If every lap-dancing club in the country were to burn down overnight, what of value would have been lost? We have more than enough commodified servility in our society as it is. Service to others is a useful thing, and paid service can at least approximate fair exchange, but one can serve without performing servility.

The basic reason why sex workers are held in contempt by society at large is not that they are unfairly stigmatised for the moral impurity of their trade (although there is that), but that feigning sexual servility is universally held to be contemptible: the performance of such servility is one of the most efficient ways one mammal can signal its inferiority and submission to another. Sex work is about enabling men to feel superior even though they’re not. Contempt is absolutely intrinsic to the equation: it’s what the punter’s paying for.

The utopia imagined by sex workers’ unions, in which sex work is physically safe, culturally destigmatised and legally protected, is a utopia incapable of sustaining the demand for sex work, which is fundamentally a demand for submission, degradation and vulnerability. Nobody wants a clean, legal, psychologically undamaged whore - neither the punter nor the would-be saviour of the fallen.

The question of what to do about this is multiply vexed, but ultimately I think that the demand for physical safety and an end to legal persecution is one that must be upheld. We should do all that we can to make sex work boring and unattractive to punters, if for no other reason than sheer spite and resentment (there are other, better reasons, but we may as well take the hit - yes, yes, we want to suffocate and diminish others’ pleasure); and the way to do that is to empower sex workers themselves. Eventually even the most adamantly sex positive might get tired of abasing themselves for the amusement of shitbags; the problem that might then arise would be that of preventing the shitbags from making the logical transition to abusing children instead (some will have made a start already).

There’s some truth in the line that prostitution acts as a safety valve, but what it draws off and diverts is not pent-up sexual desire but the frustrations of idiot machismo - those braying twats stuffing wads of cash into a stripper’s G-string are acting out their own pernicious little alpha-male fantasies of wealth and power and female sexual availability, idolators of an image of satisfaction that can never be realised without someone else being diminished, subordinated and instrumentalised. (Whether that other person feels diminished, subordinated and instrumentalised is besides the point: they’re paying her to act like she is - and act like she’s loving it. Maybe it’s possible to put on that act and feel really great about it. Maybe).

With respect to lap-dancing clubs, the obvious solution is for them to be taken into state ownership, run as co-operatives, and for their profits to be used to fund sex education (with a particular emphasis on teaching men not to be imbeciles), rape crisis clinics and the manufacture of small guillotines for the de-goolification of those who make a persistent nuisance of themselves. It remains our conviction that it is not the “moral majority” who are most threatened by the thought of sex workers who are not victimised, dirtied and secretly miserable, but rather their clients. What will you do nights now, Mr. Teece?