Hookers have been on the national agenda. Tediously, the topic has been about taxing hookers. (Yawn!) Far more interesting would have been a national debate about the seedy transactional nature of paying someone for a minute, an hour or an evening of wild sexual abandon. As an aspiring cosmopolitan, I have never fully understood the global taboo against selling sex. As Sex and the City icon Samantha Jones argues: "Sex is power and money is power. Sex for money is just an exchange of power."

Despite centuries of societal scorn and forceful legal, religious and moral attempts to wipe it out, prostitution persists as a profession. Even in highly oppressive countries like Saudi Arabia or Iran, working girls thrive underground. What gives?

Leading pop singers, Pink, Christina, Kim, Mya ham it up as the ladies of the Moulin Rouge. Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?

The fact is that the hooker mops up excess male sexual demand, which always exceeds female supply, mollifies male loneliness and fulfils "abnormal" male fantasies, which can become dangerous if left unfulfilled. She is a critical pressure valve between civilised culture and raw animal instincts. In some instances, prostitution has probably prevented rape.

Even in our very permissive age, women do not give it up with the frequency with which men desire it. Men are often required to jump through so many hoops to 'get it on' (dinner, flowers, nice words in her ear and still no guarantee of horizontal favours) that often it is just easier and cheaper to pay for it.

Moreover, the male imagination has always surpassed where most "nice" girls have historically been willing to go. From a young age, I have had an active interest in pornography both for personal titillation and intellectual curiosity. I have even sought out visual materials which were not a turn-on for me, just in order to have a fuller view of what excites the male mind. The list of categories and proclivities at a porn shop in any major Western city makes clear that we can fetishise and sexualise anything. The male (read fathers, husbands and sons) sexual imagination is avaricious and bizarre.

The hooker fills the important void between fantasy and reality; she is our collective dream weaver. What "normal" man will admit to wanting to spend an evening licking a woman's toes, being walked on in heels, being ridden like a horse, living out sadomasochistic impulses or participating in dom-sub verbal play? The list of our secret desires is endless. With the hooker, he only needs to be able to pay, and she (unlike his wife or girlfriend) will never judge. As a goddess of the underworld, she has already seen it all. She is both a solace and a testament to the normality of his "abnormal" sexual fantasies.

As Marlene Dietrich stated, a "country without brothels is like a house without bathrooms". There must always be a place for release.

The rise of male hookers is a sign that women are indeed coming into their own in terms of money and unmet sexual needs; these women have entered male space with a vengeance. Rent-a-dread, or white women seeking the illustrious big black bamboo, has always been an unofficial part of our tourist offering. Film hear-tthrob Richard Gere smouldered on the screen as Julian Bond in American Gigolo who financed his penchant for fast cars and designer living by servicing the sexually frustrated of Beverly Hills. Boys will be boys and girls will be boys. Yet the female pursuit of working boys pales in comparison to the male demand for working girls.

About a decade ago, the British actor Hugh Grant got caught with the lusciously lipped Divine Brown in the back seat of a car. The world was up in arms. How could a good-looking, successful guy like that need a prostitute? How could he go for someone like Divine with such a hot babe like the model Elizabeth Hurley as his girlfriend? And if he did want a prostitute, why a cheap $30 blow job instead of a high-class hooker who could discreetly come to his hotel room?

At the time, I had hoped that collectively we would have had an open, cathartic discussion about hookers. The very thing that was shocking us was EXACTLY what made it sooo erotic for Grant. Instead we all ran back into our collective closets and labelled him an abnormal weirdo. And rather than owning his shadow, he sheepishly apologised to the public for letting us down - as if it really was our business who he wanted to get it on with in a dark alley.

The very act of paying a woman for sex is itself erotic. (Yes, read fathers, husbands, and sons). The very nature of the episode with Divine, a black street -walker in the back of a car, electrified Grant's erotic imagination. "Look at me, big movie star Hugh Grant with a nice-boy image, taking this dangerous chance that I might get caught while degrading myself with a lusciously lipped black hooker." In the court filing, she said he "came" very quickly.

Sex is eroticised by the forbidden. The reason married couples stop having sex is because it is entirely permitted and, therefore, loses much of its erotic appeal. An acquaintance once told me that the best sex he ever had was with his wife's younger sister on the matrimonial bed. While I was morally appalled, I completely understood. The extra erotic charge was due to the breaking of multiple taboos.

We have never properly understood or discussed the erotic appeal of what I call "sexual structures". A sexual structure is a situation which is itself erotic irrespective of the specific participants involved. Pornography has grown into a multi-billion dollar industry by appealing to these structural fantasies, with its corny set-ups of schoolgirl with teacher, wife with gardener, nurse with patient, man with step-daughter, husband with wife's sister etc. A proper public discussion of the Hugh Grant scandal could have allowed for all this to come to the forefront. Sadly, it was not to be.

A few years later, social chroniclers of scandal were blessed with Heidi Fleiss and her dangerous black book which contained names of famous actors (like Charlie Sheen), businessmen and numerous international politicians (with allegedly at least one famous Jamaican). Still we learnt nothing.

Fast-forward to 2008 which brought the downfall of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, the moral crusader with his $80K a year expenditure on unprotected sex with nubile middle-class girls. Again we were shocked. What is a nice, happily married man with two beautiful daughters doing with a hooker bill larger than most people's salaries? His dangerous liaison, Ashley Dupré, looks like every man's daughter, not some washed- up, drugged-out street walker. She even has a university degree. Dear Athena, when will we learn that the buyers and sellers of sex are often people we all know?

In our sexually permissive, money-obsessed age, prostitution will become increasingly a mainstream job choice like any other profession. If her best intellectual efforts will likely yield a meagre living of US$15K a year, why do we condemn her for using other assets to make US$50K a year? Is she too not worthy of Louis Vuitton dreams?

I have never understood the collective disdain for hookers, especially from women who would give it up for dinner or a drink at a bar. Far more "undesired sex is endured by women in marriage than in prostitution", says British philosopher Bertrand Russell.
I am cautiously optimistic about the new Showtime offering of the Secret Diary of a Call Girl which chronicles the real life of Hannah and her alter ego Belle. She is the hooker figure whom I have longed to see on mainstream TV: empowered, drug-free and fabulous. Bad girls are not always sad girls. It is not just women without any other options who become prostitutes. "I love money and sex," says Belle in the opening episode. Don't we all?

The prostitute defies a man's ability to possess her. She rents her body but no one owns it, although many may try. She may be an object of pity if dire circumstances have dictated her career choice (like Fantine in Les Miserables) but she can just as readily be a feminist purveyor of female power who is unwilling to be enslaved by any one man (Madame de Pompadour, Marquis de Sade's Juliette); or she can be a destroyer of men (the Whore of Babylon in Revelations, Profumo Affair's Christine Keeler or Dutch spy Mata Hari); or a redemptive healer (Mary Magdalene, or Nancy from Oliver Twist). The whore's complex literary and factual history defies our infantile view of her as either victim or trash. Camille Paglia posits that "the prostitute is not the victim of men but ultimately their conqueror". Despite strong societal taboos and personal shame, he is compelled to seek out her wares.

The eternal allure of prostitutes and pornography testifies to our moral hypocrisy. They endure because we buy even as we condemn. Priests and politicians may pontificate from public pulpits about propriety, but prostitutes and pornographers carry the secrets of our subconscious. They should be given their proper due as honest brokers of human desire. "Hey Mister, ya got a light?"

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