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• So, when is it okay to flirt?

London - A famous actor has taken out a High Court injunction, preventing details of his transactions with a prostitute from reaching the public domain and, possibly, the ears of his wife.

Not just any old prostitute, either, but Helen Wood, the super-tanned woman who sold the story of her liaisons with Wayne Rooney to a tabloid.

I’m not here to debate whether or not the rich and famous should be able to keep some vestiges of their lives private. But I am here to say something quite controversial.

I believe that sex with a prostitute doesn’t really, in the greater scheme of things, matter one jot.

Yes, of course it’s seedy, it’s exploitative, demeaning and risky healthwise, but as far as damage to a relationship goes, I believe an affair is so much worse than your husband sleeping with a prostitute. An affair means he loves someone else more than he loves you.

An affair means a man is intimate with another woman - and by this I don’t mean sex. They read together in bed, they share poetry, they giggle and they talk. They share memories.

I speak from bitter experience. What freaked me out was not my own husband’s random philandering, but his emotional affair with a woman.

He took her photo in a stolen moment on a balcony on holiday. He sent her text messages. He dressed up for her - wearing the special Jil Sander jumper that I had bought him. They went to restaurants together. Men don’t do these things for a prostitute.

Oh, of course I would prefer it if my husband or boyfriend did not sleep with hookers, pay for lap dances, or watch pornography on the internet. (I put all these misdemeanours in the same grubby category.)

But I don’t believe that if a man uses the sex industry, in whatever small or big way, it is necessarily a reason to end a marriage or a relationship.

And while I don’t claim to speak for all women, in my view it is certainly not a sufficiently big misdemeanour to destroy his marriage, or ruin his career, or part him from his children.

I am now going to write something that will enrage feminists the world over, and provoke an outraged backlash in the columns of online feminist website Jezebel (which already has an entire section that monitors me, entitled Keeping Up With Jones).

What I have to say makes a mockery of all those glossy magazine features telling us how to “get that multiple orgasm”. It opens a door on all those seemingly perfect relationships and shiny, happy couples.

I don’t believe women are like characters in Sex And The City. We don’t shout and writhe and pursue sex as heartily and relentlessly as men do. It does not occupy our every waking moment.

The truth is: we don’t really enjoy sex that much. And we definitely don’t want sex as often as men do. That is a cold, hard fact.

And women most definitely, incontrovertibly, do not want sex once they have children - or so my friends who have children confess to me. Particularly once their stomachs develop a texture akin to cold porridge.

The only reason we do have sex is to get a man, keep a man, steal his sperm and flatter ourselves that we are attractive.

Once we have a man, his children, his name on a piece of paper, his youth and his house, we no longer want to indulge in that ridiculous, time-consuming, horizontal dance.

The decades of feminism, the millions of dishonest features in magazines like Cosmopolitan, have misled us. We are not equal to men when it comes to libido. We grow up. We have other priorities. Sex slips on to a backburner, sliding to the bottom of an almost endless list of things to do that day.

It would be easy to write here that what women want, and enjoy, is the relationship - the love, companionship and closeness. But I don’t think even that is the whole story.

We want love and closeness up to a point. Most of my friends find the men in their lives a mere annoyance to be hovered over, bossed, and moved around as we Hoover under their giant feet.

No wonder so many men stay late in the office.

When it comes to sex, men are different. For men, even for the ugly ones, even for New Men, even for men who go with us to the cinema to see Black Swan, sex is as vital as breathing.

When I used to creep upstairs to surprise my then husband in his office, just so I could catch him watching porn and tell him off, he explained his compulsion thus: “Sex to men is like going to the lavatory. We have to do it.”

Well, charming. And not very romantic. But true.

And as women retreat from sex (and statistics have revealed we do so very swiftly once embedded in a serious relationship), men by necessity have to look elsewhere.

I remember walking into the office of my (older) female boss the day after I’d discovered my husband was having an affair in 2007.

Rather than doing what all my female friends had done - the predictable, knee-jerk cries of “What a nasty b*****d! Get rid!” - she was pragmatic. “Is it serious? Does he love her? If he doesn’t, you really must forgive him, and ignore it if it happens again.”

I wish I’d listened to her.

I’d got married thinking this was it. It was going to be perfect: it was real love.

I would never dream of cheating on a man, not even with an indiscreet text message, a thought or a daydream. I considered men who did so to be disgusting, weak, disloyal, dirty and disease-ridden. The truth is, they are just being men.

My husband admitted openly - in fact, wrote about it in his novel - that he had slept with a prostitute before we met.

I found his candour refreshing, and I have to say that I found his high sex drive a turn-on, at first.

