In long ago days, fired as a Star sports scribe at age 20 and convinced my future in journalism had come to an ignominious end, I took a job in a body rub parlour.

It was called Henry VIII.

I was a wench.

The ad had promised heaps of money. No experience was required. This was quite alluring for someone with the limited skill-set of Girl Reporter and an incomplete B.A.

Despite zero training as a masseuse, I was promptly hired and “apprenticed’’ to a couple of old hands, you should forgive the expression. Such was my naïveté — and nobody had indicated differently during the job interview, or probably I was too dumb to pick up the clues — I genuinely believed the gig entailed massaging, clinical-like, maybe even done whilst wearing a white lab smock. The medieval corset should have been a tip-off.

Forthwith, I discovered what really happened behind the green door. Oh yes, I got an eyeful — and fled the premises.

Clearly, others were not so revolted. There has never been a shortage of willing frottage practitioners in this city and no lack of customers seeking sexual gratification in this manner. It’s all supply and demand, baby.

For a brief time, back in the ’70s, both supply and demand were on overt display, Yonge Street transformed into a veritable highway to hedonism — as an indignant citizenry complained — with rub ‘n’ tugs sprouting cheek-by-jowl along the squalid downtown strip. It was a weird mini-era in Toronto’s evolution when lax bylaws permitted a proliferation of sex trade businesses in prime commercial areas, including massage parlours that were de facto whorehouses.

Sodom and Gomorrah by the Lake was snuffed out with the murder of 12-year-old shoeshine boy Emanuel Jaques, strangled and drowned in the kitchen sink above a joint called Charlie’s Angels, to which he’d been lured. T.O. cleaned up its act and most of those porn palaces are now dollar stores. You judge which is more unsightly.

Anyway, that lurid phase of Toronto history — and my aborted career as Rosie Lovelace — came to mind upon learning this past week about an apparent back-door (you should forgive the expression) scheme to turn the city once again into North America’s body rub capital. At least that’s how Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti, ever-vigilant for a righteous crusade, characterized the alleged plot when the story broke in the Sun in delightfully giddy tabloid fashion.

“This will make us the biggest pimps in North America,’’ Mammoliti hyperventilated, while claiming there were already 35 such establishments in his riding. If so, they’re operating below the radar because only 25 licenses are currently held by massage parlours across the city — at $11,000 a pop for the privilege, no genital contact allowed — as opposed to the 400 licensed holistic centres that pony up a mere $150 yearly, though often accused of offering sexual services on the menu.

At issue is a meeting that was held wherein two dozen body and massage club owners were invited to meet with a City Hall staff committee to discuss the matter, including proposals to de-license holistic centres and perhaps remove the cap on body rub licenses. Proprietors of the latter are opposed to extra competition, insisting the economic downturn has taken a bite out of their business, too. There’s enough rub to go ’round, they assert. Further, easing rules that would facilitate more sex-for-pay indoors would take prostitution off the streets, where it apparently belongs. Many sex trade workers take a contrary position, arguing that licensing and legalizing, or decriminalizing, would make their occupation safer.

Every big city and little hick town has struggled since the dawn of sexual commerce to maintain morality and keep the entrepreneurially carnal on the other side of the tracks. In Toronto, as Star investigations have shown in the past, prostitution has increasingly gone vertical rather than horizontal, with escort services operating out of highrise buildings in residential neighbourhoods.

The fact is, sexual appetites have never been squelched by blue laws or john sweeps or inspector vigilance. We continuously approach the problem from the wrong end with whack-a-doxie policing and public shaming. How’s that working out for you?

If there is indeed a slew of illegal body rub shacks out there and touch-me-feel-me sex arcades masquerading as holistic enterprises, then there’s clearly an avid clientele which hasn’t been dissuaded from slaking its urges. And, frankly, why shouldn’t they be permitted to get their rocks off if no one is harmed in the transaction?

Twenty-five licenses for massage parlours strikes me as wildly insufficient for a city this size and moralistically coy to boot. We’ll allow it but only disapprovingly, in dribs, and with a wink-wink accommodation.

I don’t want to see a return to the grotty Yonge Street days, which clearly did attract criminality downtown — more commonly the pimping and exploitation of women than headline-grabbing murders. But surely it’s wiser to regulate the rub ‘n’ tug industry by acknowledging that sex is a human compulsion that shouldn’t be criminalized. If somebody is seeking a naked “body slide,” where’s the harm? Why shouldn’t emporiums offering the service be herded into a designated area a reasonable distance from residential neighbourhoods and commercial pedestrian areas? As much as I hate the idea of more regulations and more bureaucracy — we’ve already been bylawed to death in Toronto — that option seems preferable to the folly of pretending that human nature can be reinvented.

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Where there’s demand there will always be supply, licensed or illicit.

Not what I, prudish girl, was willing to do for the money, when I had the body for it. And don’t rub that in, you should forgive the expression.