WHEN even famous actors are caught using prostitutes, should we ask whether they perform a public service?

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A FAMOUS actor has taken out a High Court injunction, preventing details of his transactions with a prostitute from reaching the public domain.

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

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 health-wise 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.

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 and provoke an outraged backlash. 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.

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.

The decades of feminism and the millions of dishonest features in magazines 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. under their giant feet.

No wonder so many men stay late in the office.nte When it comes to sex, men are different. For men, even for men who go with us to the cinema to see Black Swan,nte 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."

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 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. I have to say that I found my husband's 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?

got in the way.

nteI 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 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 think, looking back, that if the love signs had not been there, I could have forgiven him for looking elsewhere. 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.

I asked seven of my girlfriends, all of whom are either married or living with a man, when was the last time they had had sex. One, a mum-of-four in her mid-40s, said she hadn't had sex since her last child, who is now three, was born. Another couldn't remember. Even a woman who had been on a romantic break with her husband said they hadn't had sex because she was exhausted.

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 they don't want another relationship, to fall in love, because they don't want to lose us, or their children or their home.

Whenever I moaned to my mum 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.

* Liz Jones is a journalist with The Daily Mail in London

Originally published as My Week: Why men need prostitutes