Later, after a 12-hour day in the office, I found it annoying; yet another chore to be ticked off along with emptying the dishwasher. I can’t be the only woman to feel this way, surely?

I knew we weren’t having enough sex about a year into our marriage, but things (work, leg hair, going to the Conran Shop, freshly ironed sheets I didn’t want to muss up) got in the way. I remember going to some industry event on my own, just after my husband had set off for three months travelling in India. I confided in a male friend: “We haven’t had sex for nine months. Is that normal for a man in his 20s?” (My husband was 27, I was 14 years older. I can’t even bear to do the sum.)

“No, it’s not,” he said, matter-of-factly. “He’s doing it with someone else.”

When I later found out my male friend was right, the liaison that finally ended our marriage, out of five or six or seven brief affairs with other women, was the one that threatened to teeter into love.

I found affectionate messages on my husband’s mobile phone and in his email inbox. He wrote to her in the exact same way he used to write to me, with lots of lower case kisses.

Going through his wallet (I became crazy once I suspected he was fond of this one), I came across her passport photo. He stuck up for her, when he should have been sticking up for me.

I became obsessed with her. I went to her place of work in Manhattan, wanting to confront her (luckily, she was on holiday). I followed her on Facebook.

A couple of years later, after my divorce, I told my ex that she had got married and had a baby. “Really?” he said, surprised. “You’re obviously more obsessed with her than I ever was.”

I think, looking back, that if the love signs had not been there, I could have forgiven him for looking elsewhere for something that I was too tired or too shy or too busy to give him. If it had just been sex - even sex with a prostitute, in fact, especially if the sex had been with a prostitute - it would have been so much easier to forgive than an affair.

Truth is women have been fed a fantasy, and it is making us all unhappy.

I have a friend who works in book publishing. After the birth of her first child, the depression she had suffered on and off, since a teenager, returned with a vengeance. She kept on top of work, but she failed to keep on top of her husband - a nerdy chap who is a teacher in a tough, inner-city school.

To everyone’s shock, she discovered he was visiting a lap-dancing club in Shoreditch on his way home from work. Her friends and family were outraged by his behaviour, and she banished him from the family home. He now lives in a bedsit.

I know it’s not ideal that he wasn’t rushing home via Tesco Express, but haven’t we become just a little too strident?

I decided to do some more research into the subject of men who stray. I asked seven of my girlfriends, all of whom are either married or living with a man, when was the last time they’d had sex.

One, a mom-of-four in her mid-40s, said she hadn’t had sex since her last child, who is now three, was born. She told me, laughing, that her husband had asked if they could go on a tantric sex weekend, and she had responded with a tart “**** off”.

Another said she couldn’t remember when she had last done it with her husband. Even a woman who had just been on a romantic break with her husband said they hadn’t had sex all weekend because she was so exhausted.

Another said that she and her boyfriend had stopped having sex years ago, and it was only when, in tears, he threatened to leave her, that they broached the subject. He told her he felt “like we are best friends, or brother and sister, rather than lovers”.

She told him she felt too overweight and unattractive to do it, and found, to her surprise, that he didn’t really care how she looked: he wanted, needed, to do it anyway.

Once again, here was a woman who had bought into the fiction that we have to look perfect to be attractive to a man in bed.

Each woman I spoke to said they put their children before their husband. Only one told me she tried to be as nice to her husband as she is to her female friends.

So, what is a man to do?

Maybe, just maybe, they don’t want another relationship, to fall in love, because they don’t want to lose us, or their children, or their home. (They probably don’t want another relationship where they are monitored within an inch of their lives, either.)

Yet I know women who don’t even want their men to fantasise, inside their own heads, about anyone other than them. It’s ridiculous. It’s a lie; our own perfect domestic fantasy that doesn’t exist except in books and movies.

Take my parents’ relationship - a marriage that spanned nearly 60 years. My dad, my handsome, perfect, upstanding, hardworking dad, loved my mum so deeply that, in old age, not well enough to drive, he used to walk to the shops to get the groceries, and my mum, too disabled to go with him, would stand at the window, waiting to catch the first glimpse of him as he rounded the corner, when he would give her a jaunty salute.

As a 19-year-old, I heard, somehow, that my dad, on a business trip in London, had gone to see Deep Throat, starring Linda Lovelace. I was outraged. I sent him to Coventry. But my mom, from a different generation, thought nothing of it.

Many years later, whenever I moaned to my mom about my husband’s affairs, her advice had been: “Be patient. Be understanding.”

I think now that we’ve become too unforgiving for our own good. - Daily Mail

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