by gangs, have helped to ensure the incredible profitability of their operations. And, at the same time, they have stopped certain women from doing jobs they quite like but of which their neighbours disapprove.

At this point you have to ask a fundamental question. Why are we getting involved in preventing or restricting sex work at all? Abuse and coercion can always be legislated against, but why act against the sex trade per se? What business is it of ours (and excuse my language here) if someone wants sensuous tea with Jilly rather than a tedious bonk with an over-familiar husband, a wank over a Richard Desmond magazine or (more likely) nothing at all? If you apply the "damage" test, then non-abusive sex work surely passes it.

In fact, I think I'd go even further. The root problem here, of course, is the notion that paid sex is necessarily bad sex, "degraded" sex. But why should we continue to see it this way? There have been (and still are) plenty of societies where sex work carries little or no stigma and where it is viewed as both inevitable and healthy. What are the chances, one wonders, that some of the respectable burghers of Shaftesbury who have read the Gazette and tutted have themselves had the occasional contact with a hired hand?

I say good luck to them, and maybe they should now come out of the closet and walk openly and proudly into the brothel. Because as I get older and meet and talk to more people, I increasingly see sex and sexuality as a vastly more complex, intricate and individual business than grope, marry and groan. Nor do I discern God's special purpose. And as I become more inclined – out of curiosity – to ask others the question "Why?" I become daily less interested in judging them. Things are changing – it's time to reform both the laws and our minds.

David.Aaronovitch@btinternet.com