When lap-dancing club Rocco Mana asked for permission to stage fully nude shows last year its neighbours were outraged. Publishing manager Robert Nichols' campaign against the move was backed by councillors and the police.

However, nude shows are now available in Brighton and Hove and it looks like the objectors are losing the fight.

But why make such a fuss about lap-dancing, says JULIE BURCHILL, in an edited extract from her book Made in Brighton, when we live in a city rife with prostitution.

WHILE East Street in Brighton is not as wild as West Street - "Little Beirut" as the police have been known to call it - it is certainly something of a haunt for pleasure-seekers after dark, albeit those on a bigger budget.

An upmarket, partly pedestrianised shopping street crammed with bars and restaurants - think South Molton Street with the addition of the screech of seagulls.

It's Burberry Prorsum to West Street's Burberry proper but it needn't get too far up its own fundament; if someone goes there after 8pm on a weekend night, chances are they got themselves dressed with a definite view to getting themselves undressed by somebody else.

Which made it a bit odd that resident Robert Nichols should have called it "an inappropriate location"

for a fully-nude lap-dancing club.

A bit like saying Duke's Mound was a daft place for gays to go cruising or that anyone looking to get drunk up West Street on a Saturday night was basically on a fool's errand.

He cast his net of lunacy wider when he followed the local objection up with: "More broadly I object on moral grounds. Brighton is not the sort of city where we want establishments of this type."

On the contrary, Brighton has been synonymous with sex since Prinnie shacked up here with Mrs Fitzherbert.

In 1922 - with typically amockalyptic, sex-starved ill-humour - TS Eliot used the phrase "a weekend at the Metropole" as a metaphor for moral decline in The Wasteland; as this was the place where I took my husband's virginity one weekend more than a decade ago, I resent this personally as well as finding it philosophically a bit suspect.

In 1979 the first British nudist beach was established here; its main advocate was, rather charmingly and eccentrically, the Tory councillor and grandmother Eileen Jakes, who believed the 200-yard stretch of shingle would radically increase tourism.

So it seems odd citizens are throwing up their hands about attractive women getting their kit off in the relative seclusion of a lap-dancing club when unattractive men have been doing the same in broad daylight for a quarter of a century.

This is a sexy city, no two ways about it. As John Osborne said in a rare moment of approval, "I never had lunch in Brighton without wanting to take a woman to bed in the afternoon ... to shudder one's last, thrusting, replete gasp between the sheets at 4 and 6 o'clock in Brighton would be the most perfect last earthly delight."

When heteros are hypocritical about sex, the sort of sex they tend to be very hypocritical about is prostitution.

I must say I don't approve of prostitution as I don't believe the good Lord made us in his image so we could act as sexual spittoons hired out by the half-hour.

But in a hate-the-sin, love-thesinner sort of way, which is unusual for me, I would also say it is a fact sex workers can be lovely women - and it's hardly them who are the sinners, in my view, but rather the seatsniffers who frequent them.

Now, in my experience it's common wisdom that there is only one way to be a filthy hypocrite about prostitution and that is to thunder against it in public while slipping around to get a slice in private.

Naturally, when these jokers are banged to rights, we all enjoy it, because to criticise someone/something and then do them/it is just plain creepy.

And it makes you look like seven kinds of saddo thinking that you'll be the very first one not to get caught!

Who do you think you are, dude?

Mr Invisible Man? This is the trad kind of prost-hyp - Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells, if you will - humphing about moral decline over his Daily Telegraph on the commuter train, then nipping out at lunchtime to have Vera from Vladivostock void her vowels over him.

But there's another type of prosthyp around these days - we'll call him Horrified of Hampstead.

He's a liberal sort of chap who says prostitution is fine, so long as his mother, daughters, wives, sisters and - especially perish the thought! - sons aren't doing it.

Yep - somehow, prostitutionenthusers don't see it quite the same way when they think about their mum or their son doing it.

It's an instinctive and, I believe, appropriate response.

This is because we instinctively realise prostitution is vile and exploitative. But it will always exist, so long as vice is rewarded so much better than virtue.

Brighton, being a saucy seaside resort, can gloss over the history of its prostituted women as slickly as anywhere. From the dawn of the railway age punters seeking both men and women flocked from London, since the going rate here is substantially lower than in the capital - the old "London prices, Brighton wages" for once not being entirely the case, unfortunately for sex workers.

By 1859 there were almost four hundred brothels in Brighton - and can't the very word "brothel", at this distance, lull one into conjuring up a welcoming haven glimpsed through a pea-souper night, rather than the misery factories they more than likely were. Prostitution is nothing if not market-led and the privatisation of British Telecom gave sex workers a new outlet in which to advertise their services - carding - a mode of announcing "availability" which was peculiar only to Brighton, the city of Westminster and Glasgow.

Carding was a haphazard occupation; as soon as they were placed in phone boxes either a cleaner or a policeman might pop up citing "destruction and littering".

Brighton Museum now has a display of these cards for the purposes of cultural and historical interest.

And, "oldest profession" or not, what a wonderful dawn it would be when every shameful shackle of the sex trade - like the slave trade before it, which with the rise of open-door immigration and the trading of women fresh off the planes on the actual tarmac of British airports it is coming more and more to resemble - could be found only in the glass cases of museums.

Until then, mine's a top table at the front of the first all-nude Brighton lap-dancing club, champagne on ice and a wad of fifties at the ready, sad slave to beauty that I am.

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