I am not convinced of the efficacy of using the law to change social mores. Certainly, the law has a big impact; I know that the rebel in me, the part of me that still rankles and wrestles and agitates, has its roots in my adolescence, when it dawned on me that having sex was illegal. I still simmer on the fuel of that outrage sometimes, the resentment of the outlaw. David Norris used the psychological impact of being criminalized as grounds for his (eventually successful) legal challenge to that law, and I can quite accept that it was as depressing and demoralizing as he and his psychological assessors claimed in court. But did it stop him from having sex? I doubt it. It certainly didn’t stop me. Even on pain of life imprisonment, desire has a way of asserting itself. One might even make the argument that such legal bondage increases desire rather than dampens it. Because there is a component of sex that is anarchic. Sex can offer the experience of transgression from duty and responsibility and rationality, it takes us out of the mundane, the ordinary, the civilized, the safe, the known. Legislators and moralists may decry this behaviour and wish to deny it, to stamp it out – down with that sort of thing – but, like the Hydra, the more one hacks off those feral heads, the more they keep on a-growing back.

And yet there has to be some way of regulating it, of taming the beast, I acknowledge that. It’s driven us crazy since time immemorial – Sophocles, on being sympathized with about growing old and losing his sex drive, replied that, on the contrary, it was like being unchained from a lunatic. The word lunatic is telling – it comes from luna, the word for the moon, which symbolises feelings, body, intuition, the chthonic, the Dionysian – as opposed to solar qualities of rationality, order, the Apollonian. How we deal with lunatics tends to be very similar to how we treat sexual anarchists. In the not-so-distant Irish past, the Magdalen laundries were evidence that, in our culture, the two were treated in exactly the same way – sexuality in women was lunacy, and there was only one response: lock them up and throw away the key. As is all too common with religion, the compassion and love shown to the original Mary Magdalen by Jesus got obscenely distorted into a cruel fundamentalist judgmentalism.

The current Irish law that criminalizes prostitutes (sadly introduced in the same Act that decriminalized homosexuality) perpetuates this cultural association. Sending whores to prison serves the same scapegoating function in society as putting lunatics in an asylum. It bolsters a sense of moral certainty and safety, but does fuck all for the benighted inmates. The modern, sensible approach to mental health is a community-care based model, but sadly that is still under-resourced and primitive in Ireland, perhaps betraying an unconscious fear that if we let them into our community, we have to relate to them, and by coming into relationship with lunacy, sexual or mental or spiritual, we have to face our fear that it’s catching.

We can’t lock our troubles away as a society, it just doesn’t work. To conquer the Hydra, we need to raise it up to the sun, bring it out into the open, discuss the complex issues, make sense of them, negotiate with them. Can anyone honestly say that sending (for example) a father of three to jail after a drunken night on the town, in which he ended up in a working girl’s bed, serves any useful purpose?

I am, sadly, a moral relativist. I can’t see that moral absolutes serve us when it comes to desire; context is all, for I do not believe that there is anything inherently wrong with consensual sex. Friends of mine who wrestle with the beast (and they are mostly men, it has to be said, testosterone is not to be sneezed at as an influence) attempt all sorts of ways to control it, to moderate it. In gay culture especially, the sexualized man is increasingly the norm, no longer the outlaw, as any visit to gaydar.ie will demonstrate. I know some of my friends hold on to a fierce sense of personal judgmentalism about this aspect of the gay scene, of male hypersexuality, and I sometimes wince at the force of it; it pushes my button marked “sinful outlaw” and I get defensive, no matter how hard I work on it. I object when personal standards become universal ones, when people use a particularly harsh personal rule to keep themselves on the straight and narrow, and judge others by the same standards. My response is that people are different. Some of us have a vigorously energetic lunatic tugging at our chain all our lives, while others simply do not have any experience of it. I do not judge someone who’s only been monogamous as being “better” in any way than someone who has had lots of sex with lots of different people. It’s only if someone is dishonest or hypocritical, that’s when my hackles rise.

The lunatic energy can be put to use in a different way, however. As my dear old Dad has always told me, the trick is to sublimate, to use that energy to fuel something else instead. He built a business on it, as he only got married at the age of 40. It’s a classically Freudian perspective, and although Freud is outdated in many ways, I find his writing on sex still relevant today.

What’s fascinating though is that when in the grip of that lunatic force, but using it differently, as I have been recently when obsessively throwing myself into a redesign of my blog that took several long days and nights, I recognise that the essence of my experience is very similar to when I’ve gone a-hunting for sex. The same feeling of being in the grip of something beyond my control. The same dogged pursuit of something intensely selfish and creative, at the expense of everything else. It’s the neglect of the relational, the domestic, the mundane, defying Hera and following Zeus, reaching for the stars. I’ve been like the archetypal nutty professor forgetting to eat or sleep or do the washing up. What I abandon in those crazy periods is any interest in the matrix of social networking, of keeping in touch with friends and family, which, for reasons of socialization or genetic makeup, women excel at. The accountability, the keeping in touch, the checking out how every one is, who was asking after whom, how so-and-so is coping, how that couple are getting on. It’s the naming of people, the placing of people, the socializing of people. In the grip of a creative lunatic frenzy, sexual or otherwise, such normalcy seems toxic.

But it passes. It always does. And then we get on with things.

“Before enlightenment, eat rice, wash bowl. After enlightenment, eat rice, wash bowl.”

Of course, Peter Stringfellow is not involved with prostitution, and I imagine, with all the publicity he gets, he runs a squeaky-clean business. But he uses sexual fantasy to sell alcohol and entertainment, and anything outside the imagined norm of stable family life gets tarred with the same brush of sexual exploitation. In this fabled world, the passive commodity of female flesh is owned and traded and repackaged and bleached and dyed and shaved and tanned and nipped and tucked; inflated and deflated and poked and leered and ogled at, and made to perform like Pavlov’s dogs, to music, in sequins.But that norm (and its transgression) is predicated on a domestic bourgeois conceit that no one ever experiences real hunger – a hunger so overwhelming that risks are taken. I’m talking hunger for food, for escape, for flesh, for novelty, for adventure, for connection – for the sacred, for fantasy, for ritual, for pleasure, for love, for release, for meaning, for attention. It is in this maelstrom of hungers that the sex industry operates, and they are often murky waters, with plenty of sharks. But, at its simplest, for every Natacha from Bratislava, starving for a better life in the West, there is a Paddy-Joe from Navan, yearning for the taste of a supple young body. In the market economy that is heterosexuality, the two satisfy each other’s hungers, and move on. There is no exploitation, unless it’s mutual. For there is nothing wrong with sex, per se. Women who are selling sex are not victims, per se, and anyone who says they are is saying that women are passive pawns in their own game, without any will or power or responsibility. The commercialising of sex may be emotionally numbing, relationship prospects for a sex worker may not be ideal, but it can be a good living and many a student or a single parent has been very grateful for the work. What goes on between consenting adults is nobody’s business but their own. Unless you count the inland revenue.

However, those involved in prostitution are often there for a myriad of chaotic and confusing reasons, often with stories of childhood neglect and hurt and abuse and addiction to tell. Wherever there are desperately hungry people, who have learned patterns of destruction and self-destruction from an early age, there are those who take advantage of them. As well as those sex workers I’ve listened to as an alcohol counsellor, I’ve seen, plenty of times, in London’s Kings Cross, vicious pimps shoving their needle-thin drug-fucked girls out to work, and witnessed just how low human beings can go in the urban jungle.On the other hand, while I’ve been in Italy, I’ve heard a completely different tale. In a village in my area, a wife and mother of three has a new spring in her step because she’s started offering personal services to other men in the area, one of whom has an invalid wife. She’s been telling people how delighted she is with all the sex she’s been having, and how much weight she’s lost. Her husband must know, but it’s presumed their children don’t. Apparently it’s quite a common and acceptable feature of rural Italian life, especially in the South. This seems to be quite a practical and sensible acknowledgement of desire, and how to meet it, without the shame and loathing that seems to accompany such matters in these North-Western isles.

Our society, in particular, has so much to learn from prostitutes. No group is better placed to assess a society and its failings, to know about a people and its faults, than those forced outside. If we protected prostitutes instead of criminalized them, we would be infinitely richer. As in practically all areas of adult victimless behaviour, criminalizing an activity does not make it go away, it just forces it underground, where it operates unseen, festering on society’s underbelly, dominated, as in most criminal worlds, by psychopathic bullies. Prostitution must be decriminalized. In addition, if heroin were legalised but controlled and made available to addicts cheaply, with counselling and support, many of the estimated 600 or so prostitutes in Ireland would not have to whore to feed their habit, freeing them to make less desperate choices.

But not necessarily different ones.

Listen